Across the world the formulaic system designed to free banking programmes from state control is in crisis. Everywhere the political class are despised and distrusted. Everywhere the myth of government as representational is exposed. The majority of citizens in the so-called democracies are against the Afghan war yet each country in the pretended ‘coalition’ finds its government backing what it insists is a necessary war. Both Iraq II and Afghanistan III have exposed the political class to disgrace. The democratic system’s adherence to the rule that the politicians decree the war and the soldiers do the dying is itself the profound cause of democracy’s collapse. Cowards should not direct wars. Anyone wishing to experience nausea in its most acute form need only listen to a politician expressing his grief and or gratitude at the deaths of soldiers.

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For the modern Arab, fulus, originally the word for small change, is money itself. It relates intimately to the word for a bankrupt, muflis, which either means someone who only has small change (fulus) and no gold or silver, or in the more extreme case, someone who does not even have small change. However, the former understanding would have to be read by a modern Arab as someone who only has ‘money’; i.e. if you only have money, you are bankrupt. Continued…

The following examination of the ayah of Qur’an which is taken to refer to the expansion of the universe is a single example of what is becoming a burgeoning literature among Muslims claiming that science proves the Qur’an to be true. This literature can be said to date from the book of Maurice Bucaille: The Bible, the Qur’an and Science. As Hajj Idris Mears pointed out, it is implicit in the title of his book that there are three successive stages of revelation: first, the Bible; second, the Qur’an which the author regards as a great deal more scientific (although in the process he manages to undermine and indeed repudiate the hadith literature); and then thirdly and lastly, science, which is clearly in his view the judge and arbiter as to the truth or falsity of the previous two. Continued…

Richard Dawkins is a man whose missionary zeal and the fervour of whose evangelical atheism puzzle even other atheists. I have read articles on him in which journalists have tried to analyse him and his family history (without success) looking for clues – family traumas, neuroses, etc. – which might explain what drives his passionate crusade (I know no more appropriate term) against God. He is a man who as well as anyone else and better than many embodies some of the essential themes with which to decode the science of this epoch, which arguably began with Galileo. Continued…