‘How about some christian music’ he asked of the Naga masseur called Andrew.

‘Excuse me sir?’

‘Some Mozart, Beethoven or Wagner perhaps.

‘Sir?’

Musicians of another woof than the buddhist world music of now’.

Silence is gold beneath the wastling sheets of silk and oil glidened hands.

La Forteresse of Mount Mgouna

Sensing, diving, swimming and drowning  – open to all with courage

The nafs, the self, this thing which tends to congeal and harden into a pseudo-reality through habit, had been shaken up. This self, born of two and a half decades of European democratic culture and the structural propaganda of school, university and the media. Shaken by poverty, by the exotic character of Morocco, by the reputedly ‘difficult’, ‘foreign’ language of Arabic, by illness, by the super-chlorinated water, by hashish, by opium and the occasional chemical trip, and by the changes inherent in physical travel. Shaken to the point of disintegration, to the point of no longer ordering one’s affair, to the point of seeing the moment, reading the moment and being only in the moment. The moment was ripe. An awareness of the heart and something other than the world of the sensory made its entry. A need for meaning. A readiness. A surrender of the self despite one’s self.

A shabby town-square perhaps Zagora, perhaps Ouzarzate, perhaps somewhere nearby, mint tea in the café when an English registered car drew up.

In it were Shaykh Abdal Qadir as-Sufi and Dr Abdalkhabir al-Amirki. I went over and asked the latter, the driver, if we could continue down the road with them. With great majesty and force the former said ‘get in’. I mentioned my companionne in the café.  ‘Get her!’

We stopped after leaving the town. F. and Mason’s with toast on a gas primus in the desert. They were westerners no doubt, and surely interesting in their relationship to each other – most polite and crisp.

Almond blossom in the ochre qasbah of Qalaat Mgouna, against blue, with pomegranate trees, apricots, and rivulets running to the side of our sufra, our table cloth, spread on the ground, served by a black man, ex-slave but by preference still around after the voices’ decree of ‘liberté‘, the booming thumping around us of the workers pounding the moist adobe earth between the shuttering to make the new walls, accompanied by Allah, Allah, Allah

Sight of veiled girls and woman half hiding as they look on at us from an outbuilding. When I asked Shaykh Abdal Qadir why, he said you will understand later. Shaykh Muhammad al Basri asks for a room with reed matting to be prepared for the night for both of us. With hindsight, most accommodating.

Singing evening in the pink room of geometric designs, then eating together with Si Muhammad al Basri, the Muqaddam of Shaykh Muhammad ibn al Habib and the father of the present Shaykh Mortada Elboumashouli, and his brother. The enormous platters of meat and prunes, of chickens, of sweet angel hair pasta with raisons, following one after the other, culminating in the tea-making of a man in the corner of the room surrounded by the utensils and served by another with boiling water – all an explosion of colour, and sensual for us, the poor, the unknowing, the seeking. The sharing too, the many hands, the conversation.

A realisation that everything was beginning to make sense, that the turbulence of the past was just a shake up for this. Meanings rushed in to every scene, every conversation, every movement. I was moving now into something written, destined, I had no choice. It was only afterwards that I came upon the rational explanation for what was happening – in the Quran where Allah ta’ala says ‘When Allah desires to guide someone, He expands his breast to Islam.’ Despite the overwhelming changes in existential perception, I was to know later that it was quite normal.

Shower, purity afterwards, without knowing formally that a ghusl is necessary before becoming Muslim. It had happened despite my self, my heart had recognized the truth in those men from Qalaat Mgouna and those who had called me in. This I realized later was called fitra, that natural awareness of each of us of what is right. My fitra could dominate after the structures of childhood dissolved. I began to perceive that Islam was not a religion but a way of being, a way of right acting, and an ever present awareness of the Truth which was not out there, foreign, but rather already contained within oneself – and covered variously by the fantasies and structures crystalized by the self into a personal history which one worships to a greater or lesser degree. This worship of personality yields unwillingly to this fitra also residing in the self. The colour, the joie de vivre, the affirmation of life, the social reality of Qalaat Mgouna was the deen, was a way of living far from the christian stereotypes of being in the world. So this becoming Muslim was not a sudden conversion but a gradual uncovering to myself of the veils of the self. The initial uncoverings were mind-blowing, as the term went then, i.e. the mind or the usual parameters of thinking were blown upon to be able to receive the – as I later understood – the nafahaat of the Lord, the breezes of mercy and knowledge; wave upon wave of new seeings engulfed my conscious self. They became less reduced in size but continued and still continue to this day for the self, the veil, is vast, as vast as the universe itself.

I was aware that my companionne was not subject to the same, I was losing her or she was losing me. A break ensued. Painful. Kataba Allah ma kataba.

The real sixth sense

is far from the mystic, esoteric, intuition

of those who have lost their Way;

rather a sensing-sensory of the beloved prey,

sometimes increasing to the fever pitch and

banned from the klosters and vatikan

but free to roam with us.

Not however for the full-time rationalist

with a light snow-covering of religious islam.

A Morality of Discrimination

In order to understand morality in an Islamic sense one has to accept that Islam is not a concept-based reality located in the minds of the Muslims but rather – in the first instance – a way of life based on that of a Messenger and formulated in legal terms. One of the names of Allah ta’ala is al-Haqq which means ‘Truth’, ‘Reality’ as well as having connotations of ‘Law’ – i.e. He, ta’ala, is the ‘court of the last instance’ with respect to haq/huqouq, all the various rulings with regard to Himself and His slaves on earth; in this respect one may examine the ayat in sura al-Ma’ida, The Table: 48, ‘And We have sent down the Book to you with truth, confirming and conserving the previous Books. So judge between them by what Allah has sent down and do not follow their whims and desires deviating from the Truth that has come to you. We have appointed a law and a practice for every one of you.’ A translation of the famous hadith of Muhammad, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him ‘I have been commanded to judge by the outward’ is a further indication that our reality is visible, tangible and subject to assessment, unlike the very loose, ever-changing and quasi-mystical reality of the christians. Thus we have justice expressed outwardly in law, and they have concepts expressed inwardly in the intellect. We have clear outward limits and they have indefinite – often idealistic – ideas which have little relation to reality. This is where a danger lies: when Muslims adopt a moral – in a christian sense – attitude to Islam the tendency is to formulate an idealistic, pious, Islamic world in their heads. This of course has little to do with the reality of everyday life and a frustration and ultimately anger forms which leads certain of the weak to blow themselves up. This moralistic approach, this living out of a perfect iman in one’s head is often to be experienced at the hand of the false salafis.

We can witness and we know from the Quran that christianity is not the deen of ‘Isa, ‘alayhi salaam: trace elements of it remain, like charity, humility and compassion, and a vague recognition of the Unseen. Instead we have a ‘religion’, i.e. a ‘faith of concepts’ in the head – but no outward behavioural pattern or rulings governing real life, i.e. trade, contracts and finance. This ‘religion’ is in turn controlled by the church and a priestly class who have made of it a spiritual business: ‘If you take us as your representatives, we shall take care of your concepts.’

Nietzsche understood this with la ilaha illallah, i.e. by his triumphant declaration of the end of the christian god, the idols, the sacrament, the concept of original sin, the tyranny of the church and priests, and his strident refusal to feel guilty about it. In short he purified himself of the superstructure of toxic, christian language and emerged free.

European translations of the Quran and the sunna were first made – and still are to a large extent – using this christian terminology. But it did not correspond to what was meant. Instead of zakat, people were reading of ‘alms’ and ‘poor tax’, instead of wudu, ‘ablution’, instead of salat, ‘prayer’, instead of Allah, ‘god’, instead of hajj ‘pilgrimage’. So the Muslims with no access to the Arabic became imprisoned in the intellectual structure of christianity: they became ‘sinners’ and at times felt ‘guilty’, etc. etc, because this was the only language available to them. The truth is however that there is no ‘sin’. If we commit a wrong action, then we turn in tawba and basta! the matter is finished, the heart is purified – and without any priestly intervention. The Arabs had to invent a word for guilt: shu’our al-dhanb, i.e. a sensation, a consciousness or a perception that one has committed a wrong action, that is, a feeling that lingers and weighs one down. But this is not our deen: at any given moment we can free ourselves, purify ourselves of our past actions.

We are of course instructed in many translations of the Quran to ‘command to the good and forbid evil’ which sounds somewhat moral and christian in tone. But a closer examination of the prophetic language reveals that in fact we are instructed to ‘command to what is ma’rouf, i.e. known [to be socially sane, healthy and just] and forbid what is munkar, i.e. unknown [or unrecognized by sane healthy and just members of society] – as is clear from the non-christian translation of the Bewleys: ‘command to what is right and forbid what is wrong’. We are commanded to the right and wrong of the fitra which corresponds to our natural being, to a balanced way of living rather than mere moral, intellectual concepts. And this commanding or forbidding is not a finger-wagging whine of passive incapacity, but rather – in the first instance – an active involvement in the situation one finds oneself in, an embodiment of the words of the Rasoul sallalah alayhi was salam ‘if you see something wrong then change it with your hand’.

There is then no christian guilt with us – and by extension no collective or personal feelings of guilt. Any such tendency to such things is merely the residue of christian terminology in the language we use. Rid oneself of this terminology and one frees oneself of such feelings or concepts. At the height of its power and glory the Osmanli dawlat expressed itself with up to sixty percent of Islamic terminology and Arabic words ; Urdu is permeated with the same – up to thirty or forty percent, as is Swahili, Malaysian, Hausa, Bahasa Indonesie, Persian, Tamazight etc. Indeed we may judge the degree to which Islam is present in any given territory by the penetration of its language. Europe is in the early stages of such a transformation and as such many Muslims resident here live under the shadow of priestly morality. This is why Nietzsche is required reading for many. He can help to a return to the original meaning of ‘morality’, i.e. a quality of character and behaviour based on healthy discrimination.

HENRY STUART, KING of SCOTS

1545-1567

To the Queen

Be a governor both good and gratious;

Be trustworthy, of friendly disposition to all your lords;

Be generous in granting freedom and not desirous;

Be just to the poor folk for any person may fall;

Be firm of faith and constant as a wall;

Be ready ever to staunch evil discord;

Be charitable and surely you shall

Be amenable always to know your God and Lord.

Be not proud when heir to wordly goods;

Be mindful that you will not remain for long;

Be sure also that you must die without a doubt;

Be aware then that time waits for no man;

Be virtuous and set all vice aside;

Be patient, humble and merciful;

Be so disciplined wherever you go or stay;

Be amenable always to know your God and Lord.

Be well advised of whom you seek counsel;

Be sure of them, that they be trustworthy and true;

Reflect whether they be friend or seeming so;

Be true to your soul, its words or your perception;

Be never over hasty to act – wrongly causing regret;

Be not friends with those who make false testimony;

Be always ready to renew all good works;

Be amenable always to know your God and Lord.

Be assured of and take possession of your heritage

Be enemies of those old enemies who now occupy it;

Be strength and force to calm those you must assuage

Be law of God – such that no man may deny it;

Be not as a lantern unnoticed in the gloom;

Be aware of your right that your lands be restored,

Be worthy so your name be magnified;

Be amenable always to know your God and Lord.

Be strong as a lion towards rebels;

Be fierce in pursuing them wherever you find them;

Be both gentle and meek to your liegemen;

Be their aid and help them to health and safety;

Be aware of your charge and why you were crowned;

Be always concerned that justice be not smothered;

Be glad of heart; expound these words often;

Be amenable always to know your God and Lord.

Said Lao Tzu Who

to the Mandarin: “Tell the truth, it’s more deceptive than lies

to the godless stateists”.

The sharee’a is a legal code embracing all visible activities.

Each detail has its corresponding dose of light in the unseen.

Applied law is how to worship Allah free of the nafs

for every movement with taqwa combats the lower self

allowing purity of action and true freedom.

Who needs to take a walk on the wild side

in Berlin

where wild is low-normal

and tame is wild fitra?

Eid al Fitr 2015

Islam is a gift from Allah. He guides whom He wishes. Eid is a day of happiness, a day of gifts. It is not an empty religious rite, but one of Allah’s signs, a sign of togetherness, community. That we can still perform the sala al-Eid here in Europe openly is a miracle in this age of humanism, an age of man-made laws elevated to the status of inviolability.

This is a day to give thanks, for our Islam and for the freedom to practice our deen in many areas. We must take note however of the consequences of what happens when the Muslims abandon their laws and imitate those made by man, what happens when they turn the deen into a religion. Only then shall we realize why Allah has allowed the umma to disappear, allowed racist national states run by capitalists to rule the Muslims.

We must reflect upon the fact that fasting is forbidden in China. That Indonesia’s trade is controlled by China. That Malaysia has never recovered from the linguistic rape of the British administration. That more land is owned by the agricultural banks in Bangladesh than by the people. That the community with the greatest number of Muslims, India – not Indonesia as is widely cited in the press – is still imprisoned in the caste system. That in Pakistan corruption is so rife it has become the norm, that hardly any trees have been left standing, and that there is often no electricity. Afghanistan has been split into two by the vote, the ballot fever – between those who follow traditional leadership but who have been driven to extremism in their frustration at having lost authority and those who think that putting a piece of paper in a box every four years shall solve their problems. We must take note that the safavids are extending their influence over the Muslims from Mashhad through to Gaza. And may Allah protect the remnant of the Osmanli dawlat in its struggle to reassert the deen through democratic means. 300.000 killed in the war in Sham, 4 million refugees, unknown numbers tortured, a wasteland. In the Gulf they are still striving with each other to build higher and higher buildings while their hotels are filling with alcohol and their streets with prostitutes. Saudi is California plus the five sala per day and women in black sacks, any mention of the laws of trade of the rasoul, sallalhhu alayhi was salaam, is deemed unprogressive, almost on a par with terrorism. Egypt, where riba in its modern form began with the printing of endless bank notes, calls to democracy rhetorically and throws out the result when it disagrees with them – as has happened five times in so called Muslim countries to date. More food is now imported to Cairo during Ramadan than in any other month. Civil war still rages in Libya. Tunis is a tourist resort with a confused and angry youth. Algeria does not know if it is still part of France – having just recovered from one civil war, fighting has now broken out between the berbers and the arabs. In Morocco the King is struggling courageously to reintroduce a traditional Islam after two generations of wahhabi influence; but the water in the major towns is so contaminated with chlorine that legally speaking it may not be used even for wudu, livestock eat plastic bags on rubbish heaps and the enormous chickens, fed on steroids and hormones, are so dangerous that the French expats are importing meat from France. Caesarean births are preferred because they are more profitable for the hospitals and French drug companies.

Africa has become a social, political and political chaos run by ruthless puppets schooled in France and Britain. The noble Muslim Kings and Amirs have been replaced by ignorant puppets, ignorant of the next world. The great Muslim tribes have been replaced by the nuclear family.

But Allah is in charge and there is no changing the sunna of Allah. As He says in Al ‘Imran: ‘They plotted and Allah plotted. But Allah is the best of plotters’. Allah ta’ala says in Sura Muhammad: ‘Allah is Rich and you are poor. If you turn away, He will replace you with a people other than yourselves and they will not be like you.’ And He says in sura al Maida: ‘You who have iman! if any of you renounce your deen, Allah will bring forward a people whom He loves and who love Him’. The message is clear people have turned away from His deen in Africa and Asia and so He is bringing forward a new people.

We have a treasure but we must share it – through da’wa to the people of Europe. As one of the great shaykhs of this age has said: ‘If we don’t, they will come and rip from our hands as they are doing in Asia and Africa. We have community, we have balanced leadership. You who have come from these lands, you have made hijra. We too the Europeans have made hijra and are still making hijra from the land of kufr. The Rasoul, sallahu alayhi wa sallam, has said: ‘Actions are according to intention and each shall get what he intended. Whoever made the hijra for Allah and His Messenger,then his hijra is for Allah and His Messenger and whoever made his hijra for the dunya – in order gain something of it, or for a woman – in order to marry her, then his hijra is for that for which he made his hijra.’

When the Muslims new to Europe have learnt a European language, they naturally become European, no doubt. Together we have a lot to give, namely the fitra to a people who have abandoned the fitra for total sexual licence, we can reintroduce the reality of extended or tribal family which has been all but destroyed, we can reintroduce healthy living to a people exhausted by drugs both legal and legal. And if we recognize the achievements of the people of Europe in the dunya – clean drinking water, food still relatively healthy, abundunt trees, clean streets and civil order for example, there can only be growth and positive increase.

Stats

A courteous and open request to the media, in particular the German media in this instance, for less terror-hype and a little more rational reflection.
According to our legal school, that of Imam Malik, as well as the three other schools of Shafii, Abu Hanifa and Ibn Hanbal, may Allah be pleased with them all, suicide [bombing] is strictly forbidden and punished by the Lord of the Worlds with eternal Fire.
As Shaykh Sidi al Jamal has said, the Shaykh of Shaykh ad-Darqawi:
‘One single man can illuminate a whole city, while a whole city cannot illuminate a single man’
Although statistics are generally – and often deliberately – misleading, as our footnote below illustrates, the following recent postings by government, semi- governmental and mainstream media must have some meaning:
14,551 persons (10,922 men and 3,629 women) ‘died in Germany in 2012 as a result of excessive alcohol consumption – four times more than road deaths’, see the official website of the German government organ das Statistische Bundesamt (Destatis) – and therefore approximately:
3,500 accident-related road deaths occurred last year. These two statistics are obviously a great improvement on the following statistic from one leading German newspaper some years ago, and points to the success of certain government campaigns to heighten awareness of the dangers of alcohol but it does not go far enough:
74,000 deaths from alcohol – see: Die Welt am Sonntag, 27.06.10;
1,002 deaths from illegal drugs in 2013 – see the highly-regarded German website Statista – Das Statistik-Portal;
550 deaths through aids in 2013 in Germany – see again Das Statistik-Portal;
110 000 to 140 000 deaths in 2014 in Germany associated with diseases arising from tobacco – this taken from the website: Gesundheit – Zahlen, Daten, Fakten.
3.300 deaths from passive smoking, see: www.kreuzbund.de/de/das-suchtproblem-in-deutschland.html. Almost akin to murder, what?
36,000 deaths – it was reported in the leading German magazine, Der Spiegel, 27.11.2014, that this number of persons died in 2012 as a result of mental illnesses and behavioral imbalances, and that this number is increasing alarmingly annually – and:
150 deaths caused by a deranged pilot just recently.
One could go on to list the number of killings in domestic and sexual violence of husbands, wives and children, of murders through criminals and deaths through medical negligence, but suffice the following:

0 – not a single death in German speaking territory in the last 2000 years, or longer, i.e. since written records exist, has been caused through terror attacks attributed to Muslims.
So as Nietzsche might recommend: A little more attention to encouraging the treatment of drunkards and lunatics, drug-addicts, sexual extremists, social misfits and those prone to road-rage, rather than volk-related rumour mongering. Imam Malik’s teaching stresses the prioritization of actions: some are important, some less so. A top priority for our society here in Germany in the light of the above statistics would appear to be a return to health and sanity in the media.

Footnote:

During the O.J. Simpson trial, the prosecution made much of the fact that Simpson had a record of violence towards his wife. In response, Simpson’s legal team argued that, of all women subjected to spousal abuse, only one in 2,500 was subsequently killed by the abusive husband. It was hence implied that, since the ratio of abusers to killers was so high, any evidence about the accused’s prior violent behaviour was insignificant.

This sounds plausible. However, there is another way to consider the statistics. According to the German academic Gerd Gigerenzer, we are not trying to predict whether a husband will murder his wife: Simpson’s wife inarguably had been murdered, so instead, we should ask the question backwards: given that a battered wife has been murdered, what are the odds that the husband did it? Gigerenzer calculates that ‘the chances that a batterer actually murdered his partner, given that she has been first abused and then killed, is about eight in nine’.

This is a case where a statistical sleight of hand normally called ‘the prosecutor’s fallacy’ worked for the defence. What is interesting is not merely that we are confused but the degree of our confusion: the presentation of the data affects our judgment by factor of thousands: from 0.04 per cent to 90 per cent. We need to be alert to this kind of error, particularly since computers and ‘big data’ make it easy to generate spurious but plausible statistics on almost any subject.

High-profile criminal cases seem plagued by peculiar mental biases. In particular, they seem to cause people to polarise around only two opposing theories of ‘what happened’.

I felt slightly vindicated when I finally heard that the British police were investigating the possibility that the disappearance of Madeleine McCann was the result of a burglary attempt gone wrong. Since planned abduction by a paedophile is so rare, it struck me as odd that no one much considered this more probable option.

Press and internet commentary seems to amplify the either/or effect. If you want to see this tendency at its most extreme, the online reaction to the trials of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito is a textbook case. The two camps, the Colpevolisti and Innocentisti, operate entirely separate, partisan websites: which site you see first will affect your assessment of Knox and Sollecito’s guilt enormously. I have to say here that using Occam’s razor — or even Occam’s nasal hair-trimmer — should incline you towards believing the pair are more likely to be innocent than guilty. Burglaries gone wrong seem more common than sex games turned murderous. The investigating authorities formulated theories before evidence was available, and were reluctant to modify them, instead creating further bizarre theories to support their initial assumptions — a tendency known as ‘privileging the hypothesis’. Had the DNA and fingerprint evidence implicating Guede been available at once, would the investigation have proceeded as it did? Almost certainly not.

But few commentators discuss the case in terms of probabilities — it is all about certainty first, evidence later. This tendency is probably innate. But Gigerenzer believes it can be corrected: ‘Schools spend most of their time teaching children the mathematics of certainty — geometry, trigonometry — and spend little if any time on the mathematics of uncertainty. Statistical thinking could be taught as the art of real-world problem solving.’

German schools are beginning to adopt his approach. Britain (and Italy) should follow.

Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman of Ogilvy Group UK.