Rest In Peace Stephen

Stephen Lawrence 13 September 1974 - 22 April 1993

Social Evils

A report published by The Joseph Rowntree Foundation lists the top 10 social evils in UK society as: decline of community; individualism and selfishness; consumerism and greed, a decline of values, the decline of the family, young people as both victims and perpetrators, drugs and alcohol, poverty and inequality, immigration and responses to it, and crime and violence.

BBC article - Report lists new ’social evils’

It will be interesting to hear what solutions they come up with to tackle these social problems. Change in a society’s ethical values happens slowly and I can’t imagine it can be reversed quickly or easily. Especially if we don’t recognise what the root causes of each problem are. For example how do you deal with the problem of consumerism and greed? A commentator on the BBC website wrote:

“The egalitarian principles of liberty, brotherhood and justice have been consumed by social Darwinist greed”.

Food for thought…

TV Dinners and Adab

“TV dinner ruin children manners” according to the Association of Schools and College Leaders.

Lack of a traditional family meal has produced a generation of kids with bad manners, head teachers have warned.
Since parents allow their children to eat while watching TV, the responsibility of teaching kids how to communicate with one another has come on the shoulders of schools.
Source

The Arabic word for manners or etiquette - “adab”, also means “feast” or “banquet”. It was traditionally understood that during meal times children learned manners and proper etiquette. How to behave with adults, elders, siblings, those younger than them. They also gained communication skills from the dinner table conversation.

People from societies closer to “fitra” find it strange that some people have meals on their own, and those even more closer to fitra find it weird people eat on separate plates!

On a holiday to Marrakesh me and my wife met an American family who have settled there (2nd generation converts i.e. their parents converted so they were born Muslim), one of the highlights of our trip was having sharing a meal with their family - one Tagine dish between 8 people, a couple and their two young kids and their grandparents. Sharing emphasised because this is one of the most important qualities you learn from this experience. It was Friday so it’s tradition to have meat, we had a delicious lamb tagine with couscous.

As we were the guests the people sitting next to us were breaking off the nice bits of the meat and placing it on our part of the bowl, doing it quite subtly as well that we didn’t always notice.

There is also more barakah in a shared meal, I didn’t think 1 tagine would be enough for 8 people but all of us ate until we were full and there were left over’s for the cats.

The Arabic language is filled with these beautiful insights, it is a miraculous language. It’s fascinating the ASC have found the link between manners and meals, while this understanding was built within the language of the Arabs since pre-Islamic times.

Leaked Pentagon Report: 2020 Britain will be like Siberia!

..Also nuclear war, drought, famine, riots and world anarchy.

Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us

True Cost of War in Iraq/Afghanistan

I remember one of my teachers saying (two years into the Iraq war) maybe this is a means by which Allah bankrupts an arrogant superpower…

Link for article - The true cost of war

Extracts -

Some time in 2005, Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, who also served as an economic adviser under Clinton, noted that the official Congressional Budget Office estimate for the cost of the war so far was of the order of $500bn. The figure was so low, they didn’t believe it, and decided to investigate. The paper they wrote together, and published in January 2006, revised the figure sharply upwards, to between $1 and $2 trillion. Even that, Stiglitz says now, was deliberately conservative: “We didn’t want to sound outlandish.”

And the borrowed trillions have to come from somewhere. Because “the saving rate [in America] is zero,” says Stiglitz, “that means that you have to finance [the war] by borrowing abroad. So China is financing America’s war.” The US is now operating at such a deficit, in fact, that it doesn’t have the money to bail out its own banks. “When Merrill Lynch and Citibank had a problem, it was sovereign funds from abroad that bailed them out. And we had to give up a lot of shares of our ownership. So the largest shareowners in Citibank now are in the Middle East. It should be called the MidEast bank, not the Citibank.” This creates a precedent of dependence, “and whether we become dependent on Middle East oil money, or Chinese reserves - it’s that dependency that people ought to worry about. That is a big change. The amount of borrowing in the last eight years, on top of the borrowing that began with Reagan - that has all changed the US’s economic position in the world.”

In figures
$16bn
The amount the US spends on the monthly running costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - on top of regular defence spending
$138
The amount paid by every US household every month towards the current operating costs of the war
$19.3bn
The amount Halliburton has received in single-source contracts for work in Iraq
$25bn
The annual cost to the US of the rising price of oil, itself a consequence of the war
$3 trillion
A conservative estimate of the true cost - to America alone - of Bush’s Iraq adventure. The rest of the world, including Britain, will shoulder about the same amount again
$5bn
Cost of 10 days’ fighting in Iraq
$1 trillion
The interest America will have paid by 2017 on the money borrowed to finance the war
3%
The average drop in income of 13 African countries - a direct result of the rise in oil prices. This drop has more than offset the recent increase in foreign aid to Africa

Evil Close to Home

This week we saw the conviction of Levi Bellfield for murdering two women and attacking another, and also the conviction (to be sentenced later) of brothers Dean and Michael Atkins for murdering an elderly woman in her home, and attacking another family.

These criminals lived very close to me. I’ve heard of the Atkins brothers and their friends before, they drank at a pub near my house. Levi Bellfield lived around the corner from me, he worked as a car clamper in a nearby town. A friends sister had a few unpleasant encounters with him. He stalked her as she used to come out of her gym, making lewd comments. Luckily she got her boyfriend to pick her up one day and that scared him off.

It’s shocking and frightening when these crimes happen so close to home, this part of London isn’t especially rough. We have our fare share of problems associated with drugs, car crime, anti social behaviour etc. But it is the brutal, sadistic nature of the violence committed against the women in these cases that is troubling. Can’t help but worry for the safety of my wife, my family, neighbours, colleagues…

May Allah protect all women from these evil men, amin.

Rooting for Canterbury

by Father Frank Gelli

FATHER FRANK’S RANTS

Rant Number 292 11 February 2008

Rooting for Rowan: The Archbishop and the Sharia

What’s wrong with me? I am in living in Qatar , not in Yemen . I mean, here there is no qat, Yemen ’s popular hallucinogenic weed. Yet, something peculiar is happening. I’d never, never have believed but…yes, I confess it: I agree with the Archbishop of Canterbury. He backs sharia law in Britain . You bet he isn’t chewing qat either. Still, he happens to be right.

A friend even suggested it’s my influence. Well, maybe. The priest’s occult powers…even I don’t fully know them!

It is droll to see how berzerk Rowan’s enemies have gone. Stoning, beheading, chopping off of limbs and flogging, he is calling for them, they scream. Even his druidical roots are mischievously imputed. (Groan… the priest himself has poked fun at Williams for that in the past: mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.) Didn’t his Celtic ancestors practise the cult of the severed head? Proof positive this Welshman hankers after the same, under the cover of Islam. Might as well charge Scot Gordon Brown with being a Pictish marauder at heart, or Texan George Bush with rooting for lynch law. A veritable apotheosis of missing the point - that sums up many people’s reactions to the ABC’s sensible remarks - in part.

Truth is, allowing Muslims in England voluntarily to submit to sharia rulings in certain family and marital disputes is no more judicially enormous than letting Catholics ask the Sacra Rota ecclesiastical tribunal to annul their marriage. Or permitting Anglo-Catholic traditionalists to bar women priests from the altar. My good friend Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg could provide condign examples affecting Jews. Angry or anguished cries of ‘there is only one British law’ ignore these plain facts. The most rational comment I have come across on the web is that of an African Christian. He observes that in their African colonies the Brits always allowed ‘parallel universes of common and customary laws’. And that worked out pretty well. But never in England ! shout Islamophobes. Do they mean it? Unless they propose to boot out all Muslims from this sceptred island, as 400 years ago Spain’s King Philip III did with the Moriscos, how can they prevent this minority from enjoying some of its own religious or customary laws, if it so wishes?

But what if religious rulings conflict with the law of the land? More about that anon. Meanwhile I note that the law of the land, like Heraclitus’ river, and unlike God’s law, is always in a state of flux. A church marriage was once prescriptive, now there is a civil alternative. Today capital punishment is off the statute book. Homosexuality was once a crime - now no longer. Ditto for same-sex unions. Whilst fox-hunting has become illegal. The priest does not pass judgment here, only notes. Parliament changes the law all the time, man!

Of course, sharia law isn’t just about humdrum family disputes and jolly Imam’s counselling. It is a whole, comprehensive and total system, embracing every social, political, economic and personal aspects of human life. Guess that is what puts the wind up a lot of Western people these days. ‘Jesus Christ we have largely disposed of, are we now having to suffer Muhammad?’ our secularists moan, shaking with fear and loathing. For such people I have no sympathy. Also, in reality sharia isn’t monolithic. OK, the Saudi and Sudanese models aren’t quite everybody’s cup of tea, and that includes many Muslims. But in many countries, like little Qatar , the Sharia Court is only for domestic cases, family troubles, whilst state courts are fashioned after a mix of Western legal practices. The Qur’an officially underlies legislation, yes. Qataris, unlike many Europeans, are in no doubt as to their identity…

The British Government, unsurprisingly, equivocates. ‘British law should apply in the UK , based on British values’, thunders Gordon Brown. British values, eh? Like what? Queuing, saying ‘thank you’ a billion times a day and being generally nice? A bit too weak a brew to work as the basis of a culture. (Note how the wily PM always keeps mum about that authentic English value, Christianity.) Anyway, his spokesman admits that legally ‘small adjustments had been and will be made’. Mini-sharia’s OK, in other words. Which is broadly what the Archbishop is pleading for. In other words, the government cynically fudges the issue. What’s new?

So, dear Rowan, the poor priest defends you. But I ask you to go one better. As a leader of Christianity - please, don’t get nervous now - you must start beating the drum for Christian principles, too. There is something faintly comical about the way in your recent lecture you set yourself up as interpreter of sharia - leave that to Muslims to determine. But you can/ought to speak strongly about Christian law. Right to have 3/% of the population have their laws, but Christians are a bit more numerous than that in England . So we too must have our share. I bet you know what Christian law is.

Wot! You don’t? Pulling my leg, eh? But just in case, let me remind you. The laws of Christianity are set out in Holy Scripture. For example, both in the Old and the New Testaments we find God through His chosen Christ, His apostles and prophets forbidding and blasting adultery and fornication. Sins also explicitly cited in Cranmer’s Anglican Prayer Book. So you must demand that the British state allow church courts to try such crimes and punish them. (No stoning, no. Maybe just a few

pebbles, plus naming and shaming the reprobates.) Our liberal rulers won’t have it of course. They’ll get mad at you. Because church courts would conflict with their permissive, iniquitous laws. When then? Rowan, this is your chance. No longer the establishment’s bearded jester everybody’s takes you for, you will take up the mantle of Christian prophecy. Proclaim loud and clear, like our first martyrs did, that Christians must serve God rather than men. Oh, boy, how they will revile you!

But at last you will truly become what you are meant to be: a leader of Christians.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

It’s all in the Game

Brilliant dialogue from the TV series The Wire, between Omar Little, a rip and runner (one who robs drug dealers) and Maurice Levy, defence lawyer for a man involved with a drug gang, on trial for murdering a witness.  Omar is giving witness against the defence lawyer’s client.   Shows the moral ambiguity of defence lawyers.

Omar Little: That wasn’t no attempt murder.
Maurice ‘Maury’ Levy: What was it, Mr. Little?
Omar Little: I shot the boy Mike-Mike in his hind parts, that all.
[Jury laughs]
Omar Little: Fixed it up so he couldn’t sit right.
[Judge chuckles]
Maurice ‘Maury’ Levy:  Why’d you shoot Mike-Mike in his, um, hind parts, Mr. Little?
Omar Little: Let’s say we had a disagreement.
Maurice ‘Maury’ Levy:  A disagreement over?
Omar Little: Well, you see, Mike-Mike thought he should keep that cocaine he was slingin’ and the money he was makin’ from slingin’ it. I thought otherwise.
Maurice ‘Maury’ Levy:  Why should we believe your testimony then? Why believe anything you say?
Omar Little: That’s up to y’all, really.
Maurice ‘Maury’ Levy:  You are feeding off the violence and the despair of the drug trade. You are stealing from those who themselves are stealing the lifeblood from our city. You are a parasite who leeches off the culture of drugs…
Omar Little: Just like you, man.
Maurice ‘Maury’ Levy:  Excuse me? What?
Omar Little: I got the shotgun. You got the briefcase. It’s all in the game though, right?

Fitrah: Innate belief in the Creator

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I love Abdul Hakim Murad!  May Allah bless and preserve him.

Back to Work/Back to Blog

A belated happy new year to all. 

The dreaded first day back to work has not been that bad, even with the boss still on holiday which means I’ve got to cover for him so I gots crazy amount of work to do, alhamdulillah it’s preparation for things to come.  This year is going to be hella busy for me, with starting my professional qualification and continuing Arabic studies, I won’t have as much time to spend on the blogs.  May Allah grant us barakah in our time, amin.

It’s been just over 6 months since I started this blog, some thoughts on blogging so far…

Blogland

It’s a big bloggy world but also a very small world.  Yes there are a zillion blogs out there but you always seem to bump into the same faces, even when randomly blog surfing.  Like brother Darvish, dude is everywhere!  I have a theory… I thinks he is one of those mystics that wot can be in several places at the same time, the ‘Abdal or People of the Step as they are known :o)

Bloggers

Most blogs I’ve come across I have found, surprisingly, the bloggers and people commenting to be nice people, intelligent, tolerant and sincere.  I was surprised because from past experience on various forums I got the picture most people like to vent their anger and hatred on the net, with the safety of anonymity and the ease in expressing whatever we want, there are extremely contemptuous comments being made on discussion forums (eg The Guardian Comment is Free section)

This is not the case with most bloggers, most of us don’t like to be hosts for ugly argumentation.  Call it fitra or whatever, but most people are sick of all the hatred that floods the net and there is a rising trend for discussion with manners, hurrah!

Writing

A self discovery I made since blogging is how bad I write, I knew I wasn’t no Shakespeare but I didn’t think I was this bad!  Another thing is I sound like a different person in my writing, like when you hear your voice recorded, do I really sound like that?!  I’ve not written like this in years, need to get re-accustomed to expressing my thoughts coherently and with a bit of eloquence, insha Allah!   This was one of the reasons I started the Poetry blog, at least in Poetry you can pretend to be eloquent :o)

Intentions for Blogging

I keep coming back to this, I’ve read many seasoned bloggers who say they regret a lot of what they wrote.  Speaking on subjects they are not qualified to, writing egotistically like their opinion deserves special attention.  Shukran to all those brothers and sisters who warned of this, I have loads of stuff thats sitting in draft, or was deleted.  Because they were too long and badly written and also a lot of it I had to admit was egotistical writing, my unqualified opinion on matters (I wrote long pieces on the row over race and intelligence sparked by Dr Watson and a review of the film American Gangster).  The world does not need to hear everything that goes on inside my head, I have a patient wife who listens to my mad theories.

My intention when starting this was to mostly pass on khayr, any sort of goodness I come across if I could share it somehow through this blog I would.  Something that will benefit me and others for eternity, a salawat, something that increases iman, taqwa of Allah, love for Rasul Allah (sal Allahu ‘alayhi wasallam). 

A specific du’a I made was for Allah to make this blog a means for my happiness on Yawmal Qiyamah.  That someone finds something here that guides them, that makes them from the awliya and then on That Day that person remembers this sinner.