Ulster says “No!” – Abdassamad Clarke
Mar 16th, 2009
“Usury I put down, as the great pivot of all their (the Irish people’s) disasters – the main and primary spring that sets on motion the whole machinery of Ireland’s calamities.” (Jeremiah O’Callaghan 1780 -1861)
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.
Nice work. Thanks to Jameela for drawing my attention to it, too. wasalaam.
Whats the difference between god and Allah? Is Allah not God?
‘god’ is a noun indicating what is worshipped, whatever that may be. ‘Allah’ is the name for the One indicated by the name. Allah is certainly our god, but when people say ‘god’ even with a capital ‘G’ it is by no means certain that they mean the same. Thus we make the distinction.
So He is the creator of the malaria moscito and all the other beautyful
pests in this perfect universe, incl. my angelic self? Well then.
Payment could improve even for such a small but nevertheless demanding role like mine
in His unique melodramatic epiphany, but then, even I know, I should not be too greedy.
Its all right, when theres no way out.
Opa, I see you trying to catch us in the famous Christian dilemma “The problem of suffering”, which is simply a straw horse created by idle minds from the perverted idea of ‘good’ as something that will fit on an English lawn with the vicar and a cup of tea. I took you for being more interesting than that, and you on your part ought to recognise that I am not, and we are not, Candide.
abdassamad, being neither christian nor british nor owner of lawns with or without vicars on it, nonetheless I drink a casual cup o tea and idle on the sense of this existence, and tend to jugde a landlord over the state and condition and even the overall architecture of his property, and thats all, I do not try to catch someone, cause I have no cage to keep him anyway.
I am rather more keen to catch myself again and again, that is to keep it, before I loose it as scheduled, and with that goes the question of who or what created me to what purpose. There goes islam and tells me I am created to submit to the creator and pray to Him. Therefore I deem it a fair question whether this creator cares anything about that, and if so, why then hes does not finish of the wrongs in this world with a whip of his hand, or if He created them in the first place, then for what purpose? Just to test my reaction and my judgement and my consequences of it? Strange concept, but maybe.
Maybe you know? Since I dont. I didnt even know Candide, but now I read of it.
So far my concept is that there is a life force which comes to awakening, and emerging
with that are concepts of good and bad in life itself, but that does not mean, and some facts
portray that imho, that this being has any preconception or power over events whatsoever.
Some I read say islam is a filter, I fancy the universe could be a filter for the awakening of being, a kind of gods dream, and that islam might be one result of that process, a way to meaningful or socially healthy lifestyle for the kind of advanced animals that call themselves human, and imagine their best God. And so decide actually which part of gods dream they
play in, and judge themselves accordingly. In grades of heavens, hells, and in betweens.
But I guess this is rather heretic in islamic terms, and reduces the God to a matter of taste.
Some like it trinitarian, some as wooden idol, for some its the paper money, for some the gold, and for the chosen its Allah.
And Allah is the maker of all of these, and the best way to get near to him is to loose all
of the minor concepts, that is, all concepts of Him? Then is it His taste that chooses the way how people believe in Him? Does His taste change all the time?
So I should stop idleing. But idleing was to stop in the first place.
Could an islamic workcamp help? Or can I keep my lousy reasoning
and get some intellectually satisfying answer, then close the case and go some way,
no matter what, if its, at least, just right?
One thing more: I had my share of strange coincidences and kind of miracles.
It looked just like Gods action. But why then I see all this dull suffering in this world?
I dont suffer myself anymore. I decided not to in a big crisis long time ago. Not always succesful. But last time I visited a dentist was 20 years ago. I have no health insurance, and get well readily from anything, incl. my enemies. I thank this unknown God for this, that He really saved me. I would like to understand Him, but I dont, so far. I love Him, and being myself, I dont like that. Because I dont like to love what I dont understand. Woman is an exception, because I can see her. I dont love myself either, because I can see myself.
While I see it, its ugly.
But love exists, it doesnt care about my preconceptions. Yes. Dont care,
and He cares. Yes. Thank you. Alhamdullilah.
No. Its just life. It has all in it, and nothing in it. Put away the nothing as delusion, and remains Allah.
I am just an actor. Sorry I am, but without regret. My problem, not a christian one.
Seems christianity is more an indiciation of this problem.
In other times, I would have laid siege to england, and burn its castles and towns.
This time, I play some phraseology. Kill me. Thank you very much.
Opa Calypso,
You’re love for Him may yet bring you to a ’seeing’ by Him, rather than by yourself/your self; a seeing of the beauty of what is unseen and an obliteration, along with yourself/your self, of the ugliness of what you see by and of yourself/your self. I am no actor and this is no play: This time, lay siege to yourself/your self and burn its castles and towns. Kill your self. Thank you very much.
If I kill myself, who kills the one that killed me?
Expression fails in this delicate zone. If I may rephrase UIM’s words with the words of the poem, “And cling to the original void, and be as if you were not!”
If I cling, then weres the void, and if I dont, then were is it not, and if its everywhere, then still am I, and if I am, why shouldnt I be, and let the void not cling to Me, cause it seems, that was the idea.
Words and thoughts march on and on, concepts spin themselves and we are caught in the webs. Things ‘occur to us’ and we are helpless before their relentless outpouring. How on earth, caught in this way, do we get a glimpse of reality? The real question is whether we want that. Perhaps we enjoy the great kaleidoscope of thoughts too much. No one can answer that one except us.
Not every thought that occurs comes from the same source and goes to the same place. Then the question is whether or not we know where the thoughts came from and where we are ‘going’, whether we are even on a way or simply sitting.
Abdassamad
If there is only the original Void, then what is ‘I’ and how can this “I” will to cling to anything?
I think the Greek stoics had quite a profound understanding of life and how to live it, after I studied them recently, in the popular imagination they are presented as unemotional and ‘robotic’…in fact their philosophy is one which mirrors sufi teachings.
“Borrowing from the Cynics, the foundation of Stoic ethics is that good lies in the state of the soul itself; in wisdom and self-control. Stoic ethics stressed the rule: “Follow where reason leads.” One must therefore strive to be free of the passions, bearing in mind that the ancient meaning of ‘passion’ was “anguish” or “suffering”,[20] that is, “passively” reacting to external events — somewhat different from the modern use of the word. A distinction was made between pathos (plural pathe) which is normally translated as “passion”, propathos or instinctive reaction (e.g. turning pale and trembling when confronted by physical danger) and eupathos, which is the mark of the Stoic sage (sophos). The eupatheia are feelings resulting from correct judgment in the same way as the passions result from incorrect judgment.
The idea was to be free of suffering through apatheia (Greek: ἀπάθεια) or peace of mind (literally,’without passion)’[21], where peace of mind was understood in the ancient sense — being objective or having “clear judgment” and the maintenance of equanimity in the face of life’s highs and lows.
For the Stoics, ‘reason’ meant not only using logic, but also understanding the processes of nature — the logos, or universal reason, inherent in all things. Living according to reason and virtue, they held, is to live in harmony with the divine order of the universe, in recognition of the common reason and essential value of all people. The four cardinal virtues of the Stoic philosophy are wisdom (Sophia), courage (Andreia), justice (Dikaiosyne), and temperance (Sophrosyne), a classification derived from the teachings of Plato.
Following Socrates, the Stoics held that unhappiness and evil are the results of ignorance. If someone is unkind, it is because they are unaware of their own universal reason. Likewise, if they are unhappy, it is because they have forgotten how nature actually functions. The solution to evil and unhappiness then, is the practice of Stoic philosophy — to examine one’s own judgments and behaviour and determine where they have diverged from the universal reason of nature.”
Your point about the original void is perfectly valid, but such a statement as “Cling to the original void” is not a ‘philosophically’ rigorous one but a pointer to something which is an actual possibility and can only be known by tasting it or ceasing to taste, and it is in a zone that is beyond language, but which necessarily we must try to indicate by language since that is what we have got. Don’t take a hammer to a butterfly; it is disproportionate.
Indeed, the Greeks were more profound than the Latin-negotiated version of them which is modern-day received wisdom. However, lacking revelation, they inclined a great deal to the exercise of thought with which, nevertheless, they went very far.
I am convinced that tasawwuf is a science based on genuine practical experience of the nafs-self and of travelling the path to Allah, and of its snags and the openings experienced by the travellers. Thus as a much-travelled road it is safer and more fruitful than the road of speculation, even that of the Greeks which was so much closer to the fitrah than later models.
The point of the article though is that nothing can be whole again, no spiritual states tasted unsullied without a wholesale revaluation of all values and concomitant embracing of the entire deen in all its aspects, most specifically those which are apparently furthest from the spiritual end of the spectrum: the laws governing commerce.
Then I would add that the restoration of the zakat as practised by the first community and subsequent generations is the key to all of the above. What house lacking one of its essential corners can stand?
Abdassamad
Having read gorgias and the republic, and the last days of socrates, what other greek texts would you regard as indispensable?
Dear Londoner,
This is not my field, but I have dipped my toes in the waters a little.
Homer of course.
The things that have meant something to me have also included the tragedies of Sophocles, i.e. the Oedipus trilogy, two of which I know in Yeats’ versions, and Aeschylus’ The Oresteia which takes as its starting point the Trojan war which Homer had written about.
Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris is pretty amazing and is one of the great tragic dramas.
The Greeks’ had an intense awareness of the working out of the dynamics of the family writ large as history, and also destiny.
The philosophy came out of the same concern about the human situation and trying to see through to the right way to live, but, lacking revelation, trying with the unaided use of the intellect. However, the Greeks were still a fitrah people so that their intellectuality is far from the arid thing that moderns have. Probably one has to have classical Greek (I don’t) to really taste that. So the tragedies are a good balance for the talking heads of Plato to understand why they are talking and what drives their meditations. Deeply serious and Socrates went to his death for his thought.
As-salamu alaikum,
Abdassamad
You know, I have looked very carefully at the political systems of the West, and my conclusion is that the much and rightly beloved Shaykh Abdalqadir is 180 degrees incorrect in imagining that a Good King is what the Muslims of Britain need. My own finding is that it is the pagan magic of the ever-dying and ever-reborn Holy King that is the fundamental antagonist to Islam, which is pure rational monotheism. This magic has been the foundation of European Christendom throughout its barbaric history, and is as we all know based on a willful Roman misreading of the story of Prophet Isa, who is converted by it into an Adonis-style sacrificial holy demigod. This mystique of Holy Kingship has been transmitted in ritual form through a large number of chivalric and masonic orders, around which the entire apparatus of state revolves, and is the cause of all the occult irrationalities (including demonically complex frame-ups) with which the Muslims of the UK are afflicted. The same applies, in slightly more oblique form, in the Christian republics, where the masonic infrastructure plays just the same role in the intelligence and security apparatus, though minus the chivalric aspects.
Your reservations about Christian monarchy and rule by divine right and the myths that were invoked in that are understandable.
Germanic kingship was perverted by Merovingian concepts, i.e. the deal that Clovis (c. 466-511) made with the Church of Rome to be its sword-arm against the almost universally Arian (unitarian) Franks, Goths, et al, in exchange for being the king by divine right, unquestioned ruler and legislator, thus arrogating to himself divine and prophetic prerogatives.
Nevertheless, in its essence kingship is monarchy, i.e. rule by one man, and that is what amirate/khalifate/sultanate and Islamic kingship are.
The word “king” itself, Carlyle, who looked very much back to pre-Christian fitrah forms, said is etymologically from “ken” to know and/or “can” to be able, both prerequisites of a Muslim ruler.
I doubt that any restoration of kingship could resurrect these ancient mythic forms since we are in the age of the “whitening” of myth, i.e. its being effaced and erased.
However, that is not to say that there are not dangers, for we live in extremely dangerous times. The one thing that is certain is that it is not possible to continue as we are, since the democratic/republican form we have is certainly the worst of all possible forms; look at the death toll of the wars of democracy which are in the hundreds of millions if we include the communist death toll.
A more pragmatic case can thus be made for choosing kingship as the lesser of two evils, since we have seen under democracy that we have reached the absolute nadir of human affairs.
As-salamu alaikum,
Abdassamad
Sticking for the moment to Britain: I think you will find that the Armed Forces, as well as the security and intelligence services, are run by Masonic elites, which in turn are run by the supposed aristocracy. Thus it is not true in such grave matters that we are run at all by a ‘democratic/republican form of government’ this is merely an external facade. I regard your reference to ‘communism’, by which you mean the Soviet Empire I assume, to be a right-wing feint, worthy of no serious discussion in the British context at all.
The weakness in my argument, when you get to the core of it, is that exactly the same myth — of the dying and sacrificed Holy KIng, and of the power of his holy blood to consecrate and wipe away sins — is at the root of Shi’ism, which is the sole form of Islam showing any significant resistance to the Western Christian empires, now.
p.s. – in the Guardian today, Eric Hobsbawm takes a mild shot at free enterprise, and incautiously says some good things about the Soviets, evoking the normal red-baiting Eustonite response, as follows:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/10/financial-crisis-capitalism-socialism-alternatives
sorry, missed a closing squiggle – in the Guardian today, Eric Hobsbawm takes a mild shot at free enterprise, and incautiously says some good things about the Soviets, evoking the normal red-baiting Eustonite response, as follows:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/10/financial-crisis-capitalism-socialism-alternatives
Impressive social and educational achievements? You mean the totally unncessary and deliberate starvation of some twenty million peasants? Or the mass grave of Kolmya? These are the social achievements we are supposed to be impressed by? It is a relief to see that good Professor no longer wants to create that mass murdering totalitarian state in the UK – one that would almost certainly have killed me and most posters here – but it is a shame to see that building autobahns and making the trains run on time is not the be all and end all of Government. There is that little thing about genocide as well…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/10/financial-crisis-capitalism-socialism-alternatives?commentid=fcf5f5dd-d260-49fb-ad40-b1277472d0f4
The British system has never claimed to be ‘republican.’ Perhaps you are conflating ‘democracy’ and ‘republicanism’ because you have Irish Republicanism on the brain. But, I should have thought, the republican concept of an elected president — as opposed to a hereditary monarch with this sinister Holy Blood in his veins, or on his hands, or both (I recommend James Frazer’s “Golden Bough” and Robert Graves’ “White Goddess” for discussions of how the hereditary king and cyclical regicide are bound up together in fertility ritual — was closer to the Sunni concept of the Caliph, anyway.
Dear Rowan,
Your points are all well made.
But you must admit that we have always been clear that democracy is a sham concealing rule by oligarchy.
As to my ‘right-wing feint’, that was non-existent. I see all of the left and right wing anti-monarchical forms that emerged from the French Revolution as being much of a muchness. That the West worshipped at the idol of liberté and the East egalité is another matter. That they were both funded by banks is not entirely irrelevant, Lenin
That we can make analyses of these matters and be sometimes right and sometimes wrong is something that we men do. I grew up in Northern Ireland where the daily fare at the meal table was the discussion of politics with great passion. However, four decades of such discussion didn’t impinge on the realities one whit.
Our take on political power changes when we look to our own embodiment of that, however slight, i.e. in communities under our own leaders. We must also remain quite aware of the actuality of our situation and the power configurations of the time, and not indulge in fantasy replays of historical Islamic situations, which is my understanding of what the modern Saudi/Wahhabi movement did under Abdalaziz ibn Saud.
Abdassamad
Our posts sometimes overlap, so I will read your post on Republicanism carefully, and apologise in advance if I am using these terms sloppily.
Abdassamad
O.k. so, I SHOULD have been essaying (mind works better at being nocturnal – Fajr gets prayed on time and my mind stays at ease……) BUT I’ve been reading this article and the comments – which is BRILLIANT mashAllaah – though I must admit I have had to google a whole host of things – at many a time it left me COMPLETELY BAFFLED….so ignore my ignorance please – I’m only 18.
PER-LEASE I ask myself once more – WHY am I reading Law when all this stuff is SO MUCH MORE FASCINATING – Greek mythology, Philosophy, Theology, Politics, Economics, poetry and the like…….
I ought to go to sleep now – my mother would throw a fit if she saw me laptopping at such an hour….but I’m intrigued and want to indulge in more yet the fear of surfeiting gags me from asking…..
Perhaps I too love being within the kaleidoscope of my own thoughts or perhaps I enjoy too greatly the pleasure of conversing with God (with a CAPITAL G) of which I could NEVER become BORED!!! May He SWT give me the Tawfeeq to be as knowledgable as some of the bloggers on here. Ameen.
Please make dua – I manage to get good grades this year at university…maybe I crave the adrenalin rush of studying that which I do not enjoy or maybe I do not understand it or maybe the sheer lack of want in studying it impedes all effort. Whichever excuse I paint if I do not do well this year – does not matter – I tend to be caught on the Catch-22 segment of my kaleidoscope…may Allaah help me untangle…ameen.
Welcome “Shuara – Poetess – Sister in the Deen Anover Londoner” and ameen to all your du’as.
Why thank you bro. Abdassamad and JazakAllaahu khair for your du’as. When commenting on this I was under the impression that you had read philosophy or theology and a bit of further googling led me to believe otherwise. WOW subhanAllaah – Mathematical Science??? And of course the famous Al-Azhar…..
….I must sound super DUMB in obsessing with degrees and all but I’m in my first year of Law LLB and BORED to death – apart from the Legal Systems of Asia and Africa module which encompasses basic Islamic law, Hindu law and all the other African, Thai and Turkish laws thrown into the mix – only offered at SOAS…..
……I’d LOVE to have pursued poetry or to have taken that further….but never knew how – apart from odd poetry competition here and there which I’ve managed to win alhamdulillaah – the other section of this website – “Poem of the Week” – thoroughly enjoyed that – reminded me that maybe I SHOULD take it further….Oh and how could I submit poems to that section?
One other question – I REALLY want to be an MP – first hijaabi fighting for the rights of the constituent – engaged in Parliamentary debate but NOT claiming expenses’ for a second home being a Londoner and all…. however, would that be deemed Islamically wrong? Haraam even – I see you are not a big fan of “democracy” or are you just against the despots? I appreciate it’d involve me being in the public eye – but I just want to be a backbencher rebel and most jobs are “dunyafied”. Perhaps the best place for a Muslim woman is the home…..
PS. Opa Calypso’s little dissertation on loving God – His existence – dated 26th March 09 – 01.28 SPLENDID read – loved it….
Being against democracy does not really sum up our position, but rather it is our awareness that the declaration of democracy hides rule by an oligarchy. It is that deception which one deplores. And we are rapidly heading into a totalitarian stage which the ‘people’ seem powerless to prevent.
As to institutions of learning, they are vastly over-rated because in both cases – our UK ones and those such as al-Azhar – they have been subverted. Our universities are now little more than glorified training centres for professions and careers, and unfortunately the Azhar has its own checkered history. The truth is that it is not the institution of learning that matters but the teacher and the student. Sometimes that has to take place outside the institution. However, that often has to take place in parallel with study at an institution.
You are probably fortunate not to have studied poetry since your studies might well have robbed you of your love of poetry just as your study of law renders law heavy and boring for you. You need to find the key that will make your studies interesting. Do you know Makdisi’s study showing that Common Law derives from Maliki fiqh for example? I can think of few subjects that are potentially more exciting and interesting than law or more useful to the Muslim community.
As to being an MP, you need to have an objective beyond that and then think what is the best way to reach that objective. Parliament is a talking shop where people quickly get used to futility, and then cynicism sets in.
What I would suggest is to read Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi’s masterwork “The Time of the Bedouin” in which a really important theme is the rise to prominence of the lawyer class after the French Revolution all over the world. It would locate your studies in a wider historical context that might make a lot of sense of what you are doing and hope to do.
Salams,
Abdassamad
Wa ‘alaykum as-salaam wa rahmatullaahi wa baraktuh,
JazakAllaahu khair Abdassamad, – and I thank Him for letting me find this site. Unfortunately I need to turn the net off when I’m revising now – too distracting!!! Apologies – will respond soon iA when I come out of hibernation/hermit mode!!! iA by then I would have read at least some of The Time of the Bedouin and thought about the rest iA.
Sounding like a broken record – but please duas, duas, duas for me please – may Allaah guide me and all. Ameen.
Uhm – poetry for the Poem of the Week – how to submit? Or is that exclusive to Norwich people?
Shu.
Poem of the week is not exclusive. Send to me at: abdassamad (at) muslimsofnorwich.org.uk
Writing the email in that way is to defeat spammers.
Abdassamad
Salaams,
I can’t seem to find a search function on this site….maybe there is one but I’m blind to it?
But are there any articles/Khutbahs on Qadr? I used be under the impression that pre-destination or Allaah’s will was a 50/50 balance with my own free will. Yet as I go through life I’m more inclined to think that Allaah plays a greater part than I first imagined. Even to the extent of 99% Him and 1% of little ‘ol me. (The numbers do not really exist I suppose – they just help to illustrate my point)
From the most trivial decisions of what to eat for breakfast (toast or cereal seems easy enough – until discovering there’s no milk and the corner shop’s shut – surely He is trying to tell you something???) and then life’s greater decisions – worshipping Him, repenting to Him when we fail to do so (more often than not for a lot of us) and all the rest of life’s odd trials…. When I sin its Him allowing me to do so – when I do a good deed, surely by God I’m able to do so…..only He has the ability to say Kun fayakun – Be and it is – so what part do I play? Do I just carry out the actions that He’s decreed as its “Written”.
So yes enough rambling on my part – are there any articles/Khutbahs on this topic – please share…
JazakAllaahu khair.
wa alaikum as-salam,
You are right. The lack of a search function is an oversight, which we will rectify insha’Allah.
I could only find one khutbah whose title indicated that it is about the Decree: http://www.muslimsofnorwich.org.uk/?p=100
At the bottom of the front page there are links to all the khutbahs, arranged by year, from 2006 up until today.
Salams,
Abdassamad
Al Hamdulillah, I declare and utilise the Wasilah of Our Holy Prophet, The Best of Creation, Muhammad Ibn Abdillah SAAWAS. ASalaatu Wa Salaamu ‘Alaika ya Rrasul Ullah wa ‘Ala Alika Wa Ashabika Ya HabibUllah.
salaamu alaih kum maa sha ALLAH I enjoyed reading your work