America’s Responsibility
It is not from some arab newspaper.It is from Der Spiegel.Nothing wrong in cut&paste from that source either.
Obviously you never got past even the first line where it is mentioned.Muslims have more friends among the westerners than you may even realise---and they are non-muslims too.
Battling poverty,disease and ignorace is a cardinal Islami injunction.One does not have to abandon ones home to be free---such people are called hobos or vagabonds.Pseudos or nominals have no fixed adresses that is the reason they are treated as suspects.
It is only but natural.
Posted by
hamzadafaqui
Jan 20, 2002 06:05 pm
tahmad --431It is not from some arab newspaper.It is from Der Spiegel.Nothing wrong in cut&paste from that source either.
Obviously you never got past even the first line where it is mentioned.Muslims have more friends among the westerners than you may even realise---and they are non-muslims too.
Battling poverty,disease and ignorace is a cardinal Islami injunction.One does not have to abandon ones home to be free---such people are called hobos or vagabonds.Pseudos or nominals have no fixed adresses that is the reason they are treated as suspects.
It is only but natural.
The Identity Crisis of a Modern Muslim
[Hamzad: In my arrogant opinion, jinnah was not even fit to carry Ghandi`s toothbrush.]
_________________________________________________
TRUE.He never did that:)
Posted by
hamzadafaqui
Jan 20, 2002 11:14 am
DRUMZ----213[Hamzad: In my arrogant opinion, jinnah was not even fit to carry Ghandi`s toothbrush.]
_________________________________________________
TRUE.He never did that:)
The Identity Crisis of a Modern Muslim
Yeh!Exactly the same man.I also have something good to talk about Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto(rumoured to have secular diseases like drink & adultery),some admiration for Yahyaa Khan(ditto),even your Mujibur-Rehman(the nationalist instigator & thug--anti-muslim that he was).
In case you have still not been able to figure out,the object of my scorn are those who are secular,anti or pseudo muslim,or followers of western vulgarity or fashion only.If those who served the cause of Islam & muslims,then whatever their shortcomings ,they deserve praise.
ZA Bhutto was great because his obsession with & obtaining of the Bomb.
Remember!for we muslims only Islam is paramount and hence EVERYTHING must be judged with this in mind.If western education is helping Islam it is good if hurting then bad.
Elementary,my dear Watson.
Posted by
hamzadafaqui
Jan 20, 2002 11:14 am
sigalph235---204Yeh!Exactly the same man.I also have something good to talk about Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto(rumoured to have secular diseases like drink & adultery),some admiration for Yahyaa Khan(ditto),even your Mujibur-Rehman(the nationalist instigator & thug--anti-muslim that he was).
In case you have still not been able to figure out,the object of my scorn are those who are secular,anti or pseudo muslim,or followers of western vulgarity or fashion only.If those who served the cause of Islam & muslims,then whatever their shortcomings ,they deserve praise.
ZA Bhutto was great because his obsession with & obtaining of the Bomb.
Remember!for we muslims only Islam is paramount and hence EVERYTHING must be judged with this in mind.If western education is helping Islam it is good if hurting then bad.
Elementary,my dear Watson.
America’s Responsibility
More stuff in an attempt to put your mind in first gear.
What is wrong in being anti-US.Is it blasephemous
to be so?Is that the new cult or something.Are the Shamans of Secularism upset.
If dyed in red & blue can be gainst US on more matters than one then why not outsiders?Why is it that if one is against something then must be for the other? Being anti-mulla does not make one necessarily learned.It is a pathetic attempt to seek acceptability in a fast changing world.It is time we ``educated`` ones are able to do what we have bequeethed to those we disparagingly called mullas.Had we acquired even the rudimentaries of our Deen(as it was in the glory days)we would not be crying foul today.
Nations as countries are nothing but corrals.Whether US or Pakistan they are completely meaningless to me as a muslim.They have either some nostalgic or economic value and no more.I,me is more important than the country.Its security is dear to me because I(ME)(& those & that I value & cherish)am there and not because of some collective surge of that disease called ``patriotism``.Nation(country) is important because of ME & NOT,NOT the other way round.
``Humm ko mitaa sakey,yeh zamanay mein dumm naheeN
Humm sey zamaana khud hai,zamanay sey humm naheen``
By this time it should be evident to you how rigid & incorrigible I am.So please refrain & stay happy.Just continue your rakhee bandhans.Never worry about the limped wrists.
It is,but only natural.
MEANWHILE ENJOY THE FOLLOWING:
_________________________________________________
FORMER German minister of Defense Von Buelow.
from The SPIEGEL
VON BUELOW INTERVIEW BLOWS 911 CASE WIDE OPEN
Posted By: Rosalinda
Date: Wednesday, 16 January 2002, 1:24 a.m.
(DRAFT) [Source: Tagesspiegel, Jan. 13] PARTIAL TRANSLATION
{The following interview with Von Buelow appeared in the German
daily }Tagesspiegel,{ on Jan. 13.}
__________________________________________________
Q: You seem so angry, really upset.
Von Buelow: I can explain what`s bothering me: I see that
after the horrifying attacks of Sept. 11, all political public
opinion is being forced into a direction that I consider wrong.
Q: What do you mean by that?
Von Buelow: I wonder why many questions are not asked.
Normally, with such a terrible thing, various leads and tracks
appear that are then commented on, by the investigators,
the media, the government: Is there something here or not?
Are the explanations plausible? This time, this is not the case
at all. It already began just hours after the attacks
in New York and Washington and--
Q: In those hours, there was horror, and grief.
Von Buelow: Right, but actually it was astounding:
There are 26 intelligence services in the U.S.A.
with a budget of $30 billion--
Q: More than the German defense budget.
Von Buelow: --which were not able to prevent the attacks.
In fact, they didn`t even have an inkling they would happen.
For 60 decisive minutes, the military and intelligence agencies
let the fighter planes stay on the ground, 48 hours later,
however, the FBI presented a list of suicide attackers.
Within ten days, it emerged that seven of them were still alive.
Q: What, please?
Von Buelow: Yes, yes. And why did the FBI chief take no position
regarding contradictions? Where the list came from,
why it was false? If I were the chief investigator
(state attorney) in such a case,
I would regularly go to the public, and give information
on which leads are valid and which not.
Q: The U.S. government talked about an emergency situation
after the attacks: They said they were in a war.
Is it not understandable that one does not tell the enemy
everything one knows about him?
Von Buelow: Naturally. But a government which goes to war,
must first establish who the attacker, the enemy, is.
It has a duty to provide evidence.
According to its own admission,
it has not been able to present any evidence
that would hold up in court.
Q: Some information on the perpetrators has been proven
with documents. The suspected leader, Mohammad Atta,
left Portland for Boston on the morning of Sept. 11,
in order to board the plane that later hit the World Trade Center
Von Buelow: If this Atta was the decisive man in the operation,
it`s really strange that he took such a risk of taking a plane
that would reach Boston such a short time before
the connecting flight. Had his flight been a few minutes late,
he would not have been in the plane that was hijacked.
Why should a sophisticated terrorist do this?
One can, by the way, read on CNN (Internet)
that none of these names were on the official passenger lists.
None of them had gone through the check-in procedures.
And why did none of the threatened pilots
give the agreed-upon code 7700 over the [Steuerknueppel: STEERING NOB?] to the ground station?
In addition: The black boxes which are fire and shock proof,
as well as the voice recordings, contain no valuable data--
Q: That sounds like--
Von Buelow: --like assailants who, in their preparations,
leave tracks behind them like a herd of stampeding elephants?
They made payments with credit cards with their own names;
they reported to their flight instructors with their own names.
They left behind rented cars with flight manuals in Arabic
for jumbo jets. They took with them, on their suicide trip,
wills and farewell letters, which fall into the hands of the FBI,
because they were stored in the wrong place
and wrongly addressed. Clues were left like behind
like in a child`s game of hide-and-seek,
which were to be followed!
There is also the theory of one British flight engineer:
According to this, the steering of the planes
was perhaps taken out of the pilots` hands, from outside.
The Americans had developed a method in the 1970s,
whereby they could rescue hijacked planes
by intervening into the computer piloting
[automatic pilot system]. This theory says,
this technique was abused in this case. That`s a theory....
Q: Which sounds really adventurous, and was never considered.
Von Buelow: You see! I do not accept this theory,
but I find it worth considering. And what about
the obscure stock transactions?
In the week prior to the attacks,
the amount of transactions in stocks in American Airlines,
United Airlines, and insurance companies, increased 1,200%.
It was for a value of $15 billion.
Some people must have known something. Who?
Q: Why don`t you speculate on who it might have been.
Von Buelow: With the help of the horrifying attacks,
the Western mass democracies were subjected to brainwashing.
The enemy image of anti-communism doesn`t work any more;
it is to be replaced by peoples of Islamic belief.
They are accused of having given birth to suicidal terrorism.
Q: Brainwashing? That`s a tough term.
Von Buelow: Yes? But the idea of the enemy image doesn`t
come from me. It comes from Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel
Huntington, two policy-makers of American intelligence
and foreign policy. Already in the middle of he 1990s,
Huntingon believed, people in Europe and the U.S.
needed someone they could hate--
this would strengthen their identification
with their own society. And Brzezinski, the mad dog,
as adviser to President Jimmy Carter,
campaigned for the exclusive right of the U.S.
to seize all the raw materials of the world,
especially oil and gas.
Q: You mean, the events of Sept. 11--
Von Buelow: --fit perfectly in the concept
of the armaments industry, the intelligence agencies,
the whole military-industrial-academic complex. This is in fact
conspicuous. The huge raw materials reserves of the former Soviet
Union are now at their disposal, also the pipeline routes and--
Q: Erich Follach described that at length in {Spiegel}:
``It`s a matter of military bases, drugs, oil and gas reserves.``
Von Buelow: I can state: the planning of the attacks
was technically and organizationally a master achievement.
To hijack four huge airplanes within a few minutes
and within one hour, to drive them into their targets,
with complicated flight maneuvers!
This is unthinkable, without years-long support
from secretapparatuses of the state and industry.
Q: You are a conspiracy theorist!
Von Buelow: Yeah, yeah. That`s the ridicule heaped
[on those raising these questions] by those who would prefer
to follow the official, politically correct line.
Even investigative journalists are fed propaganda
and disinformation. Anyone who doubts that,
doesn`t have all his marbles! That is your accusation.
Q: Your career actually speaks against the idea
that you are not in your right mind.
You were already in the 1970s, state secretary
in the Defense Ministry; in 1993 you were the SPD
[Social Democratic Party] speaker
in the Schalk-Golodkowski investigation committee--
Von Buelow: And it all began there!
Until that time, I did not have any great knowledge
of the work of intelligence agencies.
And now we had to take note of a great discrepancy:
We shed light on the dealings of the Stasi
and other East bloc intelligence agencies
in the field of economic criminality,
but as soon as we wanted to know something
about the activities of the BND [German intelligence]
or the CIA, it was mercilessly blocked.
No information, no cooperation, nothing!
That`s when I was first taken aback.
Q: Schalck-Golodkowski mediated, among other things, various
business deals abroad. When you looked at his case more closely--
Von Buelow: We found, for example, a clue in Rostock,
where Schalck organized his weapons depot.
Well, then we happened upon an affiliation of Schalck in Panama,
and then we happened upon Manuel Noriega,
who was for many years President, drug dealer,
and money launderer, all in one, right?
And this Noriega was also on the payroll of the CIA,
for $200,000 a year.
These were things that really made me curious.
Q: You wrote a book on the dealings of the CIA and Co.
In the meantime, you have become an expert
regarding the strange things
related to intelligence services` work.
Von Buelow: ``Strange things`` is the wrong term.
What has gone on, and goes on, in the name of intelligence services, are true crimes.
Q: What would you say determines
the work of intelligence services?
Von Buelow: So that we don`t have any misunderstandings:
I find that it makes sense to have intelligence services....
Q: You don`t think much of the earlier proposals
by the Greens, who wanted to dismantle these agencies?
Von Buelow: No. It is right to take a look
behind the scenes. Getting intelligence about the intentions
of an enemy, makes sense. It is important when one tries
to put oneself into the mind of the enemy.
Whoever wants to understand the CIA`s methods,
has to deal with its main tasks, {covert operations}:
below the level of war, and outside international law,
foreign states are to be influenced, by organizing insurrections,
terrorist attacks, usually combined with drugs and weapons trade,
and money laundering. This is essentially very simple:
One arms violent people with weapons.
Since, however, it must not under any circumstances come out,
that there is an intelligence agency behind it,
all traces are erased, with tremendous deployment of resources.
I have the impression
that this kind of intelligence agency spends 90% of its time
this way: creating false leads. So that, if anyone suspects
the collaboration of the agencies,
he is accused of the sickness of conspiracy madness.
The truth often comes out only years later.
CIA chief Allen Dulles once said:
In case of doubt, I would even lie to the Congress!
Q: The American journalist Seymour M. Hersh,
wrote in the {New Yorker,} that even some people in the CIA
and government assumed, that certain leads had been laid
in order to confuse the investigators.
Who, Herr von Buelow, would have done this?
Von Buelow: I don`t know that either. How should I?
I simply use my common sense, and--
See: The terrorists behaved in such a way to attract attention.
And as practicing Muslims, they were in a strip-tease bar,
and, drunken, stuck dollar bills into the panty of the dancer.
Q: Things like that also happen.
Von Buelow: It may be. As a lone fighter,
I cannot prove anything, that`s beyond my capabilities.
I have real difficulties, however,
to imagine that all this all sprung
out ofthe mind of an evil man in his cave.
Q: Mr. von Buelow, you yourself say
that you are alone in your criticism.
Formerly, you were part of the political establishment,
now you are an outsider.
Von Buelow: That is a problem sometimes,
but one gets used to it. By the way,
I know a lot of people, including very influential ones,
who agree with me, but only in whispers, never publicly.
Q: Do you still have contact with old SPD companions,
such as Egon Bahr and former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt?
Von Buelow: There are no close contacts any more.
I wantedto go to the last SPD party congress, but I was sick.
Q: Can it be, Mr. von Buelow, that you are a mouthpiece for
typical anti-Americanism?
Von Buelow: Nonsense, this has absolutely nothing to do
with anti-Americanism. I am a great admirer of this great,
open, free society, and always have been. I studied in the U.S.
Q: How did you get the idea that there could be a link
between the attacks and the American intelligence agencies?
Von Buelow: Do you remember the first attack
on the WorldTrade Center in 1993?
Q: Six people were killed and over a thousand wounded,
by a bomb explosion.
Von Buelow: In the middle was the bombmaker,
a former Egyptian officer.
He had pulled together some Muslims for the attack.
They were snuck into the country by the CIA,
despite a State Department ban on their entry.
At the same time, the leader of the band was an FBI informant.
And he made a deal with the authorities:
At the last minute, the dangerous explosive material
would be replaced by a harmless powder.
The FBI did not stick to the deal.
The bomb exploded, so to speak, with the knowledge of the FBI.
The official story of the crime was quickly found:
The criminals were evil Muslims.
Q: At the time Soviet soldiers marched into Afghanistan,
you were in the cabinet of Helmut Schmidt. What was it like?
Von Buelow: The Americans pushed for trade sanctions,
they demanded the boycott of the Olympic games in Moscow....
Q.... which the German government followed...
Von Buelow: And today we know: It was the strategy
of the American security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski,
to destabilize the Soviet Union from neighboring Muslim countries
They lured the Russians into Afghanistan,
and then prepared for them a hell on earth, their Vietnam.
With decisive support of the U.S. intelligence agencies,
at least 30,000 Muslim fighters were trained
in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a bunch of good-for-nothings
and fanatics who were, and still are today, ready for anything.
And one of them is Osama bin Laden. I wrote years ago: `
`It was out of this brood, that the Taliban grew up
in Afghanistan, who had been brought up in the Koran schools
financed by American and Saudi funds,
the Taliban who are now terrorizing the country and destroying it
Q: Even though you say, for the U.S.
it was a matter of raw materials in the region,
the starting point for the U.S. aggression,
was the terrorist attack which cost thousands of human lives.
Von Buelow: Completely true. One must always keep this
gruesome act in mind. Nonetheless, in the analysis of political
processes, I am allowed to look and see who has advantages
and disadvantages, and what is coincidental. When in doubt,
it is always worthwhile to take a look at a map,
where are raw materials resources, and the routes to them?
Then lay a map of civil wars and conflicts on top of that
--they coincide. The same is the case with the third map:
nodal points of the drug trade.
Where this all comes together, the American intelligence services
are not far away. By the way, the Bush family is linked to oil,
gas, and weapons trade, through the bin Laden family.
Q: What do you think of the Bin Laden films?
Von Buelow: When one is dealing with intelligence services,
one can imagine manipulations of the highest quality.
Hollywood could provide these techniques.
I consider the videos inappropriate as evidence.
Q: You believe the CIA is capable of anything,
[wouldn`t stop at anything].
Von Buelow: The CIA, in the state interests of the U.S.,
does not have to abide by any law in interventions abroad,
is not bound by international law;
only the President gives orders.
And when funds are cut, peace is on the horizon,
then a bomb explodes somewhere. Thus it is proven,
that you can`t do without the intelligence services;
and that the critics are {nuts,} as Father Bush called them,
Bush who was once CIA head and President.
You have to see that the U.S. spends $30 billion
on intelligence services, and $13 billion on anti-drug work.
And what comes out of it?
The chief of a special unit of the strategic anti-drug work declared, in despair, after 30 years of service,
that in every big, important drug case,
the CIA came in and took it out of my hands. (Rosalinda: Michael Levin)
Q: Do you criticize the German government
for its reaction after Sept. 11?
Von Buelow: No. To assume that the government
were independent in these questions, would be naive.
Q: Herr von Buelow, what will you do now?
Von Buelow: Nothing. My task is concluded by saying,
it could not have been that way [according to the official story]
Search for the truth!
Posted by
hamzadafaqui
Jan 19, 2002 12:31 am
tahmad:---420More stuff in an attempt to put your mind in first gear.
What is wrong in being anti-US.Is it blasephemous
to be so?Is that the new cult or something.Are the Shamans of Secularism upset.
If dyed in red & blue can be gainst US on more matters than one then why not outsiders?Why is it that if one is against something then must be for the other? Being anti-mulla does not make one necessarily learned.It is a pathetic attempt to seek acceptability in a fast changing world.It is time we ``educated`` ones are able to do what we have bequeethed to those we disparagingly called mullas.Had we acquired even the rudimentaries of our Deen(as it was in the glory days)we would not be crying foul today.
Nations as countries are nothing but corrals.Whether US or Pakistan they are completely meaningless to me as a muslim.They have either some nostalgic or economic value and no more.I,me is more important than the country.Its security is dear to me because I(ME)(& those & that I value & cherish)am there and not because of some collective surge of that disease called ``patriotism``.Nation(country) is important because of ME & NOT,NOT the other way round.
``Humm ko mitaa sakey,yeh zamanay mein dumm naheeN
Humm sey zamaana khud hai,zamanay sey humm naheen``
By this time it should be evident to you how rigid & incorrigible I am.So please refrain & stay happy.Just continue your rakhee bandhans.Never worry about the limped wrists.
It is,but only natural.
MEANWHILE ENJOY THE FOLLOWING:
_________________________________________________
FORMER German minister of Defense Von Buelow.
from The SPIEGEL
VON BUELOW INTERVIEW BLOWS 911 CASE WIDE OPEN
Posted By: Rosalinda
Date: Wednesday, 16 January 2002, 1:24 a.m.
(DRAFT) [Source: Tagesspiegel, Jan. 13] PARTIAL TRANSLATION
{The following interview with Von Buelow appeared in the German
daily }Tagesspiegel,{ on Jan. 13.}
__________________________________________________
Q: You seem so angry, really upset.
Von Buelow: I can explain what`s bothering me: I see that
after the horrifying attacks of Sept. 11, all political public
opinion is being forced into a direction that I consider wrong.
Q: What do you mean by that?
Von Buelow: I wonder why many questions are not asked.
Normally, with such a terrible thing, various leads and tracks
appear that are then commented on, by the investigators,
the media, the government: Is there something here or not?
Are the explanations plausible? This time, this is not the case
at all. It already began just hours after the attacks
in New York and Washington and--
Q: In those hours, there was horror, and grief.
Von Buelow: Right, but actually it was astounding:
There are 26 intelligence services in the U.S.A.
with a budget of $30 billion--
Q: More than the German defense budget.
Von Buelow: --which were not able to prevent the attacks.
In fact, they didn`t even have an inkling they would happen.
For 60 decisive minutes, the military and intelligence agencies
let the fighter planes stay on the ground, 48 hours later,
however, the FBI presented a list of suicide attackers.
Within ten days, it emerged that seven of them were still alive.
Q: What, please?
Von Buelow: Yes, yes. And why did the FBI chief take no position
regarding contradictions? Where the list came from,
why it was false? If I were the chief investigator
(state attorney) in such a case,
I would regularly go to the public, and give information
on which leads are valid and which not.
Q: The U.S. government talked about an emergency situation
after the attacks: They said they were in a war.
Is it not understandable that one does not tell the enemy
everything one knows about him?
Von Buelow: Naturally. But a government which goes to war,
must first establish who the attacker, the enemy, is.
It has a duty to provide evidence.
According to its own admission,
it has not been able to present any evidence
that would hold up in court.
Q: Some information on the perpetrators has been proven
with documents. The suspected leader, Mohammad Atta,
left Portland for Boston on the morning of Sept. 11,
in order to board the plane that later hit the World Trade Center
Von Buelow: If this Atta was the decisive man in the operation,
it`s really strange that he took such a risk of taking a plane
that would reach Boston such a short time before
the connecting flight. Had his flight been a few minutes late,
he would not have been in the plane that was hijacked.
Why should a sophisticated terrorist do this?
One can, by the way, read on CNN (Internet)
that none of these names were on the official passenger lists.
None of them had gone through the check-in procedures.
And why did none of the threatened pilots
give the agreed-upon code 7700 over the [Steuerknueppel: STEERING NOB?] to the ground station?
In addition: The black boxes which are fire and shock proof,
as well as the voice recordings, contain no valuable data--
Q: That sounds like--
Von Buelow: --like assailants who, in their preparations,
leave tracks behind them like a herd of stampeding elephants?
They made payments with credit cards with their own names;
they reported to their flight instructors with their own names.
They left behind rented cars with flight manuals in Arabic
for jumbo jets. They took with them, on their suicide trip,
wills and farewell letters, which fall into the hands of the FBI,
because they were stored in the wrong place
and wrongly addressed. Clues were left like behind
like in a child`s game of hide-and-seek,
which were to be followed!
There is also the theory of one British flight engineer:
According to this, the steering of the planes
was perhaps taken out of the pilots` hands, from outside.
The Americans had developed a method in the 1970s,
whereby they could rescue hijacked planes
by intervening into the computer piloting
[automatic pilot system]. This theory says,
this technique was abused in this case. That`s a theory....
Q: Which sounds really adventurous, and was never considered.
Von Buelow: You see! I do not accept this theory,
but I find it worth considering. And what about
the obscure stock transactions?
In the week prior to the attacks,
the amount of transactions in stocks in American Airlines,
United Airlines, and insurance companies, increased 1,200%.
It was for a value of $15 billion.
Some people must have known something. Who?
Q: Why don`t you speculate on who it might have been.
Von Buelow: With the help of the horrifying attacks,
the Western mass democracies were subjected to brainwashing.
The enemy image of anti-communism doesn`t work any more;
it is to be replaced by peoples of Islamic belief.
They are accused of having given birth to suicidal terrorism.
Q: Brainwashing? That`s a tough term.
Von Buelow: Yes? But the idea of the enemy image doesn`t
come from me. It comes from Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel
Huntington, two policy-makers of American intelligence
and foreign policy. Already in the middle of he 1990s,
Huntingon believed, people in Europe and the U.S.
needed someone they could hate--
this would strengthen their identification
with their own society. And Brzezinski, the mad dog,
as adviser to President Jimmy Carter,
campaigned for the exclusive right of the U.S.
to seize all the raw materials of the world,
especially oil and gas.
Q: You mean, the events of Sept. 11--
Von Buelow: --fit perfectly in the concept
of the armaments industry, the intelligence agencies,
the whole military-industrial-academic complex. This is in fact
conspicuous. The huge raw materials reserves of the former Soviet
Union are now at their disposal, also the pipeline routes and--
Q: Erich Follach described that at length in {Spiegel}:
``It`s a matter of military bases, drugs, oil and gas reserves.``
Von Buelow: I can state: the planning of the attacks
was technically and organizationally a master achievement.
To hijack four huge airplanes within a few minutes
and within one hour, to drive them into their targets,
with complicated flight maneuvers!
This is unthinkable, without years-long support
from secretapparatuses of the state and industry.
Q: You are a conspiracy theorist!
Von Buelow: Yeah, yeah. That`s the ridicule heaped
[on those raising these questions] by those who would prefer
to follow the official, politically correct line.
Even investigative journalists are fed propaganda
and disinformation. Anyone who doubts that,
doesn`t have all his marbles! That is your accusation.
Q: Your career actually speaks against the idea
that you are not in your right mind.
You were already in the 1970s, state secretary
in the Defense Ministry; in 1993 you were the SPD
[Social Democratic Party] speaker
in the Schalk-Golodkowski investigation committee--
Von Buelow: And it all began there!
Until that time, I did not have any great knowledge
of the work of intelligence agencies.
And now we had to take note of a great discrepancy:
We shed light on the dealings of the Stasi
and other East bloc intelligence agencies
in the field of economic criminality,
but as soon as we wanted to know something
about the activities of the BND [German intelligence]
or the CIA, it was mercilessly blocked.
No information, no cooperation, nothing!
That`s when I was first taken aback.
Q: Schalck-Golodkowski mediated, among other things, various
business deals abroad. When you looked at his case more closely--
Von Buelow: We found, for example, a clue in Rostock,
where Schalck organized his weapons depot.
Well, then we happened upon an affiliation of Schalck in Panama,
and then we happened upon Manuel Noriega,
who was for many years President, drug dealer,
and money launderer, all in one, right?
And this Noriega was also on the payroll of the CIA,
for $200,000 a year.
These were things that really made me curious.
Q: You wrote a book on the dealings of the CIA and Co.
In the meantime, you have become an expert
regarding the strange things
related to intelligence services` work.
Von Buelow: ``Strange things`` is the wrong term.
What has gone on, and goes on, in the name of intelligence services, are true crimes.
Q: What would you say determines
the work of intelligence services?
Von Buelow: So that we don`t have any misunderstandings:
I find that it makes sense to have intelligence services....
Q: You don`t think much of the earlier proposals
by the Greens, who wanted to dismantle these agencies?
Von Buelow: No. It is right to take a look
behind the scenes. Getting intelligence about the intentions
of an enemy, makes sense. It is important when one tries
to put oneself into the mind of the enemy.
Whoever wants to understand the CIA`s methods,
has to deal with its main tasks, {covert operations}:
below the level of war, and outside international law,
foreign states are to be influenced, by organizing insurrections,
terrorist attacks, usually combined with drugs and weapons trade,
and money laundering. This is essentially very simple:
One arms violent people with weapons.
Since, however, it must not under any circumstances come out,
that there is an intelligence agency behind it,
all traces are erased, with tremendous deployment of resources.
I have the impression
that this kind of intelligence agency spends 90% of its time
this way: creating false leads. So that, if anyone suspects
the collaboration of the agencies,
he is accused of the sickness of conspiracy madness.
The truth often comes out only years later.
CIA chief Allen Dulles once said:
In case of doubt, I would even lie to the Congress!
Q: The American journalist Seymour M. Hersh,
wrote in the {New Yorker,} that even some people in the CIA
and government assumed, that certain leads had been laid
in order to confuse the investigators.
Who, Herr von Buelow, would have done this?
Von Buelow: I don`t know that either. How should I?
I simply use my common sense, and--
See: The terrorists behaved in such a way to attract attention.
And as practicing Muslims, they were in a strip-tease bar,
and, drunken, stuck dollar bills into the panty of the dancer.
Q: Things like that also happen.
Von Buelow: It may be. As a lone fighter,
I cannot prove anything, that`s beyond my capabilities.
I have real difficulties, however,
to imagine that all this all sprung
out ofthe mind of an evil man in his cave.
Q: Mr. von Buelow, you yourself say
that you are alone in your criticism.
Formerly, you were part of the political establishment,
now you are an outsider.
Von Buelow: That is a problem sometimes,
but one gets used to it. By the way,
I know a lot of people, including very influential ones,
who agree with me, but only in whispers, never publicly.
Q: Do you still have contact with old SPD companions,
such as Egon Bahr and former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt?
Von Buelow: There are no close contacts any more.
I wantedto go to the last SPD party congress, but I was sick.
Q: Can it be, Mr. von Buelow, that you are a mouthpiece for
typical anti-Americanism?
Von Buelow: Nonsense, this has absolutely nothing to do
with anti-Americanism. I am a great admirer of this great,
open, free society, and always have been. I studied in the U.S.
Q: How did you get the idea that there could be a link
between the attacks and the American intelligence agencies?
Von Buelow: Do you remember the first attack
on the WorldTrade Center in 1993?
Q: Six people were killed and over a thousand wounded,
by a bomb explosion.
Von Buelow: In the middle was the bombmaker,
a former Egyptian officer.
He had pulled together some Muslims for the attack.
They were snuck into the country by the CIA,
despite a State Department ban on their entry.
At the same time, the leader of the band was an FBI informant.
And he made a deal with the authorities:
At the last minute, the dangerous explosive material
would be replaced by a harmless powder.
The FBI did not stick to the deal.
The bomb exploded, so to speak, with the knowledge of the FBI.
The official story of the crime was quickly found:
The criminals were evil Muslims.
Q: At the time Soviet soldiers marched into Afghanistan,
you were in the cabinet of Helmut Schmidt. What was it like?
Von Buelow: The Americans pushed for trade sanctions,
they demanded the boycott of the Olympic games in Moscow....
Q.... which the German government followed...
Von Buelow: And today we know: It was the strategy
of the American security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski,
to destabilize the Soviet Union from neighboring Muslim countries
They lured the Russians into Afghanistan,
and then prepared for them a hell on earth, their Vietnam.
With decisive support of the U.S. intelligence agencies,
at least 30,000 Muslim fighters were trained
in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a bunch of good-for-nothings
and fanatics who were, and still are today, ready for anything.
And one of them is Osama bin Laden. I wrote years ago: `
`It was out of this brood, that the Taliban grew up
in Afghanistan, who had been brought up in the Koran schools
financed by American and Saudi funds,
the Taliban who are now terrorizing the country and destroying it
Q: Even though you say, for the U.S.
it was a matter of raw materials in the region,
the starting point for the U.S. aggression,
was the terrorist attack which cost thousands of human lives.
Von Buelow: Completely true. One must always keep this
gruesome act in mind. Nonetheless, in the analysis of political
processes, I am allowed to look and see who has advantages
and disadvantages, and what is coincidental. When in doubt,
it is always worthwhile to take a look at a map,
where are raw materials resources, and the routes to them?
Then lay a map of civil wars and conflicts on top of that
--they coincide. The same is the case with the third map:
nodal points of the drug trade.
Where this all comes together, the American intelligence services
are not far away. By the way, the Bush family is linked to oil,
gas, and weapons trade, through the bin Laden family.
Q: What do you think of the Bin Laden films?
Von Buelow: When one is dealing with intelligence services,
one can imagine manipulations of the highest quality.
Hollywood could provide these techniques.
I consider the videos inappropriate as evidence.
Q: You believe the CIA is capable of anything,
[wouldn`t stop at anything].
Von Buelow: The CIA, in the state interests of the U.S.,
does not have to abide by any law in interventions abroad,
is not bound by international law;
only the President gives orders.
And when funds are cut, peace is on the horizon,
then a bomb explodes somewhere. Thus it is proven,
that you can`t do without the intelligence services;
and that the critics are {nuts,} as Father Bush called them,
Bush who was once CIA head and President.
You have to see that the U.S. spends $30 billion
on intelligence services, and $13 billion on anti-drug work.
And what comes out of it?
The chief of a special unit of the strategic anti-drug work declared, in despair, after 30 years of service,
that in every big, important drug case,
the CIA came in and took it out of my hands. (Rosalinda: Michael Levin)
Q: Do you criticize the German government
for its reaction after Sept. 11?
Von Buelow: No. To assume that the government
were independent in these questions, would be naive.
Q: Herr von Buelow, what will you do now?
Von Buelow: Nothing. My task is concluded by saying,
it could not have been that way [according to the official story]
Search for the truth!
A Mathematical Genius
Mr.Gill
I appreciate you posting the stuff about Tesla.I did,however,glean some insights from your material about him.One does benefit from readily accessable material otherwise as you rightly pointed out every & all kind of info is available in the library & the net.The whole idea here is start a conversation and not,hopefully,to give a test to anyone.
Isn`t is amazing and awesome how these great minds impact our lives.In much more subtle,silent and profound manner than any ruckus-ratcheted revolution.The metaphor of a zero-sum game is part of our collective psyche now so from your article it dawned upon me that we are not simply ``doing math here``.
__________________________________________________
I am forgetting the name of another great mathemetician who again resolved what was called (I think) Pascals theorem a couple of years ago.The documentary about such ``uncool`` subject that I saw would put the best James Bond thrillers to shame.I was almost sweating near the end.I wish I could remember the name.Maybe soebody reading this could help me here.rjanjua sahib?PLEASE!
Posted by
hamzadafaqui
Jan 18, 2002 10:30 pm
freethinker--21Mr.Gill
I appreciate you posting the stuff about Tesla.I did,however,glean some insights from your material about him.One does benefit from readily accessable material otherwise as you rightly pointed out every & all kind of info is available in the library & the net.The whole idea here is start a conversation and not,hopefully,to give a test to anyone.
Isn`t is amazing and awesome how these great minds impact our lives.In much more subtle,silent and profound manner than any ruckus-ratcheted revolution.The metaphor of a zero-sum game is part of our collective psyche now so from your article it dawned upon me that we are not simply ``doing math here``.
__________________________________________________
I am forgetting the name of another great mathemetician who again resolved what was called (I think) Pascals theorem a couple of years ago.The documentary about such ``uncool`` subject that I saw would put the best James Bond thrillers to shame.I was almost sweating near the end.I wish I could remember the name.Maybe soebody reading this could help me here.rjanjua sahib?PLEASE!
The Identity Crisis of a Modern Muslim
Oh what curves & googlies you throw.Poor souls.Have some mercy,they are not used to this art.Jay uses it but too frquently & obviously,hence ends up as a curmedgeon(sp?) satirist.
O how rewarding some of the snares have been for me.I love to see them wriggle,wiggle,twisting them in the wind.
Phonies,pretenders & the lovey-dovey kinds are my favourite quarry.I have no respect or sympathy for a half-naked fakir.I love the bold,forthright,non-apologist,CONSTITUITIONAL Quaid-e-Azam.No wonder I admire YLH so much.
Posted by
hamzadafaqui
Jan 18, 2002 10:30 pm
DRUMZ-----151Oh what curves & googlies you throw.Poor souls.Have some mercy,they are not used to this art.Jay uses it but too frquently & obviously,hence ends up as a curmedgeon(sp?) satirist.
O how rewarding some of the snares have been for me.I love to see them wriggle,wiggle,twisting them in the wind.
Phonies,pretenders & the lovey-dovey kinds are my favourite quarry.I have no respect or sympathy for a half-naked fakir.I love the bold,forthright,non-apologist,CONSTITUITIONAL Quaid-e-Azam.No wonder I admire YLH so much.
America’s Responsibility
e-mail or distribute this to all your muslim friends. __________________________________________________
KANDAHAR (Special Report): In the Mewand District of Kandahar, a US helicopter was shot down Wednesday, killing seven US soldiers. In the mountainous region of the Roodfarah area of Mewand District, which previously housed Arab Mujahideen bases, US Special Forces tried to initiate a raid. 15 US warplanes and helicopters were participating in the operation. All of a sudden, one US helicopter was destroyed which was among those guarding their ground troops. Three explosions were heard before the helicopter crashed to the ground. US Forces arrested one Afghan boy in the area, but he was later on released. This boy disclosed that the US forces were completely shocked and in a state of panic and confusion when this helicopter was destroyed. After the destruction of this helicopter, the cowardly US soldiers` left the place and called in airstrikes to level the area in which it was destroyed. Airstrikes continued throughout Wednesday night.
MORE FIRING AT KANDAHAR AIRPORT
KABUL (Online): More exchange of fire took place near Kandahar Airport on Wednesday whilst Arab Mujahideen prisoners were being transported to Cuba. The firing began when a US aircraft carrying 30 Mujahideen prisoners was about to take off for the US base in Cuba. US marines tightened up security measures in their own right after this exchange of fire. According to Military officials these measures were taken due to the presence of unidentified personnel within the security bounded areas.
BOMBING OF US WARPLANES OVER ZAWAR CONTINUES
KABUL(NNI): US warplanes continued their bombing Wednesday over the Eastern regions of Afghanistan. Attacking from a very high altitude, they targetted so called `new` Taliban and Al-Qaida positions and dropped several heavy bombs. This bombing also targetted new positions near Zawar. This bombing has been a continuous cause of unrest for the residents of the region, who are now mustering plans to break from the interim puppet government and attack US forces in Afghanistan.
PRESENCE OF SEVEN MUJAHIDEEN WITHIN PERIMETER OF KANDAHAR AIRPORT CREATES CHAOS AMONGST US SOLDIERS AFRAID OF GUERRILLA ATTACKS
WASHINGTON (NNI): US marines have tightened up their security measures after the suspected sighting of seven Mujahideen within the security perimeter of Kandahar Airport. US officials in Washington disclosed that US Marines captured a huge amount of ammunition including hand grenades, assault rifles and rocket launchers in the vicinity of Kandahar Airport. The spokesman also disclosed that seven men had entered the security perimeter of US Marines in Southern Afghanistan. The spokesman added that efforts were underway to capture those seven men and security measures had also been tightened up.
NOW CRIME TO EVEN HELP MUSLIM CIVILIANS WITH RELIEF EFFORTS
BANNU (Special Report): The media has recently carried reports of a British man, James McLintock, who was captured in Pakistan near the Afghan border on suspicion of involvement of terrorism. Mr McLintock, apparently a Muslim, told the authorities that he was involved in relief efforts for Afghan refugees with an established Karachi-based relief organisation. Having been cleared by the FBI after interrogation in inhumane conditions, Mr McLintock was given a punishment of three years hard labour in Pakistani jails for the crime of wishing to assist Afghan refugees.
This incident further shows the hypocrisy of the international community, who first made it a crime for Muslims to defend themselves, and now they have even made it a crime to help Afghan refugees, suggesting the point that: `When we disbelievers kill you Muslims, you are not allowed to defend yourselves and if we kill your fellow Muslims and turn them into refugees, then you are not allowed to help them, else you will get punished.`
Mr McLintock continues to be held in solitary confinement in Pakistan jails; his Muslim wife, Shaffia Begum, and his non-Muslim parents, have been trying to have him released, but it is unlikely the British Government will intervene to have him released, because it only intervenes for British citizens who are white and NON-Muslim, in the same way that America does not care about the rights of Mujahid John Walker Lindh, who is also white, but Muslim. If Mr McLintock was a white, non-Muslim, homosexual nurse who had committed murder and theft (like the two British nurses in Saudi Arabia who killed a fellow Australian but were released upon pressure by the British Government on Saudi Arabia), he would now be sitting in his comfortable home, with lucrative contracts to sell his story to the media and become a star.
Posted by
hamzadafaqui
Jan 18, 2002 11:43 am
News that US media would never report.e-mail or distribute this to all your muslim friends. __________________________________________________
KANDAHAR (Special Report): In the Mewand District of Kandahar, a US helicopter was shot down Wednesday, killing seven US soldiers. In the mountainous region of the Roodfarah area of Mewand District, which previously housed Arab Mujahideen bases, US Special Forces tried to initiate a raid. 15 US warplanes and helicopters were participating in the operation. All of a sudden, one US helicopter was destroyed which was among those guarding their ground troops. Three explosions were heard before the helicopter crashed to the ground. US Forces arrested one Afghan boy in the area, but he was later on released. This boy disclosed that the US forces were completely shocked and in a state of panic and confusion when this helicopter was destroyed. After the destruction of this helicopter, the cowardly US soldiers` left the place and called in airstrikes to level the area in which it was destroyed. Airstrikes continued throughout Wednesday night.
MORE FIRING AT KANDAHAR AIRPORT
KABUL (Online): More exchange of fire took place near Kandahar Airport on Wednesday whilst Arab Mujahideen prisoners were being transported to Cuba. The firing began when a US aircraft carrying 30 Mujahideen prisoners was about to take off for the US base in Cuba. US marines tightened up security measures in their own right after this exchange of fire. According to Military officials these measures were taken due to the presence of unidentified personnel within the security bounded areas.
BOMBING OF US WARPLANES OVER ZAWAR CONTINUES
KABUL(NNI): US warplanes continued their bombing Wednesday over the Eastern regions of Afghanistan. Attacking from a very high altitude, they targetted so called `new` Taliban and Al-Qaida positions and dropped several heavy bombs. This bombing also targetted new positions near Zawar. This bombing has been a continuous cause of unrest for the residents of the region, who are now mustering plans to break from the interim puppet government and attack US forces in Afghanistan.
PRESENCE OF SEVEN MUJAHIDEEN WITHIN PERIMETER OF KANDAHAR AIRPORT CREATES CHAOS AMONGST US SOLDIERS AFRAID OF GUERRILLA ATTACKS
WASHINGTON (NNI): US marines have tightened up their security measures after the suspected sighting of seven Mujahideen within the security perimeter of Kandahar Airport. US officials in Washington disclosed that US Marines captured a huge amount of ammunition including hand grenades, assault rifles and rocket launchers in the vicinity of Kandahar Airport. The spokesman also disclosed that seven men had entered the security perimeter of US Marines in Southern Afghanistan. The spokesman added that efforts were underway to capture those seven men and security measures had also been tightened up.
NOW CRIME TO EVEN HELP MUSLIM CIVILIANS WITH RELIEF EFFORTS
BANNU (Special Report): The media has recently carried reports of a British man, James McLintock, who was captured in Pakistan near the Afghan border on suspicion of involvement of terrorism. Mr McLintock, apparently a Muslim, told the authorities that he was involved in relief efforts for Afghan refugees with an established Karachi-based relief organisation. Having been cleared by the FBI after interrogation in inhumane conditions, Mr McLintock was given a punishment of three years hard labour in Pakistani jails for the crime of wishing to assist Afghan refugees.
This incident further shows the hypocrisy of the international community, who first made it a crime for Muslims to defend themselves, and now they have even made it a crime to help Afghan refugees, suggesting the point that: `When we disbelievers kill you Muslims, you are not allowed to defend yourselves and if we kill your fellow Muslims and turn them into refugees, then you are not allowed to help them, else you will get punished.`
Mr McLintock continues to be held in solitary confinement in Pakistan jails; his Muslim wife, Shaffia Begum, and his non-Muslim parents, have been trying to have him released, but it is unlikely the British Government will intervene to have him released, because it only intervenes for British citizens who are white and NON-Muslim, in the same way that America does not care about the rights of Mujahid John Walker Lindh, who is also white, but Muslim. If Mr McLintock was a white, non-Muslim, homosexual nurse who had committed murder and theft (like the two British nurses in Saudi Arabia who killed a fellow Australian but were released upon pressure by the British Government on Saudi Arabia), he would now be sitting in his comfortable home, with lucrative contracts to sell his story to the media and become a star.
The Identity Crisis of a Modern Muslim
Sarhind is still the name of the area abutting the west bank of the river sind around DIKhan & nwfp.Sar e hind is a farsi word which basically means ``at the beginning of Hind or at the advent of Hind`` like Sar e rah,or sar e shaam(beginning of road or beginning of evening) Sar e is a prfix for a lot of words in farsi.It ended up as Sind as spoken word.
Balochi,Brauhi,& pashto as languages distinct from hindi or sanskrit are a living testimony to it.
The east bank of Sind was of course Hind....but no more;).Hsitorical autopsies are simply useless & irrelevant until & unless one can earn some foreign exchange to cater to the ideocyncracies of some anal-retentive tourists.Hence the purely business interest by the archelogists in Pakistan.
Posted by
hamzadafaqui
Jan 17, 2002 11:26 pm
hobbyty:Sarhind is still the name of the area abutting the west bank of the river sind around DIKhan & nwfp.Sar e hind is a farsi word which basically means ``at the beginning of Hind or at the advent of Hind`` like Sar e rah,or sar e shaam(beginning of road or beginning of evening) Sar e is a prfix for a lot of words in farsi.It ended up as Sind as spoken word.
Balochi,Brauhi,& pashto as languages distinct from hindi or sanskrit are a living testimony to it.
The east bank of Sind was of course Hind....but no more;).Hsitorical autopsies are simply useless & irrelevant until & unless one can earn some foreign exchange to cater to the ideocyncracies of some anal-retentive tourists.Hence the purely business interest by the archelogists in Pakistan.
The Identity Crisis of a Modern Muslim
The great Philosopher Mulla Sadra of Iran.
(How many of us muslims are even aware of his name?__________________________________________________
Knowledge and Immortality in Spinoza and Mulla Sadra
By: Catherine Wilson
I.
For the most part, we English-speaking historians of 17th century philosophy continue in a state of relative ignorance of the history of Arabic and Jewish philosophy. The works of Sadr a-Din Shirazi or Mulla Sadra are a case in point. Most of his works have not been translated. And, despite some useful studies and surveys, an analytical literature of interest to philosophers is still missing, as Hossein Ziai has noted. There are a number of reasons why we historians would like to have more. The first is that, as late as the mid-17th century Islamic and Christian philosophers were drawing on the same ancient and medieval background. In metaphysics and the theory of knowledge there was a common body of knowledge and a set of well-understood controversies based on Aristotelian, Neo-platonic, and Gnostic sources. On the theological side, where Christian and Islamic sources differed, the metaphysical issues were nevertheless similar. For, as monotheistic religions, both Christianity and Islam faced a perplexing set of issues having to do with creation, divine will and......
FULL TEXT AT:
http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ip/kni.htm
Posted by
hamzadafaqui
Jan 17, 2002 05:50 pm
All---especially DRUMS,hobbyty,tahmad,darkhorse,ylh,ali1,.....The great Philosopher Mulla Sadra of Iran.
(How many of us muslims are even aware of his name?__________________________________________________
Knowledge and Immortality in Spinoza and Mulla Sadra
By: Catherine Wilson
I.
For the most part, we English-speaking historians of 17th century philosophy continue in a state of relative ignorance of the history of Arabic and Jewish philosophy. The works of Sadr a-Din Shirazi or Mulla Sadra are a case in point. Most of his works have not been translated. And, despite some useful studies and surveys, an analytical literature of interest to philosophers is still missing, as Hossein Ziai has noted. There are a number of reasons why we historians would like to have more. The first is that, as late as the mid-17th century Islamic and Christian philosophers were drawing on the same ancient and medieval background. In metaphysics and the theory of knowledge there was a common body of knowledge and a set of well-understood controversies based on Aristotelian, Neo-platonic, and Gnostic sources. On the theological side, where Christian and Islamic sources differed, the metaphysical issues were nevertheless similar. For, as monotheistic religions, both Christianity and Islam faced a perplexing set of issues having to do with creation, divine will and......
FULL TEXT AT:
http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ip/kni.htm
The Identity Crisis of a Modern Muslim
Salaam.
[Amir Khusro (Gori soi sayj pay, mukh pay darey khess).]
__________________________________________________
I mulled over for some time now and finally decided to `correct` the typo here.
The word is /kais and NOT /khess .
I just couldn`t restrain the urge & itch in me to satisfy my aesthetic sensibilities.Kais is long lush hair(Zulfain).The language/genre employed by Amir Khusro is not urdu/hindi but rekhtee.This is a unique art-form(perhaps nowhere else) & the sufis have employed it as a powerful tool for political change & social activism.
It is very unfortunate that the so called educated in Pakistan sing such songs at weddings.On the contrary these hymns are celebrating death in the hope of the Grand Reunion.
The english-enamoured are the numero uno johalaas in our homelands.May Allah rid them of us or bring about a change in their progeny to rebel against them.
Posted by
hamzadafaqui
Jan 17, 2002 02:47 pm
darkhorse---65Salaam.
[Amir Khusro (Gori soi sayj pay, mukh pay darey khess).]
__________________________________________________
I mulled over for some time now and finally decided to `correct` the typo here.
The word is /kais and NOT /khess .
I just couldn`t restrain the urge & itch in me to satisfy my aesthetic sensibilities.Kais is long lush hair(Zulfain).The language/genre employed by Amir Khusro is not urdu/hindi but rekhtee.This is a unique art-form(perhaps nowhere else) & the sufis have employed it as a powerful tool for political change & social activism.
It is very unfortunate that the so called educated in Pakistan sing such songs at weddings.On the contrary these hymns are celebrating death in the hope of the Grand Reunion.
The english-enamoured are the numero uno johalaas in our homelands.May Allah rid them of us or bring about a change in their progeny to rebel against them.
The Identity Crisis of a Modern Muslim
Thank you indeed.
Perhaps they are hankering for the sweet old days when ``THEY WERE KINGS`` & ``We were bhangies``.Maybe it had something to do with the Chhitars used on them.Such Socio-political S&M is unheard of elsewhere but it seems baighairty just never did get exorcised even after 1947.
Iftikhar Shahs` excellent book ``When Amritsar was on fire`` sends shivers & give goosebumps even today.
Posted by
hamzadafaqui
Jan 17, 2002 10:18 am
Ali--45Thank you indeed.
Perhaps they are hankering for the sweet old days when ``THEY WERE KINGS`` & ``We were bhangies``.Maybe it had something to do with the Chhitars used on them.Such Socio-political S&M is unheard of elsewhere but it seems baighairty just never did get exorcised even after 1947.
Iftikhar Shahs` excellent book ``When Amritsar was on fire`` sends shivers & give goosebumps even today.
A Mathematical Genius
No it would not,and that is not the effort & intent either.I value your input,incisive & forthright that it is,but I would request you to bear with me & scroll past.Soon it may not be needed.I do not like it myself.
Tesla has always fascinated me.The ``terrorism`` by Edison has truly not been reported(been done just enough to lay claim to ``objectivity``)and the Canadians are so awash in an inferiority complex that they are proud to have two masters to serve(Brits & Yanks)
Posted by
hamzadafaqui
Jan 17, 2002 01:41 am
DRUMZ---12.No it would not,and that is not the effort & intent either.I value your input,incisive & forthright that it is,but I would request you to bear with me & scroll past.Soon it may not be needed.I do not like it myself.
Tesla has always fascinated me.The ``terrorism`` by Edison has truly not been reported(been done just enough to lay claim to ``objectivity``)and the Canadians are so awash in an inferiority complex that they are proud to have two masters to serve(Brits & Yanks)
The Identity Crisis of a Modern Muslim
By M. Shahid Alam
It has become fashionable in some circles after September 11 to excoriate Islam as the source of the problems facing the Islamic world. The air is thick with theories which claim that Islam has been paralyzed by a deadening obscurantism since the twelfth century, and this paralysis will only end when Muslims decide to replace Islam with secular humanism. It is time these theories were deconstructed.
A Matter of Timing
I will turn directly to the thesis of the early demise of Islamic civilization: since the castigation of Islam often hinges on how and when this happened.
First, and this is very important, this thesis is quite wrong about the timing of the decline. It claims that Islam lost its creative power in the twelfth century as a result of the twin blows dealt by orthodox `Ulama-the religious scholars of Islam-and the Mongols. These ideas have an Orientalist odor.
This canard was first challenged by Marshall Hodgson in The Venture of Islam (1974). He believes that the brilliant works, in architecture, philosophy, and the visual arts, created during the sixteenth century-in Isphahan, Istanbul, Delhi and Agra-were not inferior to the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance.
The scientific work did not face sudden death either. In fact, George Saliba, in A History of Arabic Astronomy, extends Islam`s golden age to the fifteenth century. After the Mongols are supposed to have devastated Eastern Islam, major observatories were being set up as late as the fifteenth century. The astronomical tables computed at these observatories, together with the work of Ibn-Shatir (d. 1375), a time-keeper in the central mosque of Damascus, were passed on to Europe, and are believed to have contributed to the Copernican revolution.
Did Islam Stumble?
If Islam did not suffer a decline in the twelfth century, when did this happen? The beginnings of this process, as well as its sources, must be sought not so much in Islam as in Europe. It wasn`t Islam that stumbled. Rather, it was Europe that gathered speed and moved ahead, in gunnery and shipping, starting in the sixteenth century.
Europe employed its maritime strength to plunder the gold and silver of the Americas, create an Atlantic economy, and dominate the commerce of the Indian Ocean. This deepened Europe`s commercial and financial capital, while squeezing the trading profits of the major Islamic empires as well as the smaller trading states in the Indian Ocean. Over time, Europe` military advantage became decisive. And by the beginning of the nineteenth centuryin India even before thatEurope started its project of dismantling the Islamic polities in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.
Why couldn`t Islamic-or other-polities resist this growing European thrust? The Eurocentric narratives would have us believe that this was fait accompli: the simple working out of Europe`s racial, geographic, climatic, and cultural advantages over others. Asia and Africa could have done little to resist.
A historical narrative tells a different story. Their colonization of the Americas, their growing control over the trade of the Indian Ocean, their mercantilist rivalries and incessant wars-all rooted in the anarchy of nation states-accelerated the dynamic of historical change in Europe, allowing it to outpace the more centralized, mostly land-based empires in Asia and Africa. Europe`s advantages were historical-and, in part, accidental.
Thwarted Recovery
This takes us to the troubling question of Islam`s failure-unlike India and China-to mount an adequate recovery from the losses of the colonial epoch.
Why has Islam, which commanded several power centers before the rise of Europe, failed to reconstitute its lost power in the post-colonial period? Once again, those who attribute this failure to Islam are inverting the order of causation.
As recently as 1750, Islamic polities stretched from Mauritania and the Balkans in the West to Sinjiang and Mindanao in the East. But this power lacked an adequate social base. In 1800 the Arab population in the Middle East was quite thin. Elsewhere, in the Balkans and India, the Islamic empires ruled over mostly non-Muslim populations. The early collapse of Muslim power in India and the downsizing of the Ottomans in Europe had much to do with these demographic drawbacks.
The Ottomans, the Maghreb and Egypt faced another handicap: they were only a few day`s sail from Europe. This made them tempting targets for European capital and cupidity, mixed with some of the old zeal for eradicating Islam. This mission was taken up successively by France, Britain and Italy. An early and determined Egyptian effort to industrializeinitiated in 1810was dismantled by the British and French in 1840. When the Egyptians mobilized again in the 1870s, it led to their colonization in 1882. Britain, France and Israel mounted another invasion of Egypt as recently as 1956.
This suggests some sobering reflections for those who would blame the present troubles on Islam`s antipathy to modernity. Imagine if the Egyptian bid to industrialize had not been dismantled by imperialist Britain and France; it is then likely that an industrialized Egypt would eventually have led the entire region to industrial growth, prosperity and power. This thought experiment explains why Egypt`s industrial drive had to be aborted. An industrialized Middle East may have renewed the old threat of Islam to Europe.
The disarray of the Arabs in the post-colonial period goes back to two addi-tional factors: the Zionism and oil. The Zionist movement was founded on a confluence of Jewish and Western interests in the Middle East. In time, this led in 1917 to Britain`s support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, the dismantling of the Ottoman empire in 1919, the vivisection of the former Ottoman territories in the Levant, the British mandate over Palestine, and the creation of Israel in 1948. The Islamic Crescent had been splintered, and part of it occupied by a Jewish colonial-settler state.
In the meanwhile, United States and Britain were making arrangements in the Persian Gulf to ensure Western control over the richest oil reserves in the world. They decided to place the region under archaic, absolutist monarchies whose survival, against the rising tide of nationalism, would depend on United States. As part of this plan, when the Iranians overthrew the monarchy in 1953, United States and Britain instigated a coup to re-instated it. In 1967, with the decisive defeat of Egypt, Syria and Jordan-leading to the occupation of Sinai, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza-Israel cut short the career of secular Arab nationalism. The Middle East straightjacket was now securely in place.
The Iranian revolution of 1979 did not loosen the straightjacket. On the contrary, by raising the specter of Islamist power, this revolution paved the way for an `Arab` war against Iran, with the blessings of United States. In time, after the collapse of Soviet Union, this led the corrupt Arab regimes to form a grand alliance-under the aegis of United States and Israel-to control and repress their Islamist movements. When foolhardy Iraq dared to challenge this grand alliance, it was bombed back to the stone age and crippled with comprehensive economic sanctions.
A new `cold war` had descended on the Islamic world in the 1990s. Its rules were clear. The United States would support the Islamic despots-of whatever stripe-so long as they kept the lid on political Islam. If any country dared to depart from the terms of this contract, it faced economic and military sanctions; and, if these did not work, they would be followed by swift and devastating reprisals. Iraq showed to the Islamic world the price it would pay for challenging this new contract. Similarly, Algeria stands as an example of what happens when the democratic process threatens to empower Islamists.
An explanation of why the `democratization` of the 1990s bypassed the Islamic world might be found in this new cold war. Most Western commentators think otherwise: they choose to blame Islam. Their method is classic-damnation by accusation. If Islam is obscurantist, anti-rationalist, fanatical, and misogynist, then, it must also be opposed to democracy. The Orientalist has spoken: the case is closed.
Those who believe that Islam is anti-democratic need a short lesson in the modern history of constitutional movements in Islam. Muhammad Ali of Egypt appointed his first advisory council in 1824, consisting mostly of elected members. In 1881, the Egyptian nationalist movement succeeded in convening an elected parliament, but this was aborted only a year later by British occupation. Tunisia had promulgated a constitution in 1860, setting up a Supreme Council purporting to limit the powers of the monarchy. But this was suspended in 1864 when the French discovered that it interfered with their ambitions. Turkey elected its first parliament in 1877, though it was dissolved a year later by the Caliph; a second parliament was convened in 1908. Iran`s progress was more dramatic. It started with protests against a British tobacco monopoly in the 1890s, and quickly led to an elected parliament in 1906, with powers to confirm the cabinet. A year later, however, the British and Russians carved up Iran into their spheres of influence, a development that would lead to the dissolution of the parliament in 1910. Nevertheless, the constitutional movement persisted until it was suppressed in 1931 by a new dynasty brought to power by the British.
Compare these developments with the history of constitutional movements elsewhere, not excluding Europe, during the nineteenth century-and the world of Islam does not suffer from the comparison. Incredible as this appears to minds blinded by Eurocentric prejudice, Tunisia, Egypt and Iran were taking the lead in making the transition to constitutional monarchies. The `resistance to democracy` in the Arab world even today does not come from their population. Quite the opposite. It comes from neo-colonial surrogates-brutal military dictatorships and absolutist monarchies-imposed by a United States determined to safeguard oil and Israel.
A New Colonial Contract
The US-imposed straightjacket has deepened the contradictions of global capitalism in the Islamic world: a development that is pregnant with consequences which threaten to spin out of control.
During the Cold War, the elite factions in many Third World coun-tries-especially their military elites-competed to win the US contract for re-pressing their populist movements. As long as they did their job, they enjoyed a degree of autonomy in managing their economies. A few of them in East Asia, the most favored ones, became showcases of capitalist success. When Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, this contract was terminated. It was replaced by the Washington Consensus, enforced by the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organization. The elites in the periphery would now compete to open up their economies for takeover by multinational corporations.
There are two versions of this new colonial contract. Countries in the non-Islamic periphery are generally encouraged to compete for the contract through the ballot box. In countries that have strong Islamist movements, this option is not available; they are allowed to keep their dictators and monarchs. The excuse for this two-track policy is flimsy. It is charged that the Islamist parties oppose democracy: that they will use the ballot to shut down the ballot. The real reason is Western nervousness over the Islamist`s twin goals: introducing an Islamic social order, and reversing the fragmentation of Islam.
This siege of the Islamic world is unlikely to produce the desired results. On the contrary, it has engendered contradictions that will only deepen over time. After the rout of the Arab armies in 1967, the failure of secular, nationalist movements to reverse Arab marginalization was becoming transparent. In 1973, with appropriate offers of American `aid`, Egypt made a separate peace with Israel. In abdicating its leadership of the Arab world, Egypt wrote the obituary of Arab nationalism. From now on, the historic task of liberating the Arab world would be assumed by the Islamists.
Although defeated, the corrupt Arab regimes remained ensconced in power. They owe their survival to the new colonial contract which allowed them to keep their repressive apparatus if they used it to wage war against their own people. The turn around was quick, moving through capitulations at Camp David and Oslo, normalization of ties with Israel, and capitulation to the Washington Consensus. The war against Islam intensified. The Islamist parties were banned, rooted out of professional associations and trade unions, and eventually their leaders were jailed, executed, or hounded out of the country.
This repression of Islamists has produced two results. Nearly everywhere, it immobilized mainstream Islamists who wished to work through the institutions of civil society: through political parties, professional associations, the media, the courts, and charities. The focus now shifted to the extremists willing to engage in violent action to gain their ends. But the extremists too had little crawl space under the repressive Arab regimes. Those who survived were driven underground, or went into exile in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or the Western countries.
At this point, some of them decided to change their strategy.
They would target their problems at its source-and inflict damage on United States. They wanted to sting the United States into lifting its siege of Islamic countries. Alternatively, they hoped to start wars-like the one in Afghanistan-on the chance that this would spark rebellions against the American surrogates in the Islamic world.
Giving Up `False Notions`?
Of late, sagely voices-outside and inside Islam-have been counseling Muslims to give up the `false notions` of Islam. I hope to have shown that the false notions we need give up are the Orientalist narratives-of an Islam that has been (mis)represented as irrational, misogynist, fatalist and fanatical.
Rational thinking did not begin with the Enlightenment. In fact, several En-lightenment thinkers turned to Islam to advance their own struggle against medieval obscurantism and the intolerance of an organized clergy. It is time for alienated Muslim intellectuals to tear the Orientalist veil that obscures the face of Islam, re-enter the historical currents they have abandoned, create a deeper understanding of the dynamics of derailed Islamic societies, and lead them into an Islamic vision of a world where all communities participate in a race to create works of excellence.
The West too must give up its false notions of Islam as the irreconcilable `Other`, that must forever be battled and besieged. If Islam is a greater threat to the West than India or China, that is because our actions-in large part-have succeeded in preventing it from reconstituting its center, its wholeness and history. More than a fifth of the world`s population seek their place in the world within a stream of history that flows from the Qur`an. They want to live by ethical ideals that in the past have produced nobility, magnanimity, sobriety, tolerance, science, mathematics, philosophy, architecture and poetry. Islam may do so again if only we lift the siege-and allow the light, freshness and sweetness at its core to find expression again in a contest of creative minds and soulful hearts, intertwined with reason and mercy.
Shahid Alam is a Professor of Economics at Northeastern University in Boston.
Posted by
hamzadafaqui
Jan 17, 2002 01:41 am
Is There an Islamic Problem?By M. Shahid Alam
It has become fashionable in some circles after September 11 to excoriate Islam as the source of the problems facing the Islamic world. The air is thick with theories which claim that Islam has been paralyzed by a deadening obscurantism since the twelfth century, and this paralysis will only end when Muslims decide to replace Islam with secular humanism. It is time these theories were deconstructed.
A Matter of Timing
I will turn directly to the thesis of the early demise of Islamic civilization: since the castigation of Islam often hinges on how and when this happened.
First, and this is very important, this thesis is quite wrong about the timing of the decline. It claims that Islam lost its creative power in the twelfth century as a result of the twin blows dealt by orthodox `Ulama-the religious scholars of Islam-and the Mongols. These ideas have an Orientalist odor.
This canard was first challenged by Marshall Hodgson in The Venture of Islam (1974). He believes that the brilliant works, in architecture, philosophy, and the visual arts, created during the sixteenth century-in Isphahan, Istanbul, Delhi and Agra-were not inferior to the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance.
The scientific work did not face sudden death either. In fact, George Saliba, in A History of Arabic Astronomy, extends Islam`s golden age to the fifteenth century. After the Mongols are supposed to have devastated Eastern Islam, major observatories were being set up as late as the fifteenth century. The astronomical tables computed at these observatories, together with the work of Ibn-Shatir (d. 1375), a time-keeper in the central mosque of Damascus, were passed on to Europe, and are believed to have contributed to the Copernican revolution.
Did Islam Stumble?
If Islam did not suffer a decline in the twelfth century, when did this happen? The beginnings of this process, as well as its sources, must be sought not so much in Islam as in Europe. It wasn`t Islam that stumbled. Rather, it was Europe that gathered speed and moved ahead, in gunnery and shipping, starting in the sixteenth century.
Europe employed its maritime strength to plunder the gold and silver of the Americas, create an Atlantic economy, and dominate the commerce of the Indian Ocean. This deepened Europe`s commercial and financial capital, while squeezing the trading profits of the major Islamic empires as well as the smaller trading states in the Indian Ocean. Over time, Europe` military advantage became decisive. And by the beginning of the nineteenth centuryin India even before thatEurope started its project of dismantling the Islamic polities in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.
Why couldn`t Islamic-or other-polities resist this growing European thrust? The Eurocentric narratives would have us believe that this was fait accompli: the simple working out of Europe`s racial, geographic, climatic, and cultural advantages over others. Asia and Africa could have done little to resist.
A historical narrative tells a different story. Their colonization of the Americas, their growing control over the trade of the Indian Ocean, their mercantilist rivalries and incessant wars-all rooted in the anarchy of nation states-accelerated the dynamic of historical change in Europe, allowing it to outpace the more centralized, mostly land-based empires in Asia and Africa. Europe`s advantages were historical-and, in part, accidental.
Thwarted Recovery
This takes us to the troubling question of Islam`s failure-unlike India and China-to mount an adequate recovery from the losses of the colonial epoch.
Why has Islam, which commanded several power centers before the rise of Europe, failed to reconstitute its lost power in the post-colonial period? Once again, those who attribute this failure to Islam are inverting the order of causation.
As recently as 1750, Islamic polities stretched from Mauritania and the Balkans in the West to Sinjiang and Mindanao in the East. But this power lacked an adequate social base. In 1800 the Arab population in the Middle East was quite thin. Elsewhere, in the Balkans and India, the Islamic empires ruled over mostly non-Muslim populations. The early collapse of Muslim power in India and the downsizing of the Ottomans in Europe had much to do with these demographic drawbacks.
The Ottomans, the Maghreb and Egypt faced another handicap: they were only a few day`s sail from Europe. This made them tempting targets for European capital and cupidity, mixed with some of the old zeal for eradicating Islam. This mission was taken up successively by France, Britain and Italy. An early and determined Egyptian effort to industrializeinitiated in 1810was dismantled by the British and French in 1840. When the Egyptians mobilized again in the 1870s, it led to their colonization in 1882. Britain, France and Israel mounted another invasion of Egypt as recently as 1956.
This suggests some sobering reflections for those who would blame the present troubles on Islam`s antipathy to modernity. Imagine if the Egyptian bid to industrialize had not been dismantled by imperialist Britain and France; it is then likely that an industrialized Egypt would eventually have led the entire region to industrial growth, prosperity and power. This thought experiment explains why Egypt`s industrial drive had to be aborted. An industrialized Middle East may have renewed the old threat of Islam to Europe.
The disarray of the Arabs in the post-colonial period goes back to two addi-tional factors: the Zionism and oil. The Zionist movement was founded on a confluence of Jewish and Western interests in the Middle East. In time, this led in 1917 to Britain`s support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, the dismantling of the Ottoman empire in 1919, the vivisection of the former Ottoman territories in the Levant, the British mandate over Palestine, and the creation of Israel in 1948. The Islamic Crescent had been splintered, and part of it occupied by a Jewish colonial-settler state.
In the meanwhile, United States and Britain were making arrangements in the Persian Gulf to ensure Western control over the richest oil reserves in the world. They decided to place the region under archaic, absolutist monarchies whose survival, against the rising tide of nationalism, would depend on United States. As part of this plan, when the Iranians overthrew the monarchy in 1953, United States and Britain instigated a coup to re-instated it. In 1967, with the decisive defeat of Egypt, Syria and Jordan-leading to the occupation of Sinai, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza-Israel cut short the career of secular Arab nationalism. The Middle East straightjacket was now securely in place.
The Iranian revolution of 1979 did not loosen the straightjacket. On the contrary, by raising the specter of Islamist power, this revolution paved the way for an `Arab` war against Iran, with the blessings of United States. In time, after the collapse of Soviet Union, this led the corrupt Arab regimes to form a grand alliance-under the aegis of United States and Israel-to control and repress their Islamist movements. When foolhardy Iraq dared to challenge this grand alliance, it was bombed back to the stone age and crippled with comprehensive economic sanctions.
A new `cold war` had descended on the Islamic world in the 1990s. Its rules were clear. The United States would support the Islamic despots-of whatever stripe-so long as they kept the lid on political Islam. If any country dared to depart from the terms of this contract, it faced economic and military sanctions; and, if these did not work, they would be followed by swift and devastating reprisals. Iraq showed to the Islamic world the price it would pay for challenging this new contract. Similarly, Algeria stands as an example of what happens when the democratic process threatens to empower Islamists.
An explanation of why the `democratization` of the 1990s bypassed the Islamic world might be found in this new cold war. Most Western commentators think otherwise: they choose to blame Islam. Their method is classic-damnation by accusation. If Islam is obscurantist, anti-rationalist, fanatical, and misogynist, then, it must also be opposed to democracy. The Orientalist has spoken: the case is closed.
Those who believe that Islam is anti-democratic need a short lesson in the modern history of constitutional movements in Islam. Muhammad Ali of Egypt appointed his first advisory council in 1824, consisting mostly of elected members. In 1881, the Egyptian nationalist movement succeeded in convening an elected parliament, but this was aborted only a year later by British occupation. Tunisia had promulgated a constitution in 1860, setting up a Supreme Council purporting to limit the powers of the monarchy. But this was suspended in 1864 when the French discovered that it interfered with their ambitions. Turkey elected its first parliament in 1877, though it was dissolved a year later by the Caliph; a second parliament was convened in 1908. Iran`s progress was more dramatic. It started with protests against a British tobacco monopoly in the 1890s, and quickly led to an elected parliament in 1906, with powers to confirm the cabinet. A year later, however, the British and Russians carved up Iran into their spheres of influence, a development that would lead to the dissolution of the parliament in 1910. Nevertheless, the constitutional movement persisted until it was suppressed in 1931 by a new dynasty brought to power by the British.
Compare these developments with the history of constitutional movements elsewhere, not excluding Europe, during the nineteenth century-and the world of Islam does not suffer from the comparison. Incredible as this appears to minds blinded by Eurocentric prejudice, Tunisia, Egypt and Iran were taking the lead in making the transition to constitutional monarchies. The `resistance to democracy` in the Arab world even today does not come from their population. Quite the opposite. It comes from neo-colonial surrogates-brutal military dictatorships and absolutist monarchies-imposed by a United States determined to safeguard oil and Israel.
A New Colonial Contract
The US-imposed straightjacket has deepened the contradictions of global capitalism in the Islamic world: a development that is pregnant with consequences which threaten to spin out of control.
During the Cold War, the elite factions in many Third World coun-tries-especially their military elites-competed to win the US contract for re-pressing their populist movements. As long as they did their job, they enjoyed a degree of autonomy in managing their economies. A few of them in East Asia, the most favored ones, became showcases of capitalist success. When Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, this contract was terminated. It was replaced by the Washington Consensus, enforced by the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organization. The elites in the periphery would now compete to open up their economies for takeover by multinational corporations.
There are two versions of this new colonial contract. Countries in the non-Islamic periphery are generally encouraged to compete for the contract through the ballot box. In countries that have strong Islamist movements, this option is not available; they are allowed to keep their dictators and monarchs. The excuse for this two-track policy is flimsy. It is charged that the Islamist parties oppose democracy: that they will use the ballot to shut down the ballot. The real reason is Western nervousness over the Islamist`s twin goals: introducing an Islamic social order, and reversing the fragmentation of Islam.
This siege of the Islamic world is unlikely to produce the desired results. On the contrary, it has engendered contradictions that will only deepen over time. After the rout of the Arab armies in 1967, the failure of secular, nationalist movements to reverse Arab marginalization was becoming transparent. In 1973, with appropriate offers of American `aid`, Egypt made a separate peace with Israel. In abdicating its leadership of the Arab world, Egypt wrote the obituary of Arab nationalism. From now on, the historic task of liberating the Arab world would be assumed by the Islamists.
Although defeated, the corrupt Arab regimes remained ensconced in power. They owe their survival to the new colonial contract which allowed them to keep their repressive apparatus if they used it to wage war against their own people. The turn around was quick, moving through capitulations at Camp David and Oslo, normalization of ties with Israel, and capitulation to the Washington Consensus. The war against Islam intensified. The Islamist parties were banned, rooted out of professional associations and trade unions, and eventually their leaders were jailed, executed, or hounded out of the country.
This repression of Islamists has produced two results. Nearly everywhere, it immobilized mainstream Islamists who wished to work through the institutions of civil society: through political parties, professional associations, the media, the courts, and charities. The focus now shifted to the extremists willing to engage in violent action to gain their ends. But the extremists too had little crawl space under the repressive Arab regimes. Those who survived were driven underground, or went into exile in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or the Western countries.
At this point, some of them decided to change their strategy.
They would target their problems at its source-and inflict damage on United States. They wanted to sting the United States into lifting its siege of Islamic countries. Alternatively, they hoped to start wars-like the one in Afghanistan-on the chance that this would spark rebellions against the American surrogates in the Islamic world.
Giving Up `False Notions`?
Of late, sagely voices-outside and inside Islam-have been counseling Muslims to give up the `false notions` of Islam. I hope to have shown that the false notions we need give up are the Orientalist narratives-of an Islam that has been (mis)represented as irrational, misogynist, fatalist and fanatical.
Rational thinking did not begin with the Enlightenment. In fact, several En-lightenment thinkers turned to Islam to advance their own struggle against medieval obscurantism and the intolerance of an organized clergy. It is time for alienated Muslim intellectuals to tear the Orientalist veil that obscures the face of Islam, re-enter the historical currents they have abandoned, create a deeper understanding of the dynamics of derailed Islamic societies, and lead them into an Islamic vision of a world where all communities participate in a race to create works of excellence.
The West too must give up its false notions of Islam as the irreconcilable `Other`, that must forever be battled and besieged. If Islam is a greater threat to the West than India or China, that is because our actions-in large part-have succeeded in preventing it from reconstituting its center, its wholeness and history. More than a fifth of the world`s population seek their place in the world within a stream of history that flows from the Qur`an. They want to live by ethical ideals that in the past have produced nobility, magnanimity, sobriety, tolerance, science, mathematics, philosophy, architecture and poetry. Islam may do so again if only we lift the siege-and allow the light, freshness and sweetness at its core to find expression again in a contest of creative minds and soulful hearts, intertwined with reason and mercy.
Shahid Alam is a Professor of Economics at Northeastern University in Boston.
The Identity Crisis of a Modern Muslim
nashaa e mai ko ta`aluque naheen paimaaney sey
Hai ayaan yurash e Tataar ket afsaaney sey
Paasbaan mil gaey kaabey ko sanam khaaney sey
Kashtee huque kaa zamaaney mein saharaa too hai
usr e nau raat hai,dhundlaa saa sitara too hai``
tr:
You will not perish,if iraan is no more
the vintage has no relation to the wine-cup
Evident it is by the Mongol conquests
That Kaabaa got custodians from idol-houses
Also:
``Islaam teraa des hai,too Mustafavi hai``
And:
``reh behr mein aazad e vatan soorat e maahee``
tr:Like fish in an ocean,you move around this world.
And:
``Cheen O Arab humaara,Hindostaan humaara
Muslim hain humm,vatan hai saara hahan hamaara``
tr:We are at home everywhere be it China,Arabia,or India....The whole world is our homeland.
(This was said long long before ``Global Village`` was even a twinkle in the eye of Mr.McLuhan)
__________________________________________________
Muslim Identity-Crisis?----The ULTIMATE Oxymoron.
Posted by
hamzadafaqui
Jan 17, 2002 01:41 am
``Tu naa mit jayegaa eeraan key mit jaaney seynashaa e mai ko ta`aluque naheen paimaaney sey
Hai ayaan yurash e Tataar ket afsaaney sey
Paasbaan mil gaey kaabey ko sanam khaaney sey
Kashtee huque kaa zamaaney mein saharaa too hai
usr e nau raat hai,dhundlaa saa sitara too hai``
tr:
You will not perish,if iraan is no more
the vintage has no relation to the wine-cup
Evident it is by the Mongol conquests
That Kaabaa got custodians from idol-houses
Also:
``Islaam teraa des hai,too Mustafavi hai``
And:
``reh behr mein aazad e vatan soorat e maahee``
tr:Like fish in an ocean,you move around this world.
And:
``Cheen O Arab humaara,Hindostaan humaara
Muslim hain humm,vatan hai saara hahan hamaara``
tr:We are at home everywhere be it China,Arabia,or India....The whole world is our homeland.
(This was said long long before ``Global Village`` was even a twinkle in the eye of Mr.McLuhan)
__________________________________________________
Muslim Identity-Crisis?----The ULTIMATE Oxymoron.
The Identity Crisis of a Modern Muslim
Subhaan allah subhaa allah.
May I extend my heartfelt welcome to you to CHOWK.With the self-effacing credentials you have we might,just might,be able to pry something out of your cached gems.
``Surkhee e lub sey phir ayi khusro e shireen dahanaan
aaj urzaan ho koi hurf shanaa saee kaaa``
__________________________________________________
Posted by
hamzadafaqui
Jan 16, 2002 05:28 pm
darkhorse----66Subhaan allah subhaa allah.
May I extend my heartfelt welcome to you to CHOWK.With the self-effacing credentials you have we might,just might,be able to pry something out of your cached gems.
``Surkhee e lub sey phir ayi khusro e shireen dahanaan
aaj urzaan ho koi hurf shanaa saee kaaa``
__________________________________________________
The Identity Crisis of a Modern Muslim
__________________________________________________
MONDAY JANUARY 07 2002
`Allah came knocking at my heart`
BY GILES WHITTELL
Anecdotal evidence suggests that there has been a surge in conversions to Islam since September 11, especially among affluent young white Britons
Six months ago Elizabeth L. — a graduate in political science, the daughter of affluent white British parents, an opponent of terrorism in all its forms — climbed Mount Sinai at night to watch the desert sunrise from its summit.
“It was the stillest, most peaceful place I’ve ever been,” she says. “I could hear my feelings come up from within me, and in one surreal moment it all seemed to come together.”
Last Friday, at 4.45pm, Elizabeth went to Regent’s Park Mosque in Central London and converted to Islam.
It wasn’t hard. She didn’t even have to wear a scarf. Witnessed by two Muslim men and nine other friends squeezed into the imam’s office, she pronounced, in Arabic learnt from a tape the night before, the words she will repeat like a mantra five times a day for the rest of her life: “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger.” Afterwards there was a modest celebration at Al-Dar on the Edgware Road. Elizabeth and her well-wishers sipped mint tea and smoked apple-flavoured tobacco from a hookah. There was no booze, but she never drank much anyway.
Why has she done this? “I know it sounds clichéd, but Allah came knocking at my heart. That’s really how it feels. In many ways it is beyond articulating, rather like falling in love.”
It was, in other words, intensely personal. As she read the Koran and prepared for her conversion, the September attacks came and went and failed to derail her spiritual journey, despite their proven link to a fundamentalist Islamist terror network. In as far as they featured in her thinking, they even elicited some sympathy. All terrorism is cowardly, she says. “But I can see why people get fed up with the West. Capitalism is enormously oppressive.”
Elizabeth is not a freak, and she is certainly not alone. There is compelling anecdotal evidence of a surge in conversions to Islam since September 11, not just in Britain, but across Europe and America. One Dutch Islamic centre claims a tenfold increase, while the New Muslims Project, based in Leicester and run by a former Irish Roman Catholic housewife, reports a “steady stream” of new converts.
This fits a pattern set by recent history. Similar surges followed the outbreak of the Gulf War, the Bosnian conflict and the declaration of a fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Some of the newcomers doubtless do not share David Blunkett’s enthusiasm for overt espousals of Britishness. They may even have been caught on police videos flag-waving for the Taleban. But most will speak our language and support our football teams with roughly average fervour, and some — by all accounts a rapidly expanding minority — are white, more educated and more middle-class than the Home Secretary himself.
These are some of Islam’s more surprising converts. They have chosen their new creed over the world’s other great religions having had the privilege of choice, often confounding their own and their families’ prejudices in the process. They are highly articulate and tolerant to a degree. They’re People Like Us, only they’re not. They’re Muslims. They pray five times a day, fast during Ramadan and hope to go to Mecca before they die. They answer their mobiles with “salaam alaikum”.
Unlike Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber of American Airlines Flight 63, Britain’s pukka Muslim converts, as the label implies, tend to be over-privileged, not under. Unlike James McLintock, the Scots lecturer’s son being held in a Peshawar jail, the fighting in Afghanistan has dismayed rather than attracted them.
They are people like Elizabeth (who asked for her name to be changed because she has not told her parents yet); like Lucy Bushill-Matthews, a 30-year-old graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge, who flirted with Islam as a student in order to dismiss it, but found it “so simple and logical I couldn’t push it away”; like “Yahya”, whose father is a pillar of the Anglo Establishment and who feels that Islam “fits right into British tradition”; and like Joe Ahmed-Dobson, a son of the former Labour Minister Frank Dobson who believes that Islam transformed his spiritual life — and helped him to get a first at university.
If there is something familiar about these people’s startling choices, there should be. We have been here before, or at least Imperial Britain’s adventuring classes and their moneyed gap-year successors have.
T. E. Lawrence fell hard for the romance and otherness of Islam and came to embody them for succeeding generations even though he never converted. Gai Eaton, a former British diplomat now in his seventies, did convert. His influential work Islam and the Destiny of Man has become required reading for bright young Anglo-Saxons turning to his adopted faith, often as an expression of dissatisfaction with a Western culture that appeared to have offered them everything.
Matthew Wilkinson made headlines when he converted and changed his name to Tariq in 1993; he was a former Eton head boy. He and Nicholas Brandt, another Etonian and the son of an investment banker, swapped their destinies as scions of the Establishment for a Slough semi shared with four other Muslims.
Lord Birt’s son, Jonathan, forsook a fast track into the ranks of the great and the good by converting in 1997 and starting a PhD on British Islam. So did a son and a daughter of Lord Justice Scott, the scourge of Tory sleaze and the chairman of the Arms to Iraq inquiry.
And so did Jemima Khan. “My decision . . . was entirely my own choice and in no way hurried,” the 21-year-old daughter of the billionaire James Goldsmith declared angrily after suggestions that she had converted to marry Imran Khan, the former Pakistan cricket captain. She noted accurately that the Koran allowed Imran to marry any Muslim, Jew or Christian (even though it bars Muslim women from marrying non-Muslim men). She pointed out that Imran’s sisters, far from being oppressed by his brothers-in-law, were all educated professionals, and she insisted that she found the tunic and trousers she would henceforth have to wear “far more elegant and feminine than anything in my wardrobe”.
Her plea seemed hard to credit in the circumstances, but it is a common one from educated British women trying to persuade baffled non-Muslims that conversion did not mean surrendering their independence or their critical faculties.
For Lucy Bushill-Matthews, it meant the reverse. “When I went to Cambridge I joined the Christian and Islamic societies and all three political parties,” she says. “I wanted to explore all the possibilities in order to dismiss them.”
She thinks of herself as pragmatic and not all that spiritual, and as such she found Islam irresistible. “It made sense of all the world’s faiths. It was a clear, simple way to believe in God.” She claims that it has even helped her to land good jobs by marking her out as a free thinker. Her husband is a Muslim of English and Iranian descent whom she married after converting.
Yahya, too, chose Islam from the broadest possible religious gamut. He was raised in a high-profile London family that, because of his father’s position, could not be seen to favour one faith over another. He then took a degree in comparative religion — the theological equivalent of a blind wine tasting — and Islam, quite simply, won.
“It’s pure monotheism,” he says. “It has a clear moral system and an intact tradition of religious scholarship. No scripture expresses its message of the oneness of God as clearly as the Koran. It also has a remarkably rich mysticism, which may be what appeals to middle-class white Brits like me.”
Yahya converted five years ago. Now 33, he is at Oxford writing a PhD on British Islam and is dismayed not just by last September’s attacks, but also by the mauling he says his religion has suffered since in the media, even — or especially — at the hands of would-be sympathisers. “It’s very painful for all of us to be associated with such sickening barbarism (of the attacks),” he says. “That’s not what we signed up for. And now we can’t portray our religion in undiluted form. It’s always mediated by someone else. It’s incredibly frustrating to have Polly Toynbee trying to save you from yourself.”
So does this wry and thoughtful soul share the credo of al-Qaeda? Of course not. But the belief system in which he and the terrorists co-exist has a serious and often lethal public relations problem. The parallel that comes to mind is with the environmental movement, boasting tens of millions of members paying dues to the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Sierra Club, and a handful bent on burning down ski lodges in the Rockies.
Well before September 11, well-heeled defectors from Anglicanism to Islam proved so unsettling to traditionalists that the Cold War author and journalist Philip Knightley branded them “the new Philbys”. They were running from privilege, he suggested, driven as much by a sense of guilt at what they had as wonder at the mysteries of Islam. The fact that Kim Philby’s father happens to have converted to Islam was taken to support the accusation. Levelled at Joe Ahmed-Dobson, it quickly seems ridiculous. The son of the former Health Secretary is a child of new Labour and the opposite of a rebel. He works on inner city regeneration, finds spiritual satisfaction in Islam’s “constant impetus to do the right thing”, and credits his first-class degree to the structure his faith has brought to his life.
All those I spoke to agreed that Christianity claims to answer the same yearnings for meaning and guidance. All had rejected it on intellectual grounds. Why grapple with mental puzzles such as the Holy Trinity and Original Sin, they asked, when the alternative, asserting neither, proved to them so much more satisfying?It was this clarity that won over Batool Al-Toma, the former Catholic who offers guidance to converts at the New Muslims Project. She tells them they need not change their names, advises women to dress modestly but not alienate their families with radical wardrobe changes and checks they have converted freely. Islam is not generally a missionary faith, she says. At one billion and counting, history shows it doesn’t need to be.
Famous converts
Gérard Depardieu: The 54-year-old French film star converted to Islam, but later converted back. He also experimented with Buddhism and the Russian Orthodox Church but says he has now found happiness in his vineyard in Anjou. “I work and keep quiet,” he told French Vogue.
Jemima Goldsmith: The daughter of Sir James, the late financier, she converted “of her own conviction” in preparation for her marriage to Imran Khan in 1995. “It would seem that a Western woman’s happiness hinges largely on her access to nightclubs, alcohol and revealing clothes,” she said. “However, as we all know, such superficialities have very little to do with true happiness.”
Eleasha Elphinstone: The wife of the boxing star Prince Naseem Hamed switched faiths in 1998 before marrying. The previous year the wedding plans had been abandoned when Eleasha had a change of heart and refused to convert.
Malcolm X: A former street hustler, Malcolm Little converted to Islam in jail, where he was serving time for burglary. He joined the Nation of Islam, was later expelled and assassinated by Nation members in 1965.
Muhammad Ali: The 59-year-old boxer previously known as Cassius Clay became an international role model, revered as much for his political stance over Vietnam and adherence to his faith, as for his showmanship in the ring.
Cat Stevens: Born Steven Georgiou, the singer dropped his nom-de-plume to become Yusuf Islam in 1977. His moment of enlightenment had come the previous year, when his brother gave him a copy of the Koran. From being a superstar at the age of 19 when Matthew and Son became a hit, Yusuf married a Muslim woman from central Asia called Fawzia, and became a high-profile spokesman for the British Muslim community.
Mike Tyson: The former world heavyweight champion was sentenced to three years in jail for raping a teenager. He converted to Islam before returning to the ring in 1995. He told visitors that he had spent his time studying the Koran, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Dumas “and a lot of Communist literature”.
_________________________________________________
``Ataa momin ko phir dargaa i haque sey honay valaa hai
shikoh e turkmaanee zehn e hindi nutqu e aaraabee``
Posted by
hamzadafaqui
Jan 16, 2002 05:28 pm
A MUSLIM is a MUSLIM is a MUSLIM anywhere anytime.He/She NEVER suffers from this modern disease called identity crisis.More than 50% of muslims are of CHINESE origin,a minority is of arab origin.There are english american redindian spanish russian icelandic european australian etc etc(you get the point)MUSLIMS & MUSLIMS only.If some Indo-Pakis are still hooting at the ruins of moenjo daro,harrapaa or khajraao and debating whether they are wise or stupid then they must be avoided like a pariah by the proud & practising ones---& flushed out of the closet in a rush.__________________________________________________
MONDAY JANUARY 07 2002
`Allah came knocking at my heart`
BY GILES WHITTELL
Anecdotal evidence suggests that there has been a surge in conversions to Islam since September 11, especially among affluent young white Britons
Six months ago Elizabeth L. — a graduate in political science, the daughter of affluent white British parents, an opponent of terrorism in all its forms — climbed Mount Sinai at night to watch the desert sunrise from its summit.
“It was the stillest, most peaceful place I’ve ever been,” she says. “I could hear my feelings come up from within me, and in one surreal moment it all seemed to come together.”
Last Friday, at 4.45pm, Elizabeth went to Regent’s Park Mosque in Central London and converted to Islam.
It wasn’t hard. She didn’t even have to wear a scarf. Witnessed by two Muslim men and nine other friends squeezed into the imam’s office, she pronounced, in Arabic learnt from a tape the night before, the words she will repeat like a mantra five times a day for the rest of her life: “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger.” Afterwards there was a modest celebration at Al-Dar on the Edgware Road. Elizabeth and her well-wishers sipped mint tea and smoked apple-flavoured tobacco from a hookah. There was no booze, but she never drank much anyway.
Why has she done this? “I know it sounds clichéd, but Allah came knocking at my heart. That’s really how it feels. In many ways it is beyond articulating, rather like falling in love.”
It was, in other words, intensely personal. As she read the Koran and prepared for her conversion, the September attacks came and went and failed to derail her spiritual journey, despite their proven link to a fundamentalist Islamist terror network. In as far as they featured in her thinking, they even elicited some sympathy. All terrorism is cowardly, she says. “But I can see why people get fed up with the West. Capitalism is enormously oppressive.”
Elizabeth is not a freak, and she is certainly not alone. There is compelling anecdotal evidence of a surge in conversions to Islam since September 11, not just in Britain, but across Europe and America. One Dutch Islamic centre claims a tenfold increase, while the New Muslims Project, based in Leicester and run by a former Irish Roman Catholic housewife, reports a “steady stream” of new converts.
This fits a pattern set by recent history. Similar surges followed the outbreak of the Gulf War, the Bosnian conflict and the declaration of a fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Some of the newcomers doubtless do not share David Blunkett’s enthusiasm for overt espousals of Britishness. They may even have been caught on police videos flag-waving for the Taleban. But most will speak our language and support our football teams with roughly average fervour, and some — by all accounts a rapidly expanding minority — are white, more educated and more middle-class than the Home Secretary himself.
These are some of Islam’s more surprising converts. They have chosen their new creed over the world’s other great religions having had the privilege of choice, often confounding their own and their families’ prejudices in the process. They are highly articulate and tolerant to a degree. They’re People Like Us, only they’re not. They’re Muslims. They pray five times a day, fast during Ramadan and hope to go to Mecca before they die. They answer their mobiles with “salaam alaikum”.
Unlike Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber of American Airlines Flight 63, Britain’s pukka Muslim converts, as the label implies, tend to be over-privileged, not under. Unlike James McLintock, the Scots lecturer’s son being held in a Peshawar jail, the fighting in Afghanistan has dismayed rather than attracted them.
They are people like Elizabeth (who asked for her name to be changed because she has not told her parents yet); like Lucy Bushill-Matthews, a 30-year-old graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge, who flirted with Islam as a student in order to dismiss it, but found it “so simple and logical I couldn’t push it away”; like “Yahya”, whose father is a pillar of the Anglo Establishment and who feels that Islam “fits right into British tradition”; and like Joe Ahmed-Dobson, a son of the former Labour Minister Frank Dobson who believes that Islam transformed his spiritual life — and helped him to get a first at university.
If there is something familiar about these people’s startling choices, there should be. We have been here before, or at least Imperial Britain’s adventuring classes and their moneyed gap-year successors have.
T. E. Lawrence fell hard for the romance and otherness of Islam and came to embody them for succeeding generations even though he never converted. Gai Eaton, a former British diplomat now in his seventies, did convert. His influential work Islam and the Destiny of Man has become required reading for bright young Anglo-Saxons turning to his adopted faith, often as an expression of dissatisfaction with a Western culture that appeared to have offered them everything.
Matthew Wilkinson made headlines when he converted and changed his name to Tariq in 1993; he was a former Eton head boy. He and Nicholas Brandt, another Etonian and the son of an investment banker, swapped their destinies as scions of the Establishment for a Slough semi shared with four other Muslims.
Lord Birt’s son, Jonathan, forsook a fast track into the ranks of the great and the good by converting in 1997 and starting a PhD on British Islam. So did a son and a daughter of Lord Justice Scott, the scourge of Tory sleaze and the chairman of the Arms to Iraq inquiry.
And so did Jemima Khan. “My decision . . . was entirely my own choice and in no way hurried,” the 21-year-old daughter of the billionaire James Goldsmith declared angrily after suggestions that she had converted to marry Imran Khan, the former Pakistan cricket captain. She noted accurately that the Koran allowed Imran to marry any Muslim, Jew or Christian (even though it bars Muslim women from marrying non-Muslim men). She pointed out that Imran’s sisters, far from being oppressed by his brothers-in-law, were all educated professionals, and she insisted that she found the tunic and trousers she would henceforth have to wear “far more elegant and feminine than anything in my wardrobe”.
Her plea seemed hard to credit in the circumstances, but it is a common one from educated British women trying to persuade baffled non-Muslims that conversion did not mean surrendering their independence or their critical faculties.
For Lucy Bushill-Matthews, it meant the reverse. “When I went to Cambridge I joined the Christian and Islamic societies and all three political parties,” she says. “I wanted to explore all the possibilities in order to dismiss them.”
She thinks of herself as pragmatic and not all that spiritual, and as such she found Islam irresistible. “It made sense of all the world’s faiths. It was a clear, simple way to believe in God.” She claims that it has even helped her to land good jobs by marking her out as a free thinker. Her husband is a Muslim of English and Iranian descent whom she married after converting.
Yahya, too, chose Islam from the broadest possible religious gamut. He was raised in a high-profile London family that, because of his father’s position, could not be seen to favour one faith over another. He then took a degree in comparative religion — the theological equivalent of a blind wine tasting — and Islam, quite simply, won.
“It’s pure monotheism,” he says. “It has a clear moral system and an intact tradition of religious scholarship. No scripture expresses its message of the oneness of God as clearly as the Koran. It also has a remarkably rich mysticism, which may be what appeals to middle-class white Brits like me.”
Yahya converted five years ago. Now 33, he is at Oxford writing a PhD on British Islam and is dismayed not just by last September’s attacks, but also by the mauling he says his religion has suffered since in the media, even — or especially — at the hands of would-be sympathisers. “It’s very painful for all of us to be associated with such sickening barbarism (of the attacks),” he says. “That’s not what we signed up for. And now we can’t portray our religion in undiluted form. It’s always mediated by someone else. It’s incredibly frustrating to have Polly Toynbee trying to save you from yourself.”
So does this wry and thoughtful soul share the credo of al-Qaeda? Of course not. But the belief system in which he and the terrorists co-exist has a serious and often lethal public relations problem. The parallel that comes to mind is with the environmental movement, boasting tens of millions of members paying dues to the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Sierra Club, and a handful bent on burning down ski lodges in the Rockies.
Well before September 11, well-heeled defectors from Anglicanism to Islam proved so unsettling to traditionalists that the Cold War author and journalist Philip Knightley branded them “the new Philbys”. They were running from privilege, he suggested, driven as much by a sense of guilt at what they had as wonder at the mysteries of Islam. The fact that Kim Philby’s father happens to have converted to Islam was taken to support the accusation. Levelled at Joe Ahmed-Dobson, it quickly seems ridiculous. The son of the former Health Secretary is a child of new Labour and the opposite of a rebel. He works on inner city regeneration, finds spiritual satisfaction in Islam’s “constant impetus to do the right thing”, and credits his first-class degree to the structure his faith has brought to his life.
All those I spoke to agreed that Christianity claims to answer the same yearnings for meaning and guidance. All had rejected it on intellectual grounds. Why grapple with mental puzzles such as the Holy Trinity and Original Sin, they asked, when the alternative, asserting neither, proved to them so much more satisfying?It was this clarity that won over Batool Al-Toma, the former Catholic who offers guidance to converts at the New Muslims Project. She tells them they need not change their names, advises women to dress modestly but not alienate their families with radical wardrobe changes and checks they have converted freely. Islam is not generally a missionary faith, she says. At one billion and counting, history shows it doesn’t need to be.
Famous converts
Gérard Depardieu: The 54-year-old French film star converted to Islam, but later converted back. He also experimented with Buddhism and the Russian Orthodox Church but says he has now found happiness in his vineyard in Anjou. “I work and keep quiet,” he told French Vogue.
Jemima Goldsmith: The daughter of Sir James, the late financier, she converted “of her own conviction” in preparation for her marriage to Imran Khan in 1995. “It would seem that a Western woman’s happiness hinges largely on her access to nightclubs, alcohol and revealing clothes,” she said. “However, as we all know, such superficialities have very little to do with true happiness.”
Eleasha Elphinstone: The wife of the boxing star Prince Naseem Hamed switched faiths in 1998 before marrying. The previous year the wedding plans had been abandoned when Eleasha had a change of heart and refused to convert.
Malcolm X: A former street hustler, Malcolm Little converted to Islam in jail, where he was serving time for burglary. He joined the Nation of Islam, was later expelled and assassinated by Nation members in 1965.
Muhammad Ali: The 59-year-old boxer previously known as Cassius Clay became an international role model, revered as much for his political stance over Vietnam and adherence to his faith, as for his showmanship in the ring.
Cat Stevens: Born Steven Georgiou, the singer dropped his nom-de-plume to become Yusuf Islam in 1977. His moment of enlightenment had come the previous year, when his brother gave him a copy of the Koran. From being a superstar at the age of 19 when Matthew and Son became a hit, Yusuf married a Muslim woman from central Asia called Fawzia, and became a high-profile spokesman for the British Muslim community.
Mike Tyson: The former world heavyweight champion was sentenced to three years in jail for raping a teenager. He converted to Islam before returning to the ring in 1995. He told visitors that he had spent his time studying the Koran, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Dumas “and a lot of Communist literature”.
_________________________________________________
``Ataa momin ko phir dargaa i haque sey honay valaa hai
shikoh e turkmaanee zehn e hindi nutqu e aaraabee``
- hamzadafaqui
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