Political Power

“As you are, so you will have put in authority over you.” So when you have taqwa of Allah and fear His punishment, you will have put in authority over you those who fear Him with respect to [their treatment of] you, and vice-versa.

In one of the revealed books there is: “I am Allah the King of kings. The kings’ hearts and their forelocks are in My hand. If the slave-worshippers obey Me, I make them a mercy over them, but if they disobey Me, I put them over them as a punishment. Do not occupy yourselves with cursing kings, but turn in tawba to Me, and I will make them kindly towards you.”

Among the du‘as of the Mustafa, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, there is: “Do not put in authority over us because of our wrong actions those who will not have mercy on us.”

And at-Tabarani related from Ka‘b al-Ahbar that he heard a man supplicating against al-Hajjaj, and said to him: “Don’t do it. You have brought him from your own selves for it has been narrated: ‘Your actions (a‘mal) are your governors (‘ummal) and just as you are so you will have put in authority over you.’”

(al-Munawi, Fayd al-Qadeer)

At-Tabarani also narrates [the hadith in the same sense] from al-Hasan [al-Basri] that he heard a man supplicating against al-Hajjaj and said to him: “Don’t do it. You have brought him from your own selves. We fear that if al-Hajjaj were removed, monkeys and pigs would be given authority over you for it has been narrated: ‘Your actions (a‘mal) are your governors (‘ummal) and just as you are so you will have put in authority over you.’” (al-‘Ajaluni, Kashf al-Khafa)

Although the hadith is regarded as weak in some respects, it is in harmony with the ‘aqida and there is much evidence corroborating it in the Book and the Sunna, as al-Munawi and the other commentators show.

Clearly this applies as much in the west as in the east, for the same facts hold: Allah has power over everything and He is able to do anything.

Fast

‘Fast’ is an intriguing word in English. Apart from its meaning of abstaining from food and drink for a specific period of time, it has also the sense of speed, as well as to make something secure or to tie or fix it: to make it fast. The morning meal is called ‘breakfast’ i.e. the breaking of the fast. “In Old English, a regular morning meal was called morgenmete, and the word dinner, which originated from Gallo-Romance desjunare (“to break one’s fast”), referred to a meal after fasting.” The French word déjeuner is from dé– +? jeûner (“un-fast (to break fast)”). The story of how Christian fasting moved from a daytime activity to a nighttime one concluded by ‘breakfast’ is an interesting one indeed but not our purpose here.

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Sura al-Baqara

We might not need anything but the Opening of the Noble Book, the Fatiha, and another sura or two, particularly that on the Divine Unity, the sura called Ihklas – Sincerity. 

If we do go further, we start with the first sura of the Qur’an after the Opening, Sura al-Baqara.

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Usurocracy

We owe to Ezra Pound his coinage of the word ‘usurocracy’ from the Latin usura and –cracy, which latter is from the Greek –kratia ‘power, rule’. Democracy is the rule of the demos – the people, and usurocracy is the rule of usury. Note that there is no agent empowered here but a process. That process elevates some and demotes others, and it does so continually, and thus produces chaos. Usury rules. Chaos rules.

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‘Tradition’

The deeply incautious use of the word ‘tradition’ in the Western context by some people actually points to something appropriated by the Roman Empire, a religion founded by a Pharisaic rabbi from a Hellenic background, and propagated among other Hellenes, a man who never met the Prophet of his time, peace be upon him, and who was rejected by his disciples.

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“GOING VIRAL”

CELEBRITY & TECHNOLOGY

One ought to pay attention to the vehicle of the metaphor “going viral”, for this is contagion, infection, and plague, and yet, entranced by media, people lust after it.

Celebrity is as old as history and probably older, but tools change it, the pen for example. Caesar’s pen in writing the Gallic Wars was as devastating in Rome as was his sword against Gallic and Germanic tribes, which is said to have been his intention in wielding the sword: to write his book, and thus to gain absolute power in Rome. 

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The Collaborative Couple

A lecture entitled delivered in 1990 by Shaykh Abdalqadir at the University of Malaya, Malaysia.

I took the title of “The Collaborative Couple” being moved by where in Qur’an, Allah, telling of people entering into the “garden” says, “They will come singly and in couples”. I felt this contained a great insight for us, if we were to take benefit from it.

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Do ‘they’ really ‘live’?

The –onomy of the oikos

–onomy is, of course, from nomos – which, as much as it is law, is custom. Astronomy is thus the observation of the customary behaviour of the heavenly bodies. It became a regular science with Isaac Newton and others who expressed that customary behaviour in terms of the mathematical relations between mass, length and time, and expressed a great many other matters in those terms as well. So far so good. Or not, as the case may be. 

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