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.
I am grateful to my brother Mahdi Lock for drawing my attention to the irregular nature of the addition “and every error is in the Fire” at the end of hadith 28 in the Arabic text and in my translation of Imam an-Nawawi’s commentary on his collection of forty, published as The Complete Forty by Ta-Ha Publishers Ltd., London.
Continue reading “Errata – Hadith 28 of Imam an-Nawawi’s Forty”
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.
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. Continue reading “Fulus – Abdassamad Clarke”
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. Continue reading “The Expansion of the Universe and the Qur’an – Abdassamad Clarke”
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. Continue reading “The Blind Professor”
Fifth investigation – the comparative merits of it and the narration of Yahya
Al-Laknawi thinks that the narration of Muhammad is weightier and better than the narration of Yahya, and he seeks to prove that as follows:
First, that Yahya al-Andalusi only heard the Muwatta completely from one of the pupils of Imam Malik, but as for Malik himself he did not hear it from him completely but there remained a portion of it [which he had not heard]. As for Muhammad, he heard it from him in its totality, and it is well known that hearing the totality without intermediary from someone such as this Shaykh is weightier than hearing it through an intermediary. Continue reading “The Response of Shaykh Muhammad ibn ‘Alawi al-Maliki to Shaykh ‘Abdalhayy al-Laknawi concerning the Relative Merits of the Muwatta of Yahya and the Muwatta of Muhammad”
The Mukhtasar al-Quduri, the classic work in Hanafi fiqh translated by Sidi Tahir al-Kiani, is now completed and on its way to the printers. It is due for publication by Ta-Ha Publishers Ltd. in April insha’Allah. Here is the Introduction.
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What, we might ask, is the significance of the publication of a weighty tome such as this on the shari’ah of Islam at this time, in this language and in these countries? We assume the reader’s understanding that the legal systems built up by Europeans over centuries incorporating basic liberties such as habeus corpus have been dismantled and are being replaced increasingly by the most totalitarian structures, which informed commentators see as perilously close to fascism. It was perhaps inevitable that something built on the frail foundations of human thought could be thus perverted, but was nonetheless terribly shocking to those who saw the accelerated process during their own lifetimes and recognised it for what it was.
It seems there is no going back. Once the framework of liberties has been demolished, there would appear to be no way to restore it. Its demolition had long preceded the more draconian manifestations. Continue reading “Shariah – Islamic Law”
Abdassamad Clarke is from Northern Ireland and studied Maths and Physics in Edinburgh. In 1973 he accepted Islam at the hands of Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi, later travelling to study Qur’an, Arabic and the deen in Cairo. He translates from Arabic, edits and typesets books on Islam, and is currently, along with Shaykh Ali Laraki, an imam of the Ihsan Mosque, Norwich, UK. This interview was originally conducted for the website of Mohamed Omar in Sweden and translated into Swedish by ´Abd us-Salâm Nordenhok as Sufierna har alltid lett jihad – intervju med Abdassamad Clarke
MO: How did you convert to Islam? Tell us the story Continue reading “Interview with Abdassamad Clarke”