In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Most Merciful and may Allah bless His slave and messenger Muhammad and his family and companions and grant perfect peace.
An up-and-coming project on which I have been working is the layout of:
Here is a PDF which you can download to get a sense of the book and the Shaykh’s treatment of this fundamentally important text on Ash‘ari ‘aqida, Maliki fiqh and Junaydi tasawwuf.
Allah, exalted is He, says that whose meaning is:
Who could say anything better
than someone who summons to Allah
and acts rightly
and says, “I am one of the Muslims”? (Surah Fussilat: 33)
You have accepted Islam. You have realised that you have a Lord Who created you, and Who has decreed your destiny, both the good and the bad of it, the sweet and the sour of it, Who hears your prayers, Who knows you well – for does He not know what He created? – Who guides you and has guided you to Islam, Who is Generous, Merciful and Powerful, Swift to take reckoning, and Who has both beautiful and majestic attributes. You realise that your Merciful Lord sent messages to you personally by means of His messengers, the last of whom was the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, Muhammad. You believe that the Book of Allah is the Speech of Allah, speaking to you. Continue reading “Letter to a New Muslim: Part 1”
A meeting here in Norwich recently reminded me of how much we have to be grateful for in this little island nation. A South American visitor told me of how in her society to be stopped by a policeman for a traffic offence necessarily means to be asked for a bribe. When she came to this country and bought a motorcycle she was largely ignorant of the traffic laws and confessed to perhaps being a little cavalier, yet in the numerous times when she was stopped by the police, they were invariably correct, courteous and honest; a bribe was never solicited and almost always there was a gentle caution. Continue reading “An Ominous Return – Abdassamad Clarke”
Sometimes a man must cast modesty and humility aside and stand forth. My turn has come. In the late 80s I was calling for the abandonment of paper money and a return to gold and silver. It was published and it is there in black and white for anyone to read. Now the whole world, from William Rees-Mogg ex-editor of the Times to Max Keiser ex-stockbroker, is calling for the same. Continue reading “A Little Immodesty – Abdassamad Clarke”
The Dreaming of the Bones by W. B. Yeats provides some unexpected insights into the current crisis in Libya.
Yeats’s work might seem an unlikely place to discover a clue to a part of the current Libyan crisis. Yet it was just in such an unanticipated way that I came upon the route to something which Muslims, to their deep frustration, have been unable to articulate satisfactorily and yet which Irish people, above all, should be able to understand.
A phenomenon has seized my attention just as a young dog might seize and worry a rag doll thrown to it as a plaything. But this phenomenon is no philosophical abstraction, for men, women and children are dying, an enormous amount of wealth is changing hands, a whole country is being re-shaped while others look on, some with trepidation and some with anticipation. And a part of the phenomenon is the interpretation of it.
Although we were much cheered by one recent author’s brave moral call for an end to science (Understanding the Present, Bryan Appleyard) and even more so by another’s assertion that it has already ended (The End of Science, John Horgan), there still remain some matters to attend to and pertinent reasons as to why there may still be a role for the Muslim. Continue reading “The Muslim: not blinded by science – Abdassamad Clarke”
Based on the notes for a talk delivered in Edinburgh at the ISLAM IN EUROPE CONFERENCE 2005 on Sunday 27th March 2005, this article contains both less and more than that talk, concluding slightly differently.
On my way here, because of various crises and minor dramas I had to call on an old friend to drive me to Stansted. Coincidentally, he is about to deliver two talks in Italy, the first on the topic of George Orwell and the idea of Big Brother, and the second on Mary Shelley and her unique creation Frankenstein. We talked about a book recommended to me by Idris Mears called Jihad vs Macworld, in which Macworld stands for all corporate globalising and centralising forces, which he was hoping to identify with Orwell’s Big Brother, and jihad for everything that stands against that including the anti-globalisation movement and indigenous peoples’ struggles for autonomy, for example. The author’s thesis is that these two forces are shaping our world and that somehow they are related while being opposed. My friend was intrigued very much by the myth of Frankenstein and his creation, the poor monster who so much wanted the love that Dr Frankenstein could not give, and he wanted to posit the al-Qaeda movement as such a monster desperately hoping for love from the force which created it, the West. Continue reading “The People of Prophetic Guidance and Europe – Abdassamad Clarke”
If we regard Thales as the man who was so enamoured of the heavens that
he fell down a well which he hadn’t noticed, then we might depict Einstein
as the man who so enthralled others with the picture he painted of the
cosmos that they didn’t even notice they themselves had already fallen
down the well. Continue reading “The Einstein Case: determinism’s rearguard action – Abdassamad Clarke”
“I’m a Muslim and I believe in Divine fate and destiny, and it was his destiny and his fate… and now he’s gone… and may Allah forgive him and bless him… that’s all I have to say…” Tariq Jahan (bereaved father)
Three young Muslims in Birmingham who had left their neighbourhood mosque in the month of Ramadan in order to defend their local area from the surrounding violence, paid with their own lives for taking responsibility in the shameful vacuum left by the failure of our government to maintain social cohesion and social justice.