The Art of Community

 

 

The Art of Community

Zakat and Awqaf in the future of Islam in England1

He has laid down the same deen for you as He enjoined on Nuh: that which We have revealed to you and which We enjoined on Ibrahim, Musa and ‘Isa: ‘Establish the deen and do not make divisions in it.’ What you call the idolators to follow is very hard for them. Allah chooses for Himself anyone He wills and guides to Himself those who turn to Him.” (Surat ash-Shura 42:13)

Establish the deen and do not make divisions in it.

At the beginning there is genuine wonder that there is anything whatsoever rather than nothing at all. Wonder is the beginning of philosophy, but gradually it turns into “I wonder what? how? why?” That leads to the cataloguing of existence – think of Linnaeus and his classification system for plants, and the work of Darwin, think of the detailing of the picture of the physical elements and so on, and the mapping and naming of the stars and galaxies. The next step is that the cataloguing becomes subject to our need to use the world, itself the result of our seeing the world as something to be used. That gives us the modern technological world. When we talk about technology in this sense, it is not about the machines and gadgets, for they are neither here nor there. But it is about man and society become machine, with a contrary trajectory of machine being brought to converge with humanity. Governance, medicine, education and policing have become automated ways of processing human beings to produce something. 

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Khutbah Eid al-Fitr – Norbury Park, London – 2024

The month of Ramadan is the one in which the Qur’an was sent down as guidance for mankind, with Clear Signs containing guidance and discrimination. Any of you who are resident for the month should fast it. But any of you who are ill or on a journey should fast a number of other days. Allah desires ease for you; He does not desire difficulty for you. You should complete the number of days and proclaim Allah’s greatness for the guidance He has given you so that hopefully you will be thankful.

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Self-knowledge

In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Most Merciful, and may Allah bless His Prophet and Messenger Muhammad and his family and companions and grant peace

Dars for Saturday 16th December København

This year marks a century and a year from the day of the final dismantling of the khalifate, and thus the rise to total dominance of the Judaeo-Christian world order, not comprising two ‘Abrahamic religions’ but two archetypal distortions of the revelation. The first was the Jewish accommodation with power, with subjection, and the centrality to it of legalisms and rituals, and the embrace of usury and banking. The second was the Christian accommodation with power; the Roman oligarchy offered them the seat of power if not its reality, and they accepted, and so the Roman Church and the Holy Roman Empire were born. Their dominant features were theology and metaphysical speculation which they took over from the Greeks.

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Americanism

My oh my, America!  

Not so much a place but a state of mind – manifest destiny perhaps, something that everyone on both sides of that deeply divided psychic condition subscribes to, whether explicitly or implicitly – and because of the looking glass world in which we live, much of the world too has become America. So when it sinks into civil strife because of reasons peculiar to it, the rest of the world adopts that strife as its own. And how much both parties to the strife concur on the basic premises. No one has ever heard the sound of one hand clapping.

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Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi on Israel


by Dr. Riyad Asvat 5/11/2023


In 2014 Shaykh Abdalqadir, rahimahullah, said: “The removal of Hamas will change nothing. There still remains a nation divided by its two contrary elements …” The nation he is referring to is Israel. The first element is that the citizens of Israel suffer from post-concentration-camp-psychosis disorder. The Shaykh explained it as follows: “The apparent ease with which educated middle-aged men and women daily on television not only approve but call for the massacre of women and children next-door in Gaza is simply not explainable rationally. It is part of this psychosis.” The second element is: “the Israeli inability to deal with matters by military practice. Bombing and droning are acts of cowardice. The Israelis cannot role-play militarism.” Israel cannot deal with the people it rules over with honour, justice, bravery and nobility. The Israeli political class and armed forces have none of that. They never conquered Palestine, they acquired it by stealth, theft, lies and fraud. Behind it all are business corporations, the worst of which are banks and the deadly sin of riba, that is, fractional reserve banking, interest and derivatives. What exactly did the Israelis steal? According to Islamic law the whole country of Palestine including the natural resources within its territorial waters.


Shaykh Abdalqadir says: “Absurd little Israel, with its multi-racial citizens who insist that they are Jews and the descendants of Sayyidina Ibrahim, may Allah be pleased with him, although their own scientists have admitted that this is a fantasy (see The Myth of the Jewish Race by Raphael Patai and Jennifer Patai), brought into being by known terrorists, the Stern gang and so on, governed over its short history by these terrorists, and finally fighting a war against the indigenous people of their land under a terrorist named as such by their own judiciary while they embark on a genocide of the native people. Palestinians, the Arab Navaho!”
How is absurd little Israel able to slaughter thousands of Palestinians, be accused of war crimes, have United Resolutions passed against it and be able to continue genocide with impunity? Shaykh Abdalqadir explains that: “1945 saw the creation of the ultimate nihilistic phase of kufr. It aspired to a world government, a world police and already laid the foundations of a world bank and single currency. The nation state was over and now the world was governed by a totally unelected oligarchy represented by three zones of power, commodities, media and financial, while the third of these represented the inner circle of power. Current events show us that all the nations lie subservient to the Oligarchic Triad while Israel remains the ideological and imperialist entity which has survived and continues above and beyond the ruin of the national states.” Israel was created as a military base to secure energy supplies for the financial and industrial centres of the oligarchs in Europe and America. The United Nations Organisation was formed to provide global governance, that is, one world government and this has been achieved now in a most subversive way. Let me explain.

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Mawlid København 2023

1. Love “Say: If you love Allah…”

Everyone has their own Qur’an: for some it is a terrible book full of warnings about eternal punishment, for others it is a legal work with regulation of all affairs of life, and with others it is a spiritual book detailing knowledge of Allah and His Messengers. Once you take the perspective of love, you will find love mentioned everywhere in the Noble Book and the Sunnah.

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Book Burning





In the Name of Allah, the All-Merciful the Most-Merciful
It is absurd beyond measure that burning a book, which is a record of speech, should become an issue of freedom of speech. Clearly it is designed to silence speech, in this case the uncreated Speech of the Divine, of the Essence itself, of That which necessarily IS. But absurdity is piled on absurdity. When a former Prime Minister sensibly spoke out in the Folketinget against this behaviour, a half or more of the members told him to shut up. 
But how did we get here? A suitable beginning which is not entirely arbitrary would be the birth of modernity itself and the modern state in the French Revolution whose exultant votaries cried out “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”, failing to notice that if you are free you would be free not to be equal, as demonstrated superbly by neo-liberalism in which some are free to be stupendously wealthy, and others are free to be miserably poor but have to shut up and accept demeaning work in an Amazon warehouse. 
Similarly, no one seemed to notice that if everyone is equal, then no one at all is free, except for the state administrators who enforce equality and spend their weekends and holidays in discrete summer houses that others can only dream about. 
And of course, in all scenarios brotherhood simply dies. That calls to mind the title of Professor Benjamin Nelson’s seminal study on another beginning of modernity The Idea of Usury – from Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood. But that is an issue that no one feels comfortable with today because he was talking about the usury that lies at the root of banking and stock exchanges, and not just the excessive and extortionate interest the dictionaries tell us is its meaning. And is this a complete and quite vicarious digression? No, because the revealed Speech of the Essence, of the Divine, of That which necessarily IS contains among its many confirmations of prior revelations, such as the Torah and the Gospels, a ringing endorsement of their long-forgotten prohibition of usury, and that is not only very inconvenient for banks, but also for the state which rubber-stamps them. In that way we can make sense of the pictures of the more than slightly deranged book-burner (his brother’s assessment) marching flanked by state-heavies, which clearly shows that the state is not simply safeguarding a citizen’s right to freedom of speech (failing to explain how burning a book fits that category) but is itself the active agent here. 
It is another absurdity for us to believe the fiction that the state merely stands by helplessly while one of its citizens does things it does not endorse. Had he demonstrated to question the holocaust (not something I would suggest), he would have been shut up immediately as were many others who have done so. There is no absolute freedom of speech, and here it is quite clear since the one whose freedom to speak is not allowed is the Divine. Everyone else may speak, but not He.

Tradition and Madinas of the Future

(To avoid confusion, it must be made clear that this has nothing to do with the ‘traditionalism’ of perennialists and esotericists.)

Recognising the catastrophe of the age and its cause in the loss of the tradition, the issue is not a simple one of returning to the tradition or restoring it. One must recognise that there was something in the tradition itself that led to its demise. Thus, respectfully, one must retrace it to its roots and then back to what it has become and what it has given rise to even in its apparent demise. 

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Unity and Equality

Unrecognised powerful religious forces are at work in the world, particularly the “modern” world. The first, particularly for Americans who religiously and sanctimoniously export it, is equality: “all men are created equal”, which is patently false. Neither by genetic nor familial inheritance is it true, nor in terms of wealth and social advantage is this the case. If we look carefully the reality is that there are no two things in the cosmos that are equal in any sense. Each one is a unique creation, and to make one equal to another is to do an injustice to both. The statement is an “ought-to-be”, and in that it is a great denial of “what is”. Tellingly it is preceded by “we hold these truths to be self-evident”.

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Ian Dallas – a victim of tadlees?

Allah, exalted is He, commands gratitude towards parents after gratitude to Himself. But the teacher is the ‘parent’ about whom Imam al-Ghazali remarked, may Allah be pleased with him, that whereas biological parents save one from the fires of this world such a teacher saves one from the Fire of the next world.

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