«… l’Etna nevoso, colonna del cielo / d’acuto gelo perenne nutrice / lo comprime. / Sgorgano da segrete caverne / fonti purissime d’orrido fuoco, / fiumi nel giorno riversano / corrente di livido fumo / e nella notte rotola / con bagliori di sangue / rocce portando alla discesa / profonda del mare, con fragore.»

(Pindaro, Pitica I 470 a.C.)

«... snowy Etna, column of the sky / nurturer of acute perennial frost / pressing down upon it /purest sources of horrid fire springing from secret caves, / rivers pouring out by day / currents of livid smoke / and in the night rolling / with flashes of blood / causing rocks to descend / in the deep of the sea, with a roar. "

(Pindar, Pitica I 470 BC)

But primarily a Sign of the All-Powerful, and secondly a provider of hot thermal springs for the poor to make ghusl in.

‘All the signs point to a global matriarchal society in the making’, he said. ‘And bully for it’, she reposted, ‘When fatherhood – in male form – disappears or becomes dysfunctional, the proles shall be more able to break away quickly from the way of their forefathers to submission’. ‘So the trans phenomenon is a transitional phase?’. ‘Why surely, the weaker, the sicker the deen becomes the greater the split between the outward and the inward – you end up with real life and this thing hanging on by the skin of its teeth known as religion. The time is ripe for the deen again: the hermaphros shall have nothing to fear, they perform the salat between the men and the women.’ ‘Well that’s a relief’, he said ‘unbuttoning his frock’.

What distinguishes the Imam of Madina from the other Imams who have gained current ascendency among the vast bulk of the umma is his reliance on, his trust in the people of Madina al-Munawwara: Shafii, his student, in the end rejected the legal value of this intimate connection of his to his companions, fellow fuqaha and precursors in favour of an intellectual, head-based, systematic assessment of the deen which veered towards logic rather than trust, and we might say rather than love; people are after all subject to forgetfulness, misunderstanding and shortcomings – with respect to the capacity for fiqh and transmission of the deen – is the argument; he was born in Palestine, came to Makka and became part of Madina society only relatively late. Abu Hanifa was based in Kufa and was obliged to take much of his knowledge from single chains of transmission, i.e from isolated companions and tabi’un who arrived with the knowledge, that is their own particular portion of knowledge, they had acquired while residing in Madina at a particular time and in particular circumstances. But as Rabi’ reports, ‘A thousand from a thousand is preferable to me then one from one, as the sunna shall be stripped away from your hands by one from one’, and the sunna he is referring to is the sunna of the Messenger, on whom be peace and blessings, which then became the accepted pattern of social life for the people of Madina, i.e. the ‘amal; moreover ‘Ubaydallah ibn Abd al-Karim ar-Raazi said, ‘The Messenger of Allah, may the peace and blessings of Allah was taken [back to His Lord] while twenty thousand eyes wept for him’, i.e. referring to the ten thousand Companions who had remained in Madina up to the time of his death and who were living in accordance with the very last form and pattern of behaviour adopted by its inhabitants from the exemplar of the Messenger living among them. What was of overriding importance to Imam Malik was what the people were doing at that particular moment and the way this practice was transmitted by succeeding generations to him – with all of the changes and modifications occasioned by the fuqaha of Madina which naturally occurred on account of changing circumstances and new situations. These then were the people who knew which pattern of life corresponded the closest to that of the Messenger, on whom be peace and blessing – precisely because succeeding generations developed within that social framework. How different from the form transmitted by a student of his who later rejected this social transmission of the deen in favour of a system which strove to erase all the anomalies which must naturally occur in the recording of a prophetic teaching transmitted by men and women! how different from the form transmitted by the great alim of Kufa who did not have access to the last, complete, social ‘picture’ of Madina and so had to rely a great deal on fresh ijtihad, i.e. not the ijtihad of the tabi’un and tabi’u tabi’un!

In short, action, ‘amal, was of overriding importance for Imam Malik; indeed he defined iman in terms of action: iman which did not lead to action was of a very insubstantial form – he was not a Maturidi; iman he knew was subject to increase and decrease; this then is the underlying reason for his trust of the people of Madina: they were acting in accordance with the Messenger, they possessed the overall balanced, social way of living because they saw themselves as part of a complete society: they understood the danger of taking an isolated hadith, however authentic, out of context, i.e. by ignoring to whom it was said, why it was said and whether of not is was of general, social import.

Imam Malik said himself that he arrived at his ‘well trodden way’ because he took it from those he personally knew, who in turn had taken it personally from those they knew, and in turn from the latter who had taken it from the Messenger, on whom be peace and blessings.

This is in no way to denigrate the other two Imams mentioned above; but it is a clear statement to the effect that this is the way, par excellence, indeed the only way, for those who understand the existentialist truth of our Imam: he knew people of knowledge and he trusted them because they acted upon what they knew; and morever a whole society of them.

Imam Malik’s iman was therefore not solely intellectual but rather suffused with the actions and judgements of all those around him – a balance of intimate social awareness together with the capacity to understand the validity of the judgements of the tabiun and tabi at-tabiun which may have differed from the decisions of the Messenger – because given in particular circumstances or even abrogated. His concern was the overall good of society; how different from vast numbers of individual ulama and shaykhs, disconnected from any society or community of their own, who ascribe fanatically to the present obsession with confining the deen to hadiths and who in doing so bring imbalance and fitna to the umma. It may now be clear to the reader why the essentially hadith-based madhhab of Imam Ahmad was able to be misused to cause so much fitna, especially in Africa – which had hitherto been the Hochburg of love for Imam Malik, may Allah be please with him; perhaps too the Imam’s trust in the people around him might be an opening for the many mini shaykhs and ulama – who abound in virtal reality – to a non-informational understanding of the deen, enabling them to ditch the ideal Islam in their brains for a hands on, existential interaction with their fellow men and women, and an acceptance of a Rais, an Amir, a Sultan or a King – however faulty in their eyes, i.e. an acceptance of one of the pillars of the deen which they conveniently choose to ignore because it necessarily implies a societal rather then an intellectual commitment.

The Imam was urged on two occasions by the governor of Makka and the Khalif to allow his teaching to become the official deen; he declined, knowing that it was up to people themselves to recognise the truth of what he was teaching: those who are not following the Imam must ask themselves where ‘this business of ours’ as Imam Malik terms it, originated: he is the Imam Dar al-Hijra, the Imam of the place to which the Messenger went to to establish a social reality after he had become certain that it was not possible in Makka: if these people genuinely desire a blue print for a just and balanced society, then it is to the Illuminated City and its Imam rather than Makka or Kufa to which they must address their study and practice.

It is relatively unusual to read such crass invective from the university Augean stables of objectivity; but so be it: hate blinds. May the All-Seeing, the All-Merciful guide D. F-M.

Clear however is the unwanted – on the part of the author – positive effect for the Muslim reader: Fernández-Morera merely serves to remind the umma of all the life-giving aspects of the deen which have become forgotten or watered down during the last decades by means of the multiple efforts on both sides of the fence to align the deen with the demands of folklore christianity and monetary democracy. Thus the author is accurate in highlighting the recent sugary academic cosiness with Muslim Andalusia but gravely wanting in his understanding of such matters as slavery, jihad, dhimmi status, women and physical punishments within the shariat: his refusal to consider any wisdom underlying the legal parameters and rulings sent down by the Lord of the Worlds or demonstrated by His Messenger, peace be upon him, renders his assessment of Iberian life a collection of shallow, anecdotal, journalistic outpourings devoid of any deeper coherent social context. Given that he judges according to christian norms and legal terms then we must remind him of the necessity of just perspective: to take but just one example: Any ‘killings’ on the Peninsula were exacted by appointed judges and in accordance with divine law, unlike the 7 millions killed in the Balkans by his co-faithists, the six exterminated by the neo-Aryan-redemptionist, wotanist christians, the untold hundreds of thousands by European christian colonialists in Africa and Asia or the 20 million plus eliminated by the linguistic inheritors of the jews and christians, i.e. the purgists, the communists. That Fernández-Morera ‘discovers’ a number of aberrant rulers or judges, the exception to the rule, only serves to support the legitimacy and reality of the judicial system of that time and place. Extra-judicial, inquisitorial torture and killings on a massive scale on the part of non-Muslim parties are historically proven by the latter themselves; such practices were certainly not the norm in Muslim societies.

اربط المعاني

‘They had sacrificed the deadly comfort of the nuclear family and made the reason for their existence the deen.’ HRR

A whitey shot dead eight blackies and two persons of indeterminate colouring in Buffalo a day or two ago at a full supermarket with further witnesses present in the street and buildings outside: the ‘suspect’ was suspiciously guilty on this account.

One of the benefits of being a stranger in a foreign land, and by that I mean a Muslim in the dunya, is that you can dance out of the row and not be deemed eccentric.

Sh. M. bin al-Habib remained hidden beneath the ignorant Frog-rule of violence – without this SDAQ would never have met him, if you are a seeker after causes.

The verb فطر, fatara, means to cleave, to split and by extension to find out or begin anything; and it also refers to Allah’s act of creation.

Among its associated meanings is the qur’anic term fitra, the natural, healthy, balanced state on which Allah has created mankind – but which is subject to unnaturalness, sickness and imbalance when the parameters and rules of the Author of this fitra are no longer adhered too; among them too is the iftaar, the breaking of the fast, the splitting, cleaving or discrimination between eating and not-eating, between drinking and not drinking and between sexual activity and refraining from it; among them too the fateera which refers to the dough which bursts into life when baked; among them too the futr, the fungi which suddenly breaks open the earth to appear after the rains.

The zakat al-fitr, ‘the purification of al-fitr’, refers to the giving of basic foodstuffs given after Ramadan in recognition of the fitr, the breaking of the fast and is an act which issues from the fitra, the natural disposition of a man or woman, in order to purify.

Just as Imam Malik’s judgement is that the zakat of wealth is to be distributed among the local people, so too is his judgement regarding the zakat al-fitr: sending an electronic message thousands of kilometres to the land of one’s parents or forefathers via the third-party, numerical, payment system is not the same – and certainly illegal under normal circumstances – as the sultan’s representative handing over actual edibles personally, face to face, to people in the community. As the fuqaha – and those who are in need of reasons, have explained: the here and now , the existential, is the nub, the crux, of the matter – better to strengthen and affirm those around one than conceptually help the far and distant; this in turn aids those who have migrated or fled their homelands to become resident, to realize that Allah in fact has brought them to their new home and that they may well die parted from their ancestral birthplace; then in turn it shall become easier for them to fathom why the phenomenon of islamic charities is more often than not counterproductive: the people in fact who are most in need of help are the muminun from the so-called rich countries; the people who are least in need of help are the muminun from the so-called poor countries who in fact are negatively impacted by most of the charity products and often encouraged to abandon their local farmlands and become dependent on ‘white’, processed foodstuffs.

Moreover the electronic transmission of numbers to pay for zakat deprives the person paying of the dua which the collector makes for him in his presence: as Allah taala has said: ‘Take zakat from their wealth to purify and cleanse them and pray for them. Your prayers bring relief to them. Allah is All-Hearing, All-Knowing’; to argue that those in far off lands may also pray for such a person is theoretically correct, but beside the point: just as real knowledge must be acquired directly from someone who acquired his knowledge directly from a real person, so the zakat-connection by internet of two persons who probably do not even know each other is not of the same rank as the meeting of two persons face to face.

The People are always in the baadiya, the sahra, the now polluted wastes, wherever they may be, thankful to Him, ta’ala, for a handful of water, in remembrance of him, on whom be peace and blessings, who made the ghusl with four mudd, and the wudu with one.

Das römische Denken hatte die griechischen Wörter übernommen – ohne die entsprechende gleichursprüngliche Erfahrung dessen, was sie sagen, ohne das griechische Wort. Die Bodenlosigkeit des abendländlichen Denkens beginnt mit diesem Übersetzen.

Roman thought had adopted Greek words without any lived experience of them, without an experience which corresponded to what they originally denoted. The groundlessness, the abyssmalness of western thought began with this transference, this translation.

Roman thought had adopted tens of thousands of Greek words without any lived experience of them, without an experience which corresponded to what they originally denoted. The groundlessness, the abyssmalness of western thought began with this transference, this translation. Then the abyss was deepened when European thought adopted christian-orientalist words for Arabic terms without having experienced what they actually meant, often avoiding a transliteration which might well have been an impulse to understanding.

(Lightly expanded with thanks to MH, from his Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, pp.13-14).

Although things are beginning to change.

Said he, ‘If he was so close to tawhid, then how was it that it could not make the leap, not open the door and enter?’

Said she, ‘Well, clearly Islam was not written for him; but if you require reasons and causes, then perhaps the following:

He inherited a language burdened with luggage from the past as the article above this one makes clear. He also got caught up in the subject-object/rationality-iman dichotomies, and had no access to Arabic: Thomas Aquinas got the goods from Ibn Rushd – who did pose these questions – but only to still the unease of certain low-brow ulama; he himself had no problem; it became Aquinas’ problem which in turn became Europe’s problem’.

He said, ‘Que?’

She said, ‘Put it like this: in the first instance: there is often no need for the sein-verb in Arabic, and so the subject-complement issue does not arise: Qul huwa Allah ahad – literally ‘Say: ‘Allah One’, there being no verb necessary; why? you might ask – perhaps because kaana, the verb for ‘to be/sein‘, also contains the meaning ‘to create’, and so any understanding is inconceivable without the mukawwin, the Bringer into being of the kawn, i.e. creation.

He said, ‘Ah ha, and what about rationality-iman?’

She said, ‘Let me read you something MH said – just to point out the weight of religious baggage encumbering [European] languages:

“The inclination to hold that the material-form-composition of things is the constitution of every existent being gains additional impetus on the basis of a prior belief, namely the biblical, that the whole of being is conceived of as something created, i.e. fabricated”.

The philosophy of this belief can, it is true, aver that all creative working of god is to be conceived of as different from the action of the artisan. If however at the same time, or even in advance, as a consequence of an understanding of the Thomist philosophy of pre-determination regarding the interpretation of the Bible, the ens creatum is conceived of as issuing from the oneness of material and form, then a belief arising out of a philosophy may be inferred whose truth rests in a revealing of Being which is of a different sort than that of a world that is conceived of in belief.

This concept of Creation, based on a belief, can now of course, lose its dominant strength with regard to knowledge of Being as a whole. Only the once employed theological interpretation of all beingness, the view of the world according to material and form, borrowed from a foreign philosophy, can nevertheless remain. Its metaphysic too rests on the medievally characterized form-material composition which only recalls in mere words the buried nature of εἶδος (form) and ύλη (matter). Thus the understanding of a thing according to form and matter, be it still medieval or transformed into Kantian-transcendental, has become something common, a matter of course. However for this reason it is no less than the other mentioned interpretations of the thingness of a thing an assault on the being inherent in the thingness of a thing.

She continued, ‘I think it shall now be clear to you that if we ditch the Thomist baggage of European thought and recommence from where the Greeks left off as MH has indicated – or more simply, reconnect to what Ibn Rushd actually said and did – then the jump becomes feasible for all who are bold.

One of the miracles of the deen in this age is its inherent, natural protection from virtual reality:

The initial shahada must spoken in the presence of and be witnessed by real people.

The salat consists of bodily movements, a clean space and is to be performed at specific times, in the company of others and be led by an imam.

Zakat is paid on tangible stuff – gold or silver, agriculture products or livestock, in the presence of a tax-collector who makes a dua for the person purifying his wealth.

The sawm is made at a specific time and the suhur and iftar are to be taken communally, except in unusual circumstances.

The hajj must be made to a specific place, at a specific time, and the standing at Arafat is along with the jamaa’a.

Minutes of the closing committee meeting, headed by Bishop Brag Matikus:

The following conclusions were reached and recommendations made:

All efforts to convince the Muslims to follow us christians and create a headlocated religion consisting of ideals and concepts have been fruitless; their insistence on calling their way a deen, and not a religion, i.e. a straight path to the Garden based on right living in every aspect of daily life has proved impossible to undermine – on account of their love of Allah and His Messenger Mustafa.

As is well known all canon laws have long since been abrogated; total freedom has been accorded to the lower nafs, the hungry, base self. As pointed out by Bishop Ataloss it has now been over fifty years since the See in effect legitimized suicide – and so it would only seem reasonable and logical that those who did not want to join the Muslims should take their own lives; this could be organized by the kerbalists who had already signalled their enthusism for this.

Given the staunch holding to aqida and amal of the common people in ‘backward territories’, i.e. trust in the Unseen and consequent action based on the latter, the Baba sees no alternative but to recognize the deep wisdom contained in the Way of Submission, accept a one-off payment of zakat from the Bayt al-Mal in the spirit of mu’allafat qulubuhum, become Muslim himself and encourage other christians to do.

As for the de-facto rulers-by-force in the gated mega-cities, the self styled ‘Protectors of the Masses’, who had succeeded in reducing the teachings of ‘Isa to a conceptual haze these are to be recognized as the de-facto rulers-by-force with the recommendation that they continue to temper their violence with the teachings of the Buddha which had also long-since been reduced to an idea.

All church goods shall be made over to the Khalif in Burkino Faso. Members of the Jesuit order conversant with Islam should try and arrange other zakat payments for potential renegades.