A talk by Shaykh Muhammad al-Yaquobi on the Compendium of Knowledge and Wisdom, our translation of the Jami’ al-‘ulum wa’l-hikam of Ibn Rajab al-Hanbali, may Allah be merciful to him. This was Ibn Rajab’s collection of fifty hadith, comprising the Forty (actually 42) of Imam an-Nawawi, may Allah be merciful to him, and another eight …
Monthly Archives: November 2008
Derivatives is the name of the game
Forget about any idea of sub-prime mortgages and other types of toxic waste being the cause of the current meltdown. The real story is the derivatives market, and to understand why, look carefully at the statistics below: According to the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), on June 30, 2008, U.S. commercial banks held $182.1 …
The Last Straw – Robert Luongo
In 1812 Sultan Mahmut II sent an order from Topkapi that the wahhabis should be removed from the cities of Makkah, Madinah and Jeddah. It must be noted that the period of Mahmut’s rule, 1839-76, known as the Tanzimat, was, according to the confirmed Islamic perspective (differentiated from an Orientalist reading of events) the point …
Letter to a New Muslim, part 2
So you are a new Muslim, and you may be such even if you have a lineage of Muslim ancestors that stretches back for generations, for each person who genuinely discovers Islam, confirms it and determines to live by it is always new. You are beginning to find your feet in this strangely topsy-turvey world …
Islamic banking is “Riba in a new get-up” say top Pakistani muftis
?Unanimous Fatwa (Ruling) on Islamic Banks by the most Senior Islamic Scholars and Mufti’s from all the four Provinces of Pakistan. (This is the English translation of the last page of the fatwa where they conclude with a ruling signed by the Mufti’s as signatories, the full fatwa extends to a detailed judgment of …
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Bank collapse and shareholders
Many interpret the string of bank, and now corporation, collapses as if the power elite were suffering, forgetting that banks and corporations are not the same as their shareholders, and their interests are not the same. If you understand the nature of the ‘corporation’, that it is regarded legally as a ‘person’, meaning that its …
Something rather than nothing
It is not often mentioned that Liebnitz’s famous question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” must be asked twice. The first time, its answer is a knowledge in the heart that is almost impossible to articulate without demeaning the question. Having reached that first knowledge, then one has to ask again, “But why is …