Foundation of Faith :...Ustaz Dr Abdullah Yasin

We must 'migrate' from 'mukhalid' to 'mu'tabir',
from 'mere follower' or 'taklid' to comprehension and understanding
from 'darkness' to 'Light'.
It is back to ilm, ilm, ilm and more ilm.




For the rest of the video, click HERE

....we have to re-examine our SHAHADAH.....

The 'SHAHADAH': Lailahail lallah,wa ashaduanna Muhamadarasullallah' is consisted of 2 parts.
The 'true conviction'[ IMAN ] part," Laila hail lallah "[ There is no god but God ] . The 'AMAL' part "wa ashhaduanna Muhamadarasullallah "[ and I testify Muhamad is the messenger of God ]

The 2nd part, 'waash haduanna Muhamadarasullallah' is the syariah part , the 'AMAL part',ie since I believe there is no god but God and I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God,I accept that he was the best person to know God and thus I follow the ways of Muhammad[ pbuh]. And now that the prophet is not around I follow the next best people around, the ulama', since my knowledge in the ways of Muhammad is very superficial and shallow .Fullstop. Since all the sages and the ulama' said so,and I have little knowledge to think otherwise, I take for granted that they are right and thus I follow.If I have the time and intelligence to know the religion as HAMKA or Shaikh Rashid Ridha do, I am free to follow my heart....But I dont.Fullstop...

The prerequisite of the 1st part of the 'Shahadah' however, requires more than just to follow.There must be definitive personal conviction, without which our Aqidah is on very flimsy ground. And indeed if we present day Muslims are honest in our self examination, we will have to concede our foundations are weak, in many of us.Non existent in some.That is basically why we Muslims currently are faced with an existential crisis of mega proportion.

We simply do not comprehend our very 'shahadah' which we repeat like parrots at least some nine times minimum per day for those of us who pray. We , mostly, never give much thought to the meaning and conviction which goes with it with respect to 'there is no god but God '. We do not bother even to read HIS letters to us.They just are there to collect dust up there in high places.

How many of us read the Quran constantly?
How many of us read the Quran with comprehension and conviction?
How many of us derive lessons from the Quran?
How many of us 'live by the Quran'?
Let me rephrase the last question in another way,...frankly, how many of us tend to deprecate people who want to 'live by the Quran' and preach others to live by the Quran as well?......brainless, simpletons,pondok people,'kampong' people' fundamentalists, ignoramus, small brained 'kopiah type' etc etc and etc.

AT the end of the day, the typical Muslim now has not enough 'ilm' but does not wish to follow the ulama'.Almost totally ignorant on matters of Islam but has the audacity to question ulama' at every nook and corner, Oxbridge or Harvard educated notwithstanding.He or she wants to have a polemical discussion on Islam while his heart and soul remained a vacuum . He or she does not have ilm. Compounded further by the fact that he or she has no real honest conviction in the only miracle available to him or her, The Quran....The daily " Laila haillallah " has no meaning to him or her. Eyes remained dry and hearts harder than stone!

Here is a very spiritually 'sick' person: Lack in IMAN, very loose and inconsistent in AMAL! In medical parlance, prognosis: POOR!


"The messenger believeth in that which hath been revealed unto him from his Lord and (so do) believers. Each one believeth in Allah and His angels and His scriptures and His messengers - We make no distinction between any of His messengers - and they say: We hear, and we obey. (Grant us) Thy forgiveness, our Lord. Unto Thee is the journeying. (285)
Al Quran , 2 : 285

The Quran 2 : 285, states so and since all Muslims believe that the Quran is the divine words of Allah, this is the conviction , which delivers the prerequisite for the 'Shahadah'.

Only after the 'Shahadah', come prayer, almsgiving, fasting,and finally doing the Haj..

We present day Muslims take our 'Shahadah' very lightly and that contribute in the main our major problem of malaise and spiritual weakness...our foundation is not strong...lack of conviction etc etc.

If one look at the formative period of Islam, Nabi spent 13 years in Mekkah building the 1st part , the 'conviction' part. Only the subsequent 10 in Medinah did the 'syariah' part came in...the call to prayers, fasting,zakat and Haj...

That was why the early Muslims were able to bring light and spread the message to Byzantine Syria,Jordan and Egypt,Sasanian Empire of Iraq and Iran and beyond the River Oxus to Afghanistan and Caucauses,Byzantine northern Africaya [Tripoli, Morocco, Algiers ], crossing over the Strait of Jabal Tariq into Christian Spain and Southern France, across the Indian Ocean into Sind. All these within the 1st 100 years post Nabi except for the final push on Constantinople and Western Turkey which occurred several centuries later.

Orientalists and Westerners deprecatingly put down Islam's fast spread due to 'The Sword'. The Roman empire took 5 centuries to be of the same size in comparision....But even if it is by the sword ,so what? It is as if empires are given on a silver plate!...if they cannot humbly acknowledge and recognise the Light and the Message that comes with it, that is part of their loss.

Now we have Muslims amongst our midst very proud ape-ing the West.
"Sir, What is wrong with the Muslims of the future? Are they few in number?". One of Nabi's shahabats asked him....

Not exactly .....there are 1.5 billions of them..."but they are just like flotsams being pushed aside by the waves..."

Now is about time that we, especially us given Islam on a silver plate from our parents, seriously need to re-examine our 'Shahadah'!

It has to be ,as usual, back to the same: Ilm, Ilm , Ilm and yet more ilm.


Dr Nik Howk

September 29, 2010 6:21 PM

Conversations on Islam: Omid Safi

...REDHA.[ or how I come to accept what I can't change ]

"Unto Allah (belongeth) whatsoever is in the heavens and whatsoever is in the earth; and whether ye make known what is in your minds or hide it, Allah will bring you to account for it. He will forgive whom He will and He will punish whom He will. Allah is Able to do all things. (284)The messenger believeth in that which hath been revealed unto him from his Lord and (so do) believers. Each one believeth in Allah and His angels and His scriptures and His messengers - We make no distinction between any of His messengers - and they say: We hear, and we obey. (Grant us) Thy forgiveness, our Lord. Unto Thee is the journeying. (285) Allah tasketh not a soul beyond its scope. For it (is only) that which it hath earned, and against it (only) that which it hath deserved. Our Lord! Condemn us not if we forget, or miss the mark! Our Lord! Lay not on us such a burden as thou didst lay on those before us! Our Lord! Impose not on us that which we have not the strength to bear! Pardon us, absolve us and have mercy on us, Thou, our Protector, and give us victory over the disbelieving folk." (286)
closing 3 ayat of Surah al Baqarah, chapter 2, The Noble Qur'an.

....we Muslims are blessed with some very powerful statements, from within the Quran and outside the Qur'an, to fall on back to when we are faced with an insoluble, seemingly intractable problem.
" Subhanallah, alhamdullilllah, allahuakbar" being the greatest.
" Laaillahaillallah, huwahdahulasyarikallah lahul mulku walahulhamdu yuhyiwayumit wahuwa ala kullisyain qadir', yet another.
The ayat of 'the Lord of the Throne' probably the favourite when in situation of fear and awe. And many others as in the sunnah...

For me though, when things in my life appear topsy turvy,too heavy for my 'heart' to endure and really 'unsolvable' and beyond my realm, I normally go take an ablution, pray the sembahyang hajat a total of 4 cycles with 2 salam.
First rakaat after fatihah, I read Surah al Ikhlas 9 times. In the 2nd rakaat ,20 times, then finnish the Ist 2 cycles of prayer with a salam.
The 3rd cycle,similarly 30 times al Ikhlas following the fatihah and finally 40 al Ikhlas in the last cycle. A total of 99 times in all.

Al-Ikhlas
"In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful
Say: He is Allah, the One! (1) Allah, the eternally Besought of all! (2) He begetteth not nor was begotten. (3) And there is none comparable unto Him." (4)

Al Ikhlas, a 'heavyweight', equivalent to a third of the Quran, 99 times and Allah having 99 names...a heady mix of the sublime, with humble you, the profane.....

Additionaly, the last 3 ayats in Surah al Baqarah [ above ] has special connotation , sublimity and meaning. I read them a lot both in my prayers and as a form of 'doa'.It somehow soften the 'blows'.

Normally, after this kind of session, I find my problem or to put it more accurately, 'perceived problem', pales into insignificance...either it get solved later or God opens up my soul to the wisdom and humility to accept whatever happened 'seadanya'[ as it is ].

The interval taken for this prolong 'doa' give the necessary 'time element' for the 'neuronal-humoral-psychomotor' cascade to weave it's way and do it's magic on my soul.

And if I find I am still not restive , I repeat this daily, even for a month if need be.......It works magic! All the time. If things do not change[ usually more often than not, the status quo on the ground remained the same ], I changed...My perspective of the perceived problem changed. And just even with a change in perception, my world suddenly become lighter, often times, brighter!...The beauty of acceptance, 'Redha'.

Better still, this prayer be done in the stillness of the night, wee hours of the morning, in conjunction and proceeding an earlier two cycles of 'tahajjud' prayer and two cycles of 'taubat' prayer. 'Tahajjud' in the theoretical sense at least is 100 % for 'Him', followed by the 'taubat' prayer which in essence,with the proviso that if accepted, represent the expiation of your 'sin'.....only then the 'situation' is rightly set up for your 'hajat prayer.Remember the scene post Nabi when Abbas, our prophet's uncle was asked by the shahabats to pray for rain during a long drought.Abbas just simply asked for the expiation of his 'sin' first and only after that 'doa' for rain.

Do it one night, two for that matter, and every night if that is necessary.
Great for your soul!

We, mere simple ordinary folks, ignorant souls ,with lowly 'maqams', unlike the saints and sufis, have to have our very own simple formullae to come to a state of Redha, and if this is within the realm of the sunnah and the syariah,why not?
This is my usual personal modus operandi...

The sufis and the saints, they are different. They have attained a 'maqam' beyond 'human wants'!...They redha all the time. We ,mere mortals, have to work hard connecting with the 'divine' before achieving some semblance of it.

We are gifted with the template and the 'tools' handed down to us in the Qur'an and the sunnah. Just pick and choose and use it. The secret is in 'constancy' rather than 'volume'.


Huwallahualam!

...History is written by the victors: Japanese surrender

This is an actual film made of the surrender ceremony of the Japanese to General McArthur in Tokyo Bay on September 2,1945. Actual voice of the General. Never been shown to the public before. We always saw the "stills" but never the film itself.
Historical Footage: Japanese Surrender Signing Aboard Battleship Missouri Sunday Sept. 2, 1945.
An important piece of history.

...Does Peace has a chance in the Middle East...

"And when Moses said unto his people: Lo! Allah commandeth you that ye sacrifice a cow, they said: Dost thou make game of us? He answered: Allah forbid that I should be among the foolish! (67) They said: Pray for us unto thy Lord that He make clear to us what (cow) she is. (Moses) answered: Lo! He saith, Verily she is a cow neither with calf nor immature; (she is) between the two conditions; so do that which ye are commanded. (68) They said: Pray for us unto thy Lord that He make clear to us of what colour she is. (Moses) answered: Lo! He saith: Verily she is a yellow cow. Bright is her colour, gladdening beholders. (69) They said: Pray for us unto thy Lord that He make clear to us what (cow) she is. Lo! cows are much alike to us; and Lo! if Allah wills, we may be led aright. (70) (Moses) answered: Lo! He saith: Verily she is a cow unyoked; she plougheth not the soil nor watereth the tilth; whole and without mark. They said: Now thou bringest the truth. So they sacrificed her, though almost they did not." (71)

Surah Al Baqarah [ The Cow ], 2 :67-71

....Does Peace has a chance when the rest of the world has to deal with this type of people, who had the tough pedigree of even going back and forth even with Allah's simple command and 'test' during Moses's time!!??
The Peace process gets more convoluted and complicated with time. In future it will be made to appear that it is the Palestinians[ and the Syrians and Lebanese ]who are encroaching on Israeli lands.
And there are just 15 millions of them around...giving all these trouble.
The Europeans had effectively off-loaded their collective guilt of The Holoucast on to the Arabs!
The American Industrial- Military complex is just too happy for the status quo to remain intact and insoluble....It is all back to economics, jobs and employment.
And cheap oil!

...LKY, the muttering, ranting and mulling of an old man.....and of course a rebuttal from Tun

TRANSCRIPT OF MINISTER MENTOR LEE KUAN YEW’S INTERVIEW WITH SETH MYDANS OF NEW
YORK TIMES & IHT ON 1 SEPTEMBER 2010.

Mr Lee: “Thank you. When you are coming to 87, you are not very happy..”

Q: “Not. Well you should be glad that you’ve gotten way past where most of us
will get.”

Mr Lee: “That is my trouble. So, when is the last leaf falling?”

Q: “Do you feel like that, do you feel like the leaves are coming off?”

Mr Lee: “Well, yes. I mean I can feel the gradual decline of energy and
vitality and I mean generally every year when you know you are not on the same
level as last year. But that is life.”

Q: “My mother used to say never get old.”

Mr Lee: “Well, there you will try never to think yourself old. I mean I keep
fit, I swim, I cycle.”

Q: “And yoga, is that right? Meditation?”

Mr Lee: “Yes.”

Q: “Tell me about meditation?”

Mr Lee: “Well, I started it about two, three years ago when Ng Kok Song, the
Chief Investment Officer of the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation,
I knew he was doing meditation. His wife had died but he was completely
serene. So, I said, how do you achieve this? He said I meditate everyday and
so did my wife and when she was dying of cancer, she was totally serene because
she meditated everyday and he gave me a video of her in her last few weeks
completely composed completely relaxed and she and him had been meditating for
years. Well, I said to him, you teach me. He is a devout Christian. He was
taught by a man called Laurence Freeman, a Catholic. His guru was John Main a
devout Catholic. When I was in London, Ng Kok Song introduced me to Laurence
Freeman. In fact, he is coming on Saturday to visit Singapore, and we will do a
meditation session. The problem is to keep the monkey mind from running off
into all kinds of thoughts. It is most difficult to stay focused on the
mantra. The discipline is to have a mantra which you keep repeating in your
innermost heart, no need to voice it over and over again throughout the whole
period of meditation. The mantra they recommended was a religious one. Ma Ra
Na Ta, four syllables. Come To Me Oh Lord Jesus. So I said Okay, I am not a
Catholic but I will try. He said you can take any other mantra, Buddhist Om Mi
Tuo Fo, and keep repeating it. To me Ma Ran Na Ta is more soothing. So I used
Ma Ra Na Ta. You must be disciplined. I find it helps me go to sleep after
that. A certain tranquility settles over you. The day’s pressures and worries
are pushed out. Then there’s less problem sleeping. I miss it sometimes when I
am tired, or have gone out to a dinner and had wine. Then I cannot
concentrate. Otherwise I stick to it.”

Q: “So...”

Mr Lee: “.. for a good meditator will do it for half-an-hour. I do it for 20
minutes.”

Q: “So, would you say like your friend who taught you, would you say you are
serene?”

Mr Lee: “Well, not as serene as he is. He has done it for many years and he is
a devout Catholic. That makes a difference. He believes in Jesus. He believes
in the teachings of the Bible. He has lost his wife, a great calamity. But the
wife was serene. He gave me this video to show how meditation helped her in her
last few months. I do not think I can achieve his level of serenity. But I do
achieve some composure.”

Q: “And do you find that at this time in your life you do find yourself getting
closer to religion of one sort or another?”

Mr Lee: “I am an agnostic. I was brought up in a traditional Chinese family
with ancestor worship. I would go to my grandfather’s grave on All Soul’s Day
which is called “Qingming”. My father would bring me along, lay out food and
candles and burn some paper money and kowtow three times over his tombstone. At
home on specific days outside the kitchen he would put up two candles with my
grandfather’s picture. But as I grew up, I questioned this because I think this
is superstition. You are gone, you burn paper money, how can he collect the
paper money where he is? After my father died, I dropped the practice. My
youngest brother baptised my father as a Christian. He did not have the right
to. He was a doctor and for the last weeks before my father’s life, he took my
father to his house because he was a doctor and was able to keep my father
comforted. I do not know if my father was fully aware when he was converted into
Christianity.”

Q: “Converted your father?”

Mr Lee: “Yes.”

Q: “Well this happens when you get close to the end.”

Mr Lee: “Well, but I do not know whether my father agreed. At that time he may
have been beyond making a rational decision. My brother assumed that he agreed
and converted him.”

Q: “But…”

Mr Lee: “I am not converted.”

Q: “But when you reach that stage, you may wonder more than ever what is
next?”

Mr Lee: “Well, what is next, I do not know. Nobody has ever come back. The
Muslims say that there are seventy houris, beautiful women up there. But nobody
has come back to confirm this.”

Q: “And you haven’t converted to Islam, knowing that?”

Mr Lee: “Most unlikely. The Buddhist believes in transmigration of the soul.
If you live a good life, the reward is in your next migration, you will be a
good being, not an ugly animal. It is a comforting thought, but my wife and I
do not believe in it. She has been for two years bed-ridden, unable to speak
after a series of strokes. I am not going to convert her. I am not going to
allow anybody to convert her because I know it will be against what she believed
in all her life. How do I comfort myself? Well, I say life is just like
that. You can’t choose how you go unless you are going to take an overdose of
sleeping pills, like sodium amytal. For just over two years, she has been inert
in bed, but still cognitive. She understands when I talk to her, which I do
every night. She keeps awake for me; I tell her about my day’s work, read her
favourite poems.”

Q: ‘And what kind of books do you read to her?”

Mr Lee: “So much of my time is reading things online. The latest book which I
want to read or re-read is Kim. It is a beautiful of description of India as it
was in Kipling’s time. And he had an insight into the Indian mind and it is
still basically that same society that I find when I visit India. “

Q: “When you spoke to Time Magazine a couple of years ago, you said Don Quixote
was your favourite?”

Mr Lee: “Yes, I was just given the book, Don Quixote, a new translation.”

Q: “But people might find that ironic because he was fantasist who did not
realistically choose his projects and you are sort of the opposite?”

Mr Lee: “No, no, you must have something fanciful and a flight of fancy. I had
a colleague Rajaratnam who read Sci-Fi for his leisure.”’

Q: “And you?”:

Mr Lee: “No, I do not believe in Sci-Fi.”

Q: “But you must have something to fantasise.”

Mr Lee: “Well, at the moment, as I said, I would like to read Kim again. Why I
thought of Kim was because I have just been through a list of audio books to
choose for my wife. Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, books she has on her book shelf.
So, I ticked off the ones I think she would find interesting. The one that
caught my eye was Kim. She was into literature, from Alice in Wonderland, to
Adventures with a Looking Glass, to Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Pride and
Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility. Jane Austen was her favourite writer
because she wrote elegant and leisurely English prose of the 19th century. The
prose flowed beautifully, described the human condition in a graceful way, and
rolls off the tongue and in the mind. She enjoyed it. Also Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales. She was an English Literature major.”

Q: “You are naming books on the list, not necessarily books you have already
read, yes?”

Mr Lee: “I would have read some of them.”

Q: “Like a Jane Austen book, or Canterbury Tales?”

Mr Lee: “No, Canterbury Tales, I had to do it for my second year English
Literature course in Raffles College. For a person in the 15th Century, he
wrote very modern stuff. I didn’t find his English all that archaic. I find
those Scottish poets difficult to read. Sometimes I don’t make sense of their
Scottish brogue. My wife makes sense of them. Then Shakespeare’s sonnets.”

Q: “You read those?”

Mr Lee: “I read those sonnets when I did English literature in my freshman’s
year. She read them.”

Q: “When you say she reads them now, you’re the one who reads them, yes?”

Mr Lee: “Yes, I read them to her.”

Q: “But you go to her.”

Mr Lee: “Yes, I read from an Anthology of Poems which she has, and several
other anthologies. So I know her favourite poems. She had flagged them. I read
them to her.”

Q: “She’s in the hospital? You go to the hospital?”

Mr Lee: “No, no, she’s at home. We’ve got a hospital bed and nurses attending
to her. We used to share the same room. Now I’m staying in the next room. I
have to get used to her groans and grunts when she’s uncomfortable from a dry
throat and they pump in a spray moisture called “Biothene” which soothes her
throat, and they suck out phlegm. Because she can’t get up, she can’t breathe
fully. The phlegm accumulates in the chest but you can’t suck it out from the
chest, you’ve got to wait until she coughs and it goes out to her throat. They
suck it out, and she’s relieved. They sit her up and tap her back. It’s very
distressing, but that’s life.”

Q: “Yes, your daughter on Sunday wrote a moving column, movingly about the
situation referring to you.”

Mr Lee: “How did you come to read it?”

Q: “Somebody said you’ve got to read that column, so I read it.”

Mr Lee: “You don’t get the Straits Times.”

Q: “I get it online actually. I certainly do, I follow Singapore online and
she wrote that the whole family suffers of course from this and she wrote the
one who’s been hurting the most and is yet carrying on stoically is my father.”

Mr Lee: “What to do? What else can I do? I can’t break down. Life has got to
go on. I try to busy myself, but from time to time in idle moments, my mind
goes back to the happy days we were up and about together.”

Q: “When you go to visit her, is that the time when your mind goes back?”

Mr Lee: “No, not then. My daughter’s fished out many old photographs for this
piece she wrote and picked out a dozen or two dozen photographs from the digital
copies which somebody had kept at the Singapore Press Holdings. When I look at
them, I thought how lucky I was. I had 61 years of happiness. We’ve got to go
sometime, so I’m not sure who’s going first, whether she or me. So I told her,
I’ve been looking at the marriage vows of the Christians. The best I read was,”
To love, to hold and to cherish, in sickness and in health, for better or for
worse, till death do us part.” I told her I would try and keep you company for
as long as I can. She understood.”

Q: “Yes, it’s been really.”

Mr Lee: “What to do? What can you do in this situation? I can say get rid of
the nurses. Then the maids won’t know how to turn her over and then she gets
pneumonia. That ends the suffering. But human beings being what we are, I do
the best for her and the best is to give her a competent nurse who moves her,
massages her, turns her over, so no bed sores. I’ve got a hospital bed with air
cushions so no bed sores. Well, that’s life. Make her comfortable.”

Q: “And for yourself, you feel the weight of age more than you have in the
past?”

Mr Lee: “I’m not sure. I marginally must have. It’s stress. However, I look
at it, I mean, it’s stress. That’s life. But it’s a different kind of stress
from the kind of stress I faced, political stresses. Dire situations for
Singapore, dire situations for myself when we broke off from Malaysia, the
Malays in Singapore could have rioted and gone for me and they suddenly found
themselves back as a minority because the Tunku kicked us out. That’s
different, that’s intense stress and it’s over but this is stress which goes
on. One doctor told me, you may think that when she’s gone you’re relieved but
you’ll be sad when she’s gone because there’s still the human being here,
there’s still somebody you talk to and she knows what you’re saying and you’ll
miss that. Well, I don’t know, I haven’t come to that but I think I’ll probably
will because it’s now two years, May, June, July, August, September, two years
and four months. It’s become a part of my life.”

Q: “She’s how old now?”

Mr Lee: “She’s two-and-a-half years older than me, so she’s coming on to 90.”

Q: “But you did make a reference in an interview with Time magazine to
something that goes beyond reason as you put it. You referred to the real enemy
by Pierre D’Harcourt who talked about people surviving the Nazi, it’s better
that they have something to believe in.”

Mr Lee: “Yes, of course.”

Q: “And you said that the Communists and the deeply religious fought on and
survived. There are some things in the human spirit that are beyond reason.”

Mr Lee: “I believe that to be true. Look, I saw my friend and cabinet
colleague who’s a deeply religious Catholic. He was Finance Minister, a fine
man. In 1983, he had a heart attack. He was in hospital, in ICU, he improved
and was taken out of ICU. Then he had a second heart attack and I knew it was
bad. I went to see him and the priest was giving him the last rites as a
Catholic. Absolutely fearless, he showed no distress, no fear, the family was
around him, his wife and daughters, he had four daughters. With priest
delivering the last rites, he knew he was reaching the end. But his mind was
clear but absolutely calm.”

Q: “Well, I am more like you. We don’t have something to cling to.”

Mr Lee: “That’s our problem.”

Q: “But also the way people see you is supremely reasonable person, reason is
the ultimate.”

Mr Lee: “Well, that’s the way I’ve been working.”

Q: “Well, you did mention to Tom Plate, they think they know me but they only
know the public me?”

Mr Lee: “Yeah, the private view is you have emotions for your close members of
your family. We are a close family, not just my sons and my wife and my parents
but my brothers and my sister. So my youngest brother, a doctor as I told you,
he just sent me an email that my second brother was dying of a bleeding colon,
diverticulitis. And later the third brother now has got prostate cancer and has
spread into his lymph nodes. So I asked what’re the chances of survival. It’s
not gotten to the bones yet, so they’re doing chemotherapy and if you can
prevent it from going into the bones, he’ll be okay for a few more years. If it
does get to the bones, then that’s the end. I don’t think my brother knows.
But I’ll probably go and see him.”

Q: “But you yourself have been fit. You have a stent, you had heart problem
late last year but besides that do you have ailments?”

Mr Lee: “Well, aches and pains of a geriatric person, joints, muscles but all
non-terminal. I go in for a physiotherapy, maintenance once a week, they give
me a rub over because when I cycle, my thighs get sore, knees get a little
painful, and so the hips.”

Q: “These are the signs of age.”

Mr Lee: “Yeah, of course.”

Q: “I’m 64. I’m beginning to feel that and I don’t like it and I don’t want to
admit to myself.”

Mr Lee: “But if you stop exercising, you make it worse. That’s what my doctors
tell me, just carry on. When you have these aches and pains, we’ll give you
physiotherapy. I’ve learnt to use heat pads at home. So after the
physiotherapy, once a week, if I feel my thighs are sore, I just have a heat pad
there. You put in the microwave oven and you tie it around your thighs or your
ankles or your calves. It relieves the pain.”

Q: “So you continue to cycle.”

Mr Lee: “Oh yeah.”

Q: “Treadmill?”

Mr Lee: “No, I don’t do the treadmill. I walk but not always. When I’ve
cycled enough I don’t walk.”

Q: “That’s your primary exercise, swimming?”

Mr Lee: “Yeah, I swim everyday, it’s relaxing.”

Q: “What other secrets, I see you drink hot water?”

Mr Lee: “Yes.”

Q: “Tell me about it.”

Mr Lee: “Well, I used to drink tea but tea is a diuretic, but I didn’t know
that. I used to drink litres of it. In the 1980s, I was having a conference
with Zhou Ziyang who was then Secretary-General of the Communist Party in the
Great Hall of the People. The Chinese came in and poured more tea and hot
water. I was scoffing it down because it kept my throat moistened, my BP was up
because more liquid was in me. Halfway through, I said please stop. I’m dashing
off. I had to relief myself. Then my doctors said don’t you know that tea is a
diuretic? I don’t like coffee, it gives me a sour stomach, so okay, let’s
switch to water.”

Q: “You know you had the hot water when I met you a couple of years ago and
after I told my wife about that, she switched to hot water. She’s not sure why
except that you drink hot water, so she’s decided to.”

Mr Lee: “Well, cold water, this was from my ENT man. If you drink cold water,
you reduce the temperature of your nasal passages and throat and reduce your
resistance to coughs and colds. So I take warm water, body temperature. I
don’t scald myself with boiling hot water. I avoid that. But my daughter puts
blocks of ice into her coffee and drinks it up. She’s all right, she’s only
50-plus.”

Q: “Let me ask a question about the outside world a little bit. Singapore is a
great success story even though people criticize this and that. When you look
back, you can be proud of what you’ve done and I assume you are. Are there
things that you regret, things that you wished you could achieve that you
couldn’t?”

Mr Lee: “Well, first I regret having been turfed out of Malaysia. I think if
the Tunku had kept us together, what we did in Singapore, had Malaysia accepted
a multiracial base for their society, much of what we’ve achieved in Singapore
would be achieved in Malaysia. But not as much because it’s a much broader
base. We would have improved inter-racial relations and an improved holistic
situation. Now we have a very polarized Malaysia, Malays, Chinese and Indians
in separate schools, living separate lives and not really getting on with one
another. You read them. That’s bad for us as close neighbours.”

Q: “So at that time, you found yourself with Singapore and you have transformed
it. And my question would be how do you assess your own satisfaction with what
you’ve achieved? What didn’t work?”

Mr Lee: “Well, the greatest satisfaction I had was my colleagues and I, were of
that generation who were turfed out of Malaysia suffered two years under a
racial policy decided that we will go the other way. We will not as a majority
squeeze the minority because once we’re by ourselves, the Chinese become the
majority. We made quite sure whatever your race, language or religion, you are
an equal citizen and we’ll drum that into the people and I think our Chinese
understand and today we have an integrated society. Our Malays are
English-educated, they’re no longer like the Malays in Malaysia and you can see
there are some still wearing headscarves but very modern looking.”

Q: “That doesn’t sound like a regret to me.”

Mr Lee: “No, no, but the regret is there’s such a narrow base to build this
enormous edifice, so I’ve got to tell the next generation, please do not take
for granted what’s been built. If you forget that this is a small island which
we are built upon and reach a 100 storeys high tower block and may go up to 150
if you are wise. But if you believe that it’s permanent, it will come tumbling
down and you will never get a second chance.”

Q: “I wonder if that is a concern of yours about the next generation. I saw
your discussion with a group of young people before the last election and they
were saying what they want is a lot of these values from the West, an open
political marketplace and even playing field in all of these things and you said
well, if that’s the way you feel, I’m very sad.”

Mr Lee: “Because you play it that way, if you have dissension, if you chose the
easy way to Muslim votes and switch to racial politics, this society is
finished. The easiest way to get majority vote is vote for me, we’re Chinese,
they’re Indians, they’re Malays. Our society will be ripped apart. If you do
not have a cohesive society, you cannot make progress.”

Q: “But is that a concern that the younger generation doesn’t realize as much as
it should?”

Mr Lee: “I believe they have come to believe that this is a natural state of
affairs, and they can take liberties with it. They think you can put it on
auto-pilot. I know that is never so. We have crafted a set of very intricate
rules, no housing blocks shall have more than a percentage of so many Chinese,
so many percent Malays, Indians. All are thoroughly mixed. Willy-nilly, your
neighbours are Indians, Malays, you go to the same shopping malls, you go to the
same schools, the same playing fields, you go up and down the same lifts. We
cannot allow segregation.”

Q: “There are people who think that Singapore may lighten up a little bit when
you go, that the rules will become a little looser and if that happens, that
might be something that’s a concern to you.”

Mr Lee: “No, you can go looser where it’s not race, language and religion
because those are deeply gut issues and it will surface the moment you start
playing on them. It’s inevitable, but on other areas, policies, right or wrong,
disparity of opportunities, rich and poor, well go ahead. But don’t play race,
language, religion. We’ve got here, we’ve become cohesive, keep it that way.
We’ve not used Chinese as a majority language because it will split the
population. We have English as our working language, it’s equal for everybody,
and it’s given us the progress because we’re connected to the world. If you
want to keep your Malay, or your Chinese, or your Tamil, Urdu or whatever, do
that as a second language, not equal to your first language. It’s up to you,
how high a standard you want to achieve.”

Q: “The public view of you is as a very strict, cerebral, unsentimental.
Catherine Lim, “an authoritarian, no-nonsense manner that has little use for
sentiment”.”

Mr Lee: “She’s a novelist, therefore, she simplifies a person’s character, make
graphic caricature of me. But is anybody that simple or simplistic?”

Q: “Sentiment though, you don’t show that very much in public.”

Mr Lee: “Well, that’s a Chinese ideal. A gentleman in Chinese ideal, the junzi
(君子) is someone who is always composed and possessed of himself and doesn’t lose
his temper and doesn’t lose his tongue. That’s what I try to do, except when I
got turfed out from Malaysia. Then, I just couldn’t help it.”

Q: “One aspect of the way you’ve constructed Singapore is a certain level of
fear perhaps in the population. You described yourself as a street fighter,
knuckle duster and so forth.”

Mr Lee: “Yes.”

Q: “And that produces among some people a level of fear and I want to tell you
what a taxi driver said when I said I was going to interview you. He said,
safer not to ask him anything. If you ask him, somebody will follow you. We’re
not in politics so just let him do the politics.”

Mr Lee: “How old is he?’

Q: “I’m sorry, middle aged, I don’t know.”

Mr Lee: “I go out. I’m no longer the Prime Minister. I don’t have to do the
difficult things. Everybody wants to shake my hands, everybody wants me to
autograph something. Everybody wants to get around me to take a photo. So it’s
a problem.”

Q: “Yes but...”

Mr Lee: “Because I’m no longer in charge, I don’t have to do the hard things.
I’ve laid the foundation and they know that because of that foundation, they’re
enjoying this life.’

Q: “So when you were the one directly in-charge, you had to be tough, you had to
be a fighter.”

Mr Lee: “Yes, of course. I had to fight left-wingers, Communists, pro-Communist
groups who had killer squads. If I didn’t have the guts and the gumption to
take them on, there wouldn’t be the Singapore. They would have taken over and
it would have collapsed. I also had to fight the Malay Ultras when we were in
Malaysia for two years.”

Q: “Well, you don’t have a lot of dissidents in prison but you’re known for
your libel suits which keeps a lot of people at bay.”

Mr Lee: “We are non-corrupt. We lead modest lives, so it’s difficult to malign
us. What’s the easy way to get a leader down? He’s a hypocrite, he is corrupt,
he pretends to be this when in fact he’s that. That’s what they’re trying to do
to me. Well, prove it, if what you say is right, then I don’t deserve this
reputation. Why must you say these things without foundation? I’m taking you
to court, you’ve made these allegations, I’m open to your cross-examination.”

Q: “But that may produce what I was talking about, about a level of fear.”

Mr Lee: “No, you’re fearful of a libel suit? Then don’t issue these defamatory
statements or make them where you have no basis. The Western correspondent,
especially those who hop in and hop out got to find something to show that they
are impartial, that they’re not just taken in by the Singapore growth story.
They say we keep down the opposition, how? Libel suits. Absolute rubbish. We
have opponents in Parliament who have attacked us on policy, no libel suits
against them and even in Parliament they are privileged to make defamatory
allegation and cannot be sued. But they don’t. They know it is not true.”

Q: “Let me ask a last question. Again back to Tom Plate, “I’m not serious all
the time. Everyone needs to have a good laugh now and then to see the funny
side of things and to laugh at himself”.”

Mr Lee: “Yes, of course.”

Q: “How about that?”

Mr Lee: “You have to be that.”

Q: “So what makes you laugh?”

Mr Lee: “Many things, the absurdity of it, many things in life. Sometimes, I
meet witty people, have conversations, they make sharp remarks, I laugh.”

Q: “And when you laugh at yourself as you said?”

Mr Lee: “That’s very frequent. Yeah, I’m reaching 87, trying to keep fit,
presenting a vigorous figure and it’s an effort and is it worth the effort? I
laugh at myself trying to keep a bold front. It’s become my habit. I just
carry on.”

Q: “So it’s the whole broad picture of things that you find funny?”

Mr Lee: “Yes, life as a whole has many abnormalities, of course.”

Q: “Your public life together with your private life, what you’ve done over
things people write about you and Singapore, that overall is something that you
can find funny?”

Mr Lee: “Yes, of course.”

Q: “You made one of the few people who laugh at Singapore.”

Mr Lee: “Let me give you a Chinese proverb “do not judge a man until you’ve
closed his coffin. Do not judge a man.” Close the coffin, then decide. Then
you assess him. I may still do something foolish before the lid is closed on
me.”

Q: “So you’re waiting for the final verdict?”

Mr Lee: “No, the final verdict will not be in the obituaries. The final
verdict will be when the PhD students dig out the archives, read my old papers,
assess what my enemies have said, sift the evidence and seek the truth? I’m not
saying that everything I did was right, but everything I did was for an
honourable purpose. I had to do some nasty things, locking fellows up without
trial.”

Q: “For the greater good?”

Mr Lee: “Well, yes, because otherwise they are running around and causing havoc
playing on Chinese language and culture, and accusing me of destroying Chinese
education. You’ve not been here when the Communists were running around. They
do not believe in the democratic process. They don’t believe in one man, one
vote. They believe in one bullet, one vote. They had killer squads. But they
at the same time had a united front exploiting the democratic game. It gave them
cover. But my business, my job was to make sure that they did not succeed.
Sometimes you just got to lock the leaders up. They are confusing the people.
The reality is that if you allow these people to work up animosity against the
government because it’s keeping down the Chinese language, because we’ve
promoted English, keeping down Chinese culture because you have allowed English
literature, and we suppress our Chinese values and the Chinese language, the
Chinese press, well, you will break up the society. They harp on these things
when they know they are not true. They know that if you actually do in Chinese
language and culture, the Chinese will riot and the society must break up.”

Q: “So leadership is a constant battle?”

Mr Lee: “In a multiracial situation like this, it is. Malaysia took the
different line; Malaysians saw it as a Malay country, all others are lodgers,
“orang tumpangan”, and they the Bumiputras, sons of the soil, run the show. So
the Sultans, the Chief Justice and judges, generals, police commissioner, the
whole hierarchy is Malay. All the big contracts for Malays. Malay is the
language of the schools although it does not get them into modern knowledge. So
the Chinese build and find their own independent schools to teach Chinese, the
Tamils create their own Tamil schools, which do not get them jobs. It’s a most
unhappy situation.”

Mdm Yeong: “I thought that was the last question.”

Q: “This is the last part of the last question. So your career has been a
struggle to keep things going in the right way and you’ve also said that the
best way to keep your health is to keep on working. Are you tired of it by this
point? Do you feel like you want to rest?”

Mr Lee: “No, I don’t. I know if I rest I’ll slide downhill fast. No, my whole
being has been stimulated by the daily challenge. If I suddenly drop it all,
play golf, stroll around, watch the sunset, read novels, that’s downhill. It is
the daily challenge, social contacts, meeting people, people like you, you press
me, I answer, when I don’t…. what have I got tomorrow?”


Mdm Yeong: “You have two more events coming up. One is the Radin Mas
Community.”

Mr Lee: “Oh yeah. I got it.”

Mdm Yeong: “And then you have other call, courtesy call on the 3rd.”

Mr Lee: “We are social animals. Without that interaction with people, you are
isolated. The worst punishment you can give a person is the isolation ward. You
get hallucinations. Four walls, no books, no nothing. By way of example, Henry
Kissinger wants to speak to me. So I said okay, we’ll speak on Sunday. What
about? We are meeting in Sao Paolo at a J P Morgan International Advisory
Board. He wants to talk to me to check certain facts on China. My mind is kept
alive, I go to China once a year at least. I meet Chinese leaders. So it’s a
constant stimulus as I keep up to date. Supposing I sit back, I don’t think
about China, just watch videos. I am off to Moscow, Kiev and Paris on the 15th
of September. Three days Moscow, three days Kiev, four days Paris. Moscow I am
involved in the Skolkovo Business School which President Medvedev, when he
wasn’t President started. I promised to go if he did not fix it in the
winter. So they fix it for September. I look at the fires, I said wow this is
no good.”

Q: “It’s not going to be freezing if there are fires.”

Mr Lee: “No but our embassy says the skies have cleared. Kiev because the
President has invited me specially and will fly me from Moscow to Kiev and then
fly me on to Paris. Paris I am on the TOTAL Advisory Board together with Joe
Nye and a few others. They want a presentation on what are China’s strengths
and weaknesses. That keeps me alive. It’s just not my impressionistic views of
China but one that has to be backed by facts and figures. So my team works out
the facts and figures, and I check to see if they tally with my impressions.
But it’s a constant stimulus to keep alive, and up-to-date. If I stop it, it’s
downhill.”

Q: “Well, I hope you continue. Thank you very much, I really enjoyed this
interview.”

. . . . .............................................
.......................................................


My God this old man LKY, in between his muttering and mulling over his 'old age' still felt much pain over being 'turfed' out of Malaysia. Thank God Tengku Abdul Rahman was a very wise man then, otherwise LKY would have caused more havoc with his 'Malaysian Malaysia' battle cry....Bring me to that useful adage often quoted:
" If we have friends like that we do not need enemies "..That is Singapore, sometime, from the Malaysian perspective.LKY do not need to sneer and look down to an overtly friendly neighbour, to feel better...That is super 'kiasu' Singapore style!
.....this is my feeling not Dr M. Dr M is more refined.....
.

Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad comment:

MALAYSIA ACCORDING TO LKY
by Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad on Wednesday, September 15, 2010 at 8:28pm
1. Mr Lee Kwan Yew, the Minister Mentor of Singapore is three years my senior. That means he and I practically grew up in the same period of time. That also means that I have been able to watch the progress of Mr Lee, and in fact to interact with him on various occasions.

2. His assertion in his interview with the New York Times that "Race relations (would be) better if Singapore (had) not (been) "turfed out" (of Malaysia) is worth studying. Is it true or is it fantasy?

3. Before Singapore joined the Peninsular, Sabah and Sarawak to form Malaysia, there was less racial politics in the Federation of Malaysia. In 1955 the Malays who made up 80 per cent of the citizens gave a large number of their constituencies to the few Chinese and Indian citizens and ensured they won with strong Malay support. As a result the Alliance won 51 of the 52 seats contested.

4. The Tunku then rewarded this willingness of the Chinese and Indian citizens to support the coalition concept by giving them one million unconditional citizenship. This reduced Malay majority to 60 per cent.

5. In the 1959 elections the Alliance of UMNO, MCA and MIC won easily though Kelantan was lost. PAS with only Malays as members was rejected. Racialism even when implied failed.

6. In 1963 Singapore became a part of Malaysia. Despite having promised that the PAP will not participate in Peninsular, Sabah and Sarawak politics, Kwan Yew reneged and the PAP tried to displace the MCA in the Alliance by appealing to Chinese sentiments in the Peninsular. Of course the slogan was "Malaysian Malaysia" which implied that the Chinese were not having equal rights with the Malays. If this appeal to Chinese sentiments against the Malays was not racial, I do not know what is racial.

7. But the Peninsular Chinese favoured working with the Malays in UMNO. They totally rejected PAP in 1964.

8. Following the Malaysian Malaysia campaign a few UMNO leaders tried to rouse Singapore Malay sentiments. There were demonstrations in Singapore where before there were none. Kwan Yew accused Jaafar Albar for instigating the Singapore Malays. Although I never went to Singapore, nor met the Malays there, I was labelled a Malay-ultra by Kwan Yew himself.

9. By 1965 racism had taken hold and the Tunku was forced to end Singapore's membership of Malaysia. But the seed of Chinese racialism had been sown, so that even after the PAP left, the "Malaysian Malaysia" war cry was picked up by the DAP, an offspring of the PAP.

10. With the background of Singapore's activities in Malaysia in the short three years of its membership, can we really believe that if it had not been "turfed out" race relations would be better in Malaysia?

11. But proof of what would have happened was shown by the politics leading up to the 1969 Election. The MCA began to criticise the Sino/Malay cooperation especially on so-called special rights and demanded for a Chinese University. UMNO then began to clamour for a greater share of the economy of the country. The UMNO/MCA conflict resulted in the Alliance faring very badly in the 1969 Elections.

12. DAP and Gerakan, a new party largely made up of MCA dissidents made gains. The Alliance were shocked and rattled.

13. Then the Gerakan and DAP held their victory parade near the Malay settlement of Kampung Baru, hurling racist insults at the Malays. The result was the 13th May race riots.

14. Till today the racist slogan "Malaysian Malaysia" is the war-cry of the DAP. Racism in Malaysia is clearly the result of Singapore's membership of the country for just three years. Can we really believe that if Singapore had not been "turfed out" Malaysia would have no racial problem.

15. While Kwan Yew talks about his belief that all ethnic communities should free themselves from the shackles of racial segregation in order to promote fairness and equality among the races, he also said that "once we are by ourselves (out of Malaysia) the Chinese become the majority".

16. Singapore's population is made up of 75 per cent Chinese and they own 95 per cent of the economy. It is therefore not a truly multi-racial country but a Chinese country with minority racial groups who are additionally much poorer.

17. In Singapore dissent is not allowed, People who contest against the PAP would be hauled up in court for libel and if they win elections would not be allowed to take their places in Parliament. Whereas in Malaysia opposition parties invariably win seats in Parliament and even set up State Governments (today five out of the 13 States are ruled by the opposition parties) the PAP in Singapore has to appoint PAP members to represent the opposition.

18. Whether the PAP admits it or not, the party has always been led and dominated by ethnic Chinese and have won elections principally because of Chinese votes. The others are not even icing on the cake.

19. If Singapore is a part of Malaysia the PAP can certainly reproduce the Singapore kind of non-racial politics because together with the Malaysian Chinese, the PAP will ethnically dominate and control Malaysian politics. No dissent would be allowed and certainly no one would dare say anything about who really runs the country.

20. Amnesia is permissible but trying to claim that it is because Singapore had been "turfed out" for the present racist politics in Malaysia is simply not supported by facts of history.

Turkey: A Giant has Woken Up...

Some 8 years ago I visited Istanbul.Another medical conference.One of the most picturesque capital in the world with a sense of history:Tokhapi Palace of the old sultans, mosques and minarets, The Hegar Sophia, miles and miles of old Roman bastion on the European side of the Bhosphorus. Constantinople. Capital of the Eastern Roman Empire.As I sat by the old palace overlooking the swift flowing Strait of Bhosphorus I could not help but shed some tears thinking about what could have been had Turkey got it straight some 50 years back:

In my mind's eye I could see how Sultan Sulayman The Conqueror [ or was it Sultan Mehmet The Great] crossed the treacherous strait with his cavalry and smashed the well entrenchened Romans in their blockaded city in the 14th century. But thanks to Ataturk, 50 years on now they are still begging for crumbs to fall from the EU Main table. With that kind of history and pedigree, things could have been different had they looked East towards Islam and the whole of Africa. An IOC with a much enlightened Turkey leading the way long time ago would have been different.Instead they chose to be beggars.

Now with The Referendum passed yesterday in favour for a constitutional change, one outside Turkey can sense an imminent major change in the offing.The Giant has woken up! Geopolitical change in the Muslim Arab world, the increasing dominance of the Asian market and the renaissance happening in Africa, the increasing anti Islamism in the West[ Angela Meckels and Sarkozy ], has shifted the world away from Europe. It is time to look East.

The gentle giant has woken up!
Subhanallah, Alhamdullillah, Allah Huakbar!

...Let us all burn the Qur'an.....

In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful

When the heaven is cleft asunder,
When the planets are dispersed,
When the seas are poured forth,
And the sepulchres are overturned,
A soul will know what it hath sent before (it) and what left behind.
O man! What hath made thee careless concerning thy Lord, the Bountiful,
Who created thee, then fashioned, then proportioned thee?
Into whatsoever form He will, He casteth thee.
Nay, but ye deny the Judgment.
Lo! there are above you guardians,
Generous and recording,
Who know (all) that ye do.
Lo! the righteous verily will be in delight.
And lo! the wicked verily will be in hell;
They will burn therein on the Day of Judgment,
And will not be absent thence.
Ah, what will convey unto thee what the Day of Judgment is!
Again, what will convey unto thee what the Day of Judgment is!
A day on which no soul hath power at all for any (other) soul.
The (absolute) command on that day is Allah's.

Surah Al Infitar [ cleft asunder ], Chapter 82, The Noble Qur'an

......and the ignorant pastor and his flock in Gainsville, USA, wants to burn the Qur'an on 11th September. Go ahead. Better still, make it as toilet papers!
The last time they did that in Denmark, Europe was in sooth and dust for months.
Perhaps USA and NATO would find themselves been moved out of Afghanistan and Iraq and all the Muslim hinterlands much earlier than planned!
Go ahead, BURN THE QURAN!

On a more serious note, the Muslim world became subservient to the plundering and 'barbaric' West in the 17th and 18th century when the Quran was codified, booked and made easily available every where and ubiquitous.Only left with gifted individuals who can regurgitate the content parrot-wise, full of melody and with dictum.More fewer still who can comprehend and dare preach and lived by it. The order of the present time is worse still: The wise and the knowledgeable in the Quran[ often times called ulama' ] were just looking for crumbs and bit and pieces falling down from The High Tables of their political 'Masters and Sultans' .Those who dare aspire to mix politics and religion are summarily considered as 'heretics'. A great ploy by the West, swallowed whole by the East. We even have ulama' and ulama' now who thought the same!

7th and 8th century Muslims conquered and gave light to almost three quarter of the then known world when the Quran's lessons, philosophy and wisdom were wholly 'internalised'....and no books, nor lengthy and esoteric tafseer and discourse.They subsequently spurred on the European renaissance... Just on the spirit of the Quran only....very little of the books around gathering dust in the 'istanas' of Istanbul, Cordova, Serville and Bagdhad.

Now we have Qur'ans and Qur'ans abound.But the soul and spirit have been displaced! When the Qur'an is read,hearts remained unmoved and eyes remained dry.

1.5 billion Muslims have the Quran on dusty shelves in high places, libraries and codified to minute details in the i-phones and cyberspaces but very little in our souls. That is why clowns like Bush, Blair and Netalnyahu et al can offer us 'sweets' and lies and have us move in circles,and we still think they are plausible and respectable..Just watching Obama today on BBC give me the impression of some semblance of sanity going on in the Western world but I wonder how much he can move the prevailing 'mountain' of distrust and ignorance.

Let us all Muslims burn that 'proverbial'dusty old Quran on the shelves and high places! Let us just began to internalised its meaning and wisdom and live by it as true Muslims all the world over. Let us Muslims not be angered by ignorant and lost souls from across the globe. Let us just be Muslims.

Let us just be true Muslims.

It is back to iLm , iLm, ilm, and iLm.
Let us move that mountain of karat2 jahiliyah.
Let our hearts and eyes remained no longer dry and unmoved by the spirit of the Quran.Let us all burn the Quran in our hearts and souls.

Dr Nik Howk
http://drnikisahak.blogspot.com/

.........................

Addendum: Letter from a Syrian Catholic pastor to Pastor Terry Jones, USA


Respected Pastor Terry Jones,

I have read your worldwide call for the burning of the Quran on this coming 11th of September. Your message stated that you are a pastor of one of the churches in Florida in the United States of America.

As an Arab Catholic priest from Damascus (Syria), I wondered what would be your objective, as an American pastor, for such a call?

I wondered, and I ask you: What are your responsibilities as a pastor?
Are you really a Christian pastor serving God in a church in America?
Or are you merely a layperson from America who is pretending to be in the service of Christ?

Did you give in to your nationalism (Americanism) rather than giving in to your Christianity?

What is your aim with that call?

(Do you wish) to further fuel hatred among people? Is that consistent with (the teachings of) Jesus, whom you represent in your eyes and the eyes of many others?
Tell me, is there in the character of Jesus, in his words or in his actions anything that would remotely justify even a hint of promoting disdain and hatred among people?

Have you forgotten that Jesus was completely for love, forgiveness and peace? Have you forgotten what he taught us when he told his disciples and the people after them to tell God the heavenly Father of all to “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who wrong us”? You overlooked or forgot that when Jesus was hanging on the cross and being subjected to insults and vile words, he raised his voice, saying, “O Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Who, then, do you represent or who are you trying to guide with this call of yours?

Isn’t it enough what has been happening since September 11, 2001: the killing, destruction, displacement and starvation of hundreds of millions of people throughout the world, from Palestine – the land of Jesus – by your leaders in particular, headed by George Bush, who was claiming direct communication with God?

Wouldn’t you agree with me that with your call (to burn the Quran), you have demonstrated that you are really unfamiliar with Jesus and that you desperately need to re-discover him again to be a true Christian pastor who calls, like Jesus, for the comprehensive love and full respect for every human being and a commitment to the full and wonderful teachings that call upon all believers, without exception, to always stand beside the poor, the oppressed and the disadvantaged?

My brother Pastor Terry Jones. Can you tell me, honestly, if Jesus came today, whose side would he take?

Is it the side of the powerful and arrogant oppressors who dominate the world and endlessly plunder its resources, violate its laws and international treaties, and kill people in their countries and destroy houses on top of their owners and turn them into refugees across the earth? Or is it the side of those who are oppressed, the disadvantaged, hungry, and homeless?

Did you forget what Jesus himself would say on the Day of Judgment to each person in front of him: “All that you did to one of my brothers, you actually did to me”?

I wonder if you have overlooked or forgotten that Jesus did not point in that speech on the Day of Judgment to the religion of any of those mistreated persons. He only referred to everyone as belonging to the human race and to his standing with the deprived, the weak, and the oppressed in this world.

So how could you as an American Christian pastor stand with the oppressors from your country whose injustice has spread around the world?

Aren’t you afraid of when you appear before Jesus on Judgment Day and you are burdened with a heavy conscience, like your leaders who are blinded by the gods of power, money, control and greed?

My brother Pastor Terry. Do you think I am being unfair if I conclude that your hatred toward Islam is what drove you to such a reprehensible call for the burning of Islam's holy book, the Quran?

But let me ask you, as a Syrian Roman Catholic priest: What do you know about Islam? It appears to me from your call to burn the Quran that you are ignorant of Christ and Christianity, and that makes me believe that you are also ignorant of Islam and Muslims.

Believe me, it is not my intention to indict you and it is not my intention to engage with you in a religious debate about Christianity or Islam. However, after I prayed for a long time, let me suggest for both of us to make a joint effort on this coming September 11.

You might ask me what effort can we do jointly when you are in Florida and I'm in Damascus?

Here is my suggestion.

I invite you to visit Syria, where you will be my guest and the guest of many of my Muslim and Christian friends. Syria is a country populated mostly by Muslims and in which Christians are indigenous to the land and have lived side-by-side with Muslims for centuries and centuries.

Come and don’t worry about anything.

Come and you will find out about Islam and Muslims what will comfort you, please you, surprise you, and even lead you, from where you are today in Florida, to invite all people to live in respect, love and cooperation among all people.

This is what people need rather than the un-Christian call to fuel the sentiment of hatred and division.

Come to Syria and you will be amazed by the good nature of people and their faith, their relations, friendly cooperation and openness toward all strangers.

Come to Damascus to witness and live an experience that is not in your mind nor the mind or expectation of all the churches of the West or their bishops, pastors, and clergymen.

Come to see and hear two choruses, Christian and Muslim, singing together during Christian and Islamic holidays to praise Allah, the One God, who created us all, and to whom we all return.

My brother Pastor Terry.

I call you my brother and I am serious about calling you brother and about my invitation to you. I await a word (of reply) from you. Trust me that you will find a brother in Damascus, actually many brothers.

Please contact me and don’t delay. I am waiting for you in Damascus.

I ask God to make our anticipated meeting the beginning of a long and interesting path that we undertake together with other brothers in Damascus and around the world.

How desperate is the need of our world for bright roads.

Come, the road to Damascus is waiting for you.

Father Elias Zahlawi

....................

An American rebuttal: Diane Trefethen


......Let us all burn the Qur'an...‏

9: 32 AM
Reply ▼
Diane Trefethen
To Nik Isahak Abdullah
Dear Nik,

Dr Nik Howk's post underscores two truly important points. First, when the
followers of Islam leave their Holy Book on a shelf to gather dust, their souls
and spirits "have been displaced! Hearts and eyes remained dry and unmoved".
His call for Muslims to set aside the "lengthy and esoteric tafseer and
discourse" and instead internalise the Quran's "meaning and wisdom and live by
it as true Muslims all the world over" is a prayer that should touch us all.

Secondly, as for "the ignorant pastor and his flock in Gainesville, USA, [who]
wants to burn the Qur'an on 11th September", he rightfully places their fate
where it belongs... in the hands of God. He quotes of the Day of Judgment that
it will be,
"A day on which no soul hath power at all for any (other) soul.
The (absolute) command on that day is Allah's."

I wish there were more Nik Howks and fewer of those who would replace "the
spirit of the Quran" and make it "codified to minute details". Perhaps then
more Muslims would see Terry Jones and his ilk for what they are, just small,
"lost souls from across the world".

And they are lost. Regarding this brou-ha-ha, a Christian has only to ask
him/herself, "What would Jesus do if He were here?" The answer is that He would
welcome the Imam as a new neighbor and also ask him to examine his own heart in
this matter.

But burn a Holy Book? Never.

With kindest regards,
Diane

PS: I would be happy if you shared my note with the others. I replied to you
alone because I wasn't sure if you would find this American's response
embarrassing at this delicate time. Either way, please convey my respect and
admiration to Dr Nik Howk.

[ Diane, Nik Howk and Dr Nik is one and the same person...the endurance crazy chap ]

...Of Stephen Hawkings, The Big Bang, The Universe and Arash.....

"O company of jinn and men, if ye have power to penetrate (all) regions of the heavens and the earth, then penetrate (them)! Ye will never penetrate them save with (Our) sanction. (33) Which is it, of the favours of your Lord, that ye deny?" (34)
Surah Al Rahman, Chapter 55 : 33-34

Stephen Hawkings, the noted cosmologist and quantum physicist, recently changed his position regarding the Universe.He thought that the 'Big Bang' and the sequel and order that follows need no Maker. It is all within the realm of things.All accounted for by the 'String Theory'. The Big Bang is just part of the 'String Theory'.

This decrepit looking man who cannot even pee nor excrete on his own nor talk without the help of a computer due to a neurological disorder[ motor neuron disease ] ,dare exclaim to the world that it is in his highly considered thought that this universe does not need a Maker. That it was all there even before time.And the whole of the present agnostic world can now sigh with relief!

One extreme end of light to the other extreme end of light [ the diameter of the universe ] is a couple of billion light years apart. Yet this universe is expanding at 300,000 kilometres per second. There are billion billion stars that make the universe. The sun is just one minute small star among the billions of stars of the galaxies. Our earth is just a minute spectre within the solar system. It take so many years even for NASA's un-maned satelite to even have a glimpse of Mars.
And yet Stephen Hawkings can prophezised from his wheel chair that this universe does not need a maker.

And what about the Arash, The Throne? How vast is it ?


"In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful
A questioner questioned concerning the doom about to fall (1) Upon the disbelievers, which none can repel, (2) From Allah, Lord of the Ascending Stairways (3) (Whereby) the angels and the Spirit ascend unto Him in a Day whereof the span is fifty thousand years. (4) But be patient (O Muhammad) with a patience fair to see. (5) Lo! they behold it afar off (6) While we behold it nigh: (7) The day when the sky will become as molten copper, (8) And the hills become as flakes of wool, (9) And no familiar friend will ask a question of his friend (10)"
Al Maarij , Chapter 70


Compared to the Arash, the universe is just like a pin dropped in a haystack.

"Have not those who disbelieve known that the heavens and the earth were of one piece, then We parted them, and we made every living thing of water? Will they not then believe? (30) And We have placed in the earth firm hills lest it quake with them, and We have placed therein ravines as roads that haply they may find their way. (31) And we have made the sky a roof withheld (from them). Yet they turn away from its portents. (32) And He it is Who created the night and the day, and the sun and the moon. They float, each in an orbit. (33) We appointed immortality for no mortal before thee. What! if thou diest, can they be immortal! (34) Every soul must taste of death, and We try you with evil and with good, for ordeal. And unto Us ye will be returned." (35)
Surah Al Anbiya [ The Prophets ], Chapter 22 : 30-35

Dr Nik Howk
http://drnikisahak.blogspot.com/


................

A comment from a cynic, Dato' KD:




DC,
How is our good doctor building a case for the existence of a Maker? By quoting some Surahs he feels he has disproved Stephen Hawking's theory?
KD

.....................

Pearls and Gem replied :...

Your Excellency,Dato' KD,

Faith in a Maker is a gift. Faith in Islam is more than the rest of this known world and the whole universe put together....This is of course not a cynical view. In Islam, this is termed as 'ainul Yakin'.

If Stephen Hawkins with his very gifted insight into the subatomic world of Quantum physics [ or anyone for that matter] choose not to see the elephant one feet away from himself despite being 'unblind', that is his own peril. We are all like blind men looking at the 'proverbial elephant'. Some admittedly are more blind than the rest. Some take certain position out of pride maybe, some wants to be politically correct. Allah does not mince world for these sort of individuals Dato',...I guess HE must have figuratively 'also runs out of patience'. HE called them ...Deaf , Dumb and Blind.....I dont add this , this is in his Book.

Hawkings knows for a fact that for all the elements of the Big Bang to occur in perfect order without the galaxies coalescsing back together into an instant 'black hole' the probability is 1 to a figure with a few 'hundred zeros' behind it. Ignoramus like me need not point this to him.Quantum physicist deals with chance and odd. That is their business.

A high IQ Your Excellency Dato', or just blind pride,does not prequalify one to have faith if one is too proud of one's academic and experiential background irrespective of an Oxford degree or a Cambridge one, or a long illustrious diplomatic service overseas.

All these add up to nothing Dato'.
That, to my mind, is a sad fact.

Selamat Hari Raya to you.
Maaf , Zahir , Batin.

Dr Nik Howk

Still on Blair,.... The Mass Murderer from London.....

An Al Quds day letter to Tony Blair. From Lauren Booth [ Cherie Booth's sister ], in Iran

Posted: 04 Sep 2010 08:57 AM PDT





Dear Tony,
Congratulations on your political memoir becoming an instant bestseller. I’m in Iran and have the only copy in the country. I can tell you, its so fiercely fought over, it’s worth its weight in WMD’s. Note to Random House; have ‘A Journey’ translated into Farsi and Arabic asap, it’ll fly off the shelves in this part of the world.


Tony, yesterday I went the Al Quds day protest in Tehran. You may have heard of it? It’s the rally where Iranians gather to protest against Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, including the Holy city of Jerusalem.


I’m being sarcastic by asking if you’ve heard of Al Quds day, because I know you have. It is after all your very worst nightmare right? It must be horrifying with the ‘world view,’ you express in your memoirs to watch scenes on the BBC news showing the precise meeting point of politics and Islam.
Personally I’ve never understood this fear of ‘political Islam’ it seems to me that religious people should always be educated on world events rather than kept in ignorance like say, Mid West Christian Zionists in the US who can’t even find their home city on a map of their state.


Anyway, yesterday, I stood in the midst of more than one million Iranian Muslims all chanting in unison ‘Marg Bar Isre-hell!’ and ‘Marg Bar Am-ri-ca!’ You know what that means Tony I’m sure ; ‘Down with Israel, down with America’. The men, women and children around me withstood a day of no water and no food (it’s called Ramadan, Tony, it’s a fast). Coping with hunger and thirst in the hundred degrees heat, as if it were nothing. They can withstand deprivation in the Muslim world, and think it a proud thing to suffer in order to express their fury at the continued slaughter of Palestinians. To protest the theft of what little remains of Palestinian land by settlers. To protest the blockade of Gaza causing immense suffering to millions.


Now, the Christian Zionists in the US and the Jewish Zionists in Israel would have you believe that I was am in danger in Iran, especially on a day like Al Quds. Well here again Tony, you’ve been fed and have consumed in its entirety, a massive lie. The lie that says that when Muslims march they march against infidels (like me I suppose) in some kind of Middle Eastern homage to the ancient crusades.
Yet the crusade Tony is yours, not ‘theirs.’

Today I spoke with many women on the Tehran protest. One mother who wept, not out of hatred for ‘the West’ but out of empathy for the mothers of Rafah, Khan Younis, Nablus and Jenin. Do you recognise these place names Tony, as Middle East peace envoy you really should. Israel has massacred children in all of these cities in recent years. Didn’t you know?


Anyway the women I met were gentle, frustrated by the refusal of the international community to stop the arrests of Palestinian children, to stop the routine bombing of the tunnels (the main access still for food and essential items in the Gaza strip). We embraced in the streets of Tehran like sisters. Not in Islam Tony, but in the fight against your brand of extremism and prejudice.


And today when the streets of London reverberate with cries of ‘Allahuakbar!’ and ‘Down Down Israel.’ Christians and Jews will join the thunderous cries of ‘Down Down Israel, marching against the ‘political’ Muslims you say you fear so much, That you would have me fear too if you could.
Having spent a good deal of time in Palestine in recent years, certainly more than you and your the ‘peace envoy’ supposedly. It repulsed me to read your blatant swallowing of the Israeli narrative regarding Palestine and its people.


The ‘conflict’ between Palestine and Israel is according to you all about religion and has nothing at all to do with the ethnic cleansing of the Arab population, nor the degredation of those who remain by their Israeli occupiers. You say that Arabs have and always will see ‘Jews’ as enemies. For God’s sake Tony do your history. And if you’re going to run a ‘Faith Foundation’ then better gen up on Islam 101 don’t you think? Did your pals in Tel Aviv forget to tell you how many thousands of Jews lived in Historic Palestine in harmony with their Arab neighbours before 1948? Do you really not know that even today tens of thousand of Jews reside contentedly in Iran?


I’ve sat with dozens and dozens of Muslim families, those whose children have been burned by Israeli/US phosphorous bombs. Those who are still suffering hunger due to the Israel siege of Gaza. Those who have lived through the early days of sanctions against Iran when they needed food vouchers just to live. And every single Muslim in these suffering families has the same message ; ‘We don’t hate anyone for their race or their religion. We cannot hate Jews they are in our holy book it is against the teachings of the Koran.’ But Tony let me ask you this. Why should any people Muslim or otherwise have NO right to justice and NO right to challenge an evil being done to them and their children? or to those who share a set of common beliefs? Do you have no understanding of what it is like to live in Gaza? Under siege, attacked with chemical weapons, your children’s schools razed to the ground by Israeli missiles, your hospitals shelled, your electricity limited, your water undrinkable?
Or do understand the ‘idea’ of the hardships suffered by millions in the Middle East as a direct result of your support for Israel and just think they deserve it?


In your book you say you knew full well how many Beirut homes were flattened, how many civilians died in Lebanon in 2006. Yet you dismiss Lebanese rage about Israeli land theft of ‘Shebas Farm’ as being an irrelevance, about a ‘tiny’ amount of land. You cannot see it as part of an attack on Lebanese life as a whole, by it’s heavily armed aggressive neighbour. You see it as: ‘Israel is attacked. Israel strikes back.’ As if Israel lives in placid peace, being kindly to all around it in between these massacres.


As other world leaders came out to demand Israel immediately cease its 2006 bombing raids on Lebanese cities, you stayed silent.


‘If I had condemned Israel’ you say ‘I would have been more than dishonest. It would have undermined my world view.’


Your world view that Muslims are mad, bad, dangerous to know. A contagion to be contained. Your final chapter is a must read here in the Middle East Tony, congratulations! For it lays out the ‘them’ and ‘us’ agenda of your friends in Washington and Tel Aviv and in David Milliband, the ambassador of Zionism that he is.


In the final chapter you say; ‘we need a religious counter attack’ against Islam. And by ‘Islam’ you mean the Al Quds rallies, the Palestinian intifada (based on an anti Apartheid struggle Tony, NOT religious bigotry), against every Arab who fails to raise a flag as the F16s rain on their homes and refugee camps and breaks out singing ‘Imagine all the people…’


When you say ‘extremism’ must be ‘controlled and beaten’ you mean the message of solidarity shared by Non Muslims alike on the streets of London and across the world today, joining the Al Quds day protests.


‘Not only extremism must be defeated’ you say but ‘the narrative that has to be assailed.’

Iran is indeed the place where Islamic tradition meets political action.


But I’m not afraid here Tony. The people are kind, friendly, full of good humour.
They are also highly aware of the history of this region, the wrongs perpetrated by Israel against Palestine and the political machinations of the US and the UK governments.
And as your book remains highly sought after here in Tehran. It’s that and not Islam, that you and your Israeli chums should be afraid of because it reveals you in all your ignorant glory.

Lauren Booth
Broadcaster and Journalist
Mail on Sunday
Press TV, UK
Source: Gilad Altzmon

Conversations on Islam...Karen Armstrong [ Part 2 ]

This building had cost too much Jewish blood. It was the Messiah would do this. The Messiah would build a temple when he returned and gave victory and liberation and redemption to the Jewish people. It was not something that human beings would do.

But there were Jews of the seventh century who hailed the Muslims as the precursors of the Messiah, the heralds of the Messiah because in clearing this holy site they had prepared the way for the Messiah.

And then the Caliph -- in Christian Jerusalem, Jews had not been allowed permanent residence in the city. They’d been allowed to visit the city once a year on the 9th of Av and mourn over the ruins and mourn around the gates, but they were not allowed to be permanent residents. And Omar eventually brought -- decided that this must stop and he brought back from Tiberius 70 Jewish families and settled them alongside the Temple Mount, now known as the Haram al-Sharif, the third holiest site in the Muslim world.

And so the Islamic conquest of Jerusalem, sadly, in the light of today’s conquest, was good for the Jewish people. Now this is the spirit of Islam, and this is the spirit we should be hearing today from our mosques, from our religious leaders, not the militant horror that we get from people like Osama bin Laden.

And I want to just talk briefly, as we’re on the subject of Jerusalem, about the story, the great story of the Prophet’s night journey to Jerusalem and his assent into heaven from the Temple Mount because I think it is a story of pluralism. This is an account of a great spiritual experience of the Prophet, a private spiritual experience for himself and it’s very similar in many ways to the visions of the Jewish throne mystics that people -- at this time, who also imagined an assent through the seven heavens to the divine throne.

The story is that one night Mohammed was miraculously conveyed from Mecca, from where he was sleeping beside the Kabbah, to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and there he was greeted by all the great prophets of the past, all of whom welcomed him into their midst and invited him to preach to them. And on the haram (ph) you will see the pulpit from which the Prophet delivered this sermon. And then he ascended through the seven heavens and at each of the seven heavens, we’re told, he encountered some of the great prophets of the past, Moses and Aaron , Jesus and John the Baptist, Enoch and finally at the threshold of the divine sphere, Abraham, the father of Jews, Christians and Muslims, the father of those who believes, St. Paul said.

And at one point -- in one of the stories the Prophet asked Moses for advice about how many times Muslims should pray and he has a rather high figure. He is thinking about eight times a day and Moses says, “Don’t think about it, go for five,” go for the happy mean, be realistic. So and then the story passes into reverent obscurity where Mohammed then enters the divine presence.

Now this is a story of pluralism. (A), I think, it symbolizes the Prophet’s yearning to bring the Arabs who’d been left off the divine map of spiritual history right into the heart of the monotheistic family into Jerusalem. So that long flight symbolizes what he was reaching out, yearning to do, yearning to achieve. And then the fact the prophets all listened to one another, welcome one another, accept one another’s insights, acknowledge one another, is a matter -- is a spirit of great pluralism, this is the real vision of Islam. And this is what we want to have today, not the narrow chauvinism.

There’s one verse of the Koran that I love. I come back to it again and again. It was after -- it was uttered -- Mohammed quoted it after he had conquered Mecca -- peacefully -- without shedding a single drop of blood. And standing beside the Kabbah he invited the people of Mecca, his own tribe the Quraysh, to enter Islam but there was to be no compulsion in this. The Koran is very, very definite in highly strong Arabic. It says, “There must be no compulsion in religion.” It is as strongly worded as the shahada, “No God but Allah,” so that the force against religious coercion is as strong as the statement for the unity of God.

And then -- but so that no one was to be forced to enter Islam against their will, but he issued an invitation to the Quraysh (ph) to become Muslims. And he said, “Oh, Quraysh, God is calling you from the haughtiness of paganism with its pride in ancestors.” We’re often a bit like this. We all like thinking of our prophets as the best, or our tradition is the best. “God is calling you from the haughtiness of paganism with its pride in ancestors, but remember all men come from Adam and Adam came from dust.”

And then he quoted these words from the Koran. “Oh, people, says God.” This is the word of God. Oh, people we have formed you into tribes and nations so that you may know one another, not so that you may dominate or coerce or convert, or bomb, or kill, or maim, or commit terrorist acts against, but so that you may know one another. The experience of living in community teaches you about living with others and it’s a springboard to the knowledge of still, other more distant people.

So what’s happened? What has happened? Why, given this pluralism, this benevolence, a benevolence shared by every single major tradition, what has happened to cause the hideous and amoral, disgusting, obscene violence that we saw on September 11th and which we’ve been seeing in other acts of Islamic -- so-called Islamic terror.

During the course of the twentieth century a militant form of religiosity has surfaced in every single major world religion. It’s often given the highly unsatisfactory name of “fundamentalism.” This is a term that was coined by Christians in the United States to describe their protestant reform movement at about the time of World War I and Muslims and Jews and Buddhists rather resent the use of this Christian term to describe their similar reform movements, too. But the first fundamentalist movement developed here in the United States during World War I and it developed in the monotheistic faith last of all. Islam was the last of all to produce a full-blown fundamentalism in the 1960s.

Now what is it? What is this militant party?

We have fundamentalist Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, even fundamentalist Confucianism in China. It represents a widespread dissatisfaction and revolt from modernity, from secular modernity. Fundamentalists feel that religion has been sidelined. They want to drag religion from the side lines to which it’s been relegated in a secular country, culture and put it back to center stage. And they’ve achieved some success in this, even though in many ways, I think, fundamentalism can mean a religious failure. It represents a rebellion, as I say, a desire to get history back on track. Bring God back.

Fundamentalists typically tend to go through a very similar scenario. First, they tend to withdraw from main stream society and create enclaves of pure faith in a godless world. I mean, examples are Bob Jones University, I think it’s in Indiana, and/or the ultra-orthodox Jewish communities in New York or indeed the training camps of bin Laden. And there they -- from this some of them will, from these enclaves of faith, some of them initiate a counter offensive against the secular mainstream society. As we saw in the 1970s when you had the Iranian revolution, you had the rise of the moral majority and the rise of fundamentalism in the Middle East.

Now, so fundamentalists are -- every fundamentalist movement that I have studied is rooted in fear. Every fundamentalist movement that I have studied, in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which is where I’ve confined my studies, is convinced that modern secular society wants to wipe out religion. Even here in the United States. It is gripped by a feeling of fear and people -- they feel that they are fighting for survival. And when people feel that their backs are to the wall they can lash out violently.

But having said that, it’s important to say that of the people who we might call fundamentalists only a small minority take part in acts of terror and violence. Some are not violence at all. The ultra-orthodox Jews are not violent at all, generally. And they -- many are simply struggling to live what they regard as a religious life in a world that seems increasingly hostile to faith.

Now, the trouble with this is that once that you are sort of engaged in this militant form of piety, struggling, struggling to survive, very often people start to distort the religion that they are trying to defend. And one of the first things that tends to go out of the window is compassion.

Now, history shows that it’s very difficult to deal with these movements. Attempts to suppress them usually result in them becoming more extreme. The Times say of the Scopes Trial in 1925 when Muslims, when Christian fundamentalists tried to ban the teaching of evolution in the public schools and were ridiculed in the secular press. Fundamentalists after that experience of humiliation swung from the left of the political spectrum to the extreme right, which is where they’ve remained ever since.

This fear of annihilation is not always just paranoid. Jewish fundamentalism, for example, is haunted by the Nazi holocaust when Hitler tried to eliminate European Jewry. The fear of annihilation is strong there. And in some parts of the Muslim world secularization has been so rapid and accelerated. It didn’t take part in a gentle way. It wasn’t very gentle with us but it did take centuries. And it’s been so rapid in some of these countries that it has seemed like an assault. If you think of Ataturk, for example, when he was creating modern, secular Turkey, abolishing the madrasses, closing down the madrasses, abolishing the sufi orders and pushing the sufis underground. This felt like an attack on religion. The Shah in 1935 gave his soldiers orders to shoot at hundreds of unarmed demonstrators who were peacefully protesting against obligatory western dress in one of the holiest shrines in Iran. And hundreds of Iranians died that day.

And in this kind of setting you can see that a secular policy experienced as great fear. But none of this fear excuses violence or killing. And what seems to be the case right now is that, as far as I can see, in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, fundamentalism is becoming more extreme. And far more extreme than what we saw in the 1970s. Certainly so in the United States there are Christians who are expecting, confidently expecting, the destruction by God of the federal democratic government of the United States and are preparing themselves to take over.

This is far more extreme than anything dreamed up by Jerry Falwell. And similarly, what we saw on September the 11th was something else. I mean, bin Laden doesn’t seem gripped by fear to me, he seems more gripped by rage and confidence. The thing has entered another phase. And there are things going on with these hijackers that I don’t understand, so we should be alert to this.

But I just want to make that point that Islam is not alone in developing a fundamentalist movement. What tends to happen when a region is divided by conflict is that religion and fundamentalist movements get sucked into that conflict. The Arab-Israeli conflict, for example, began on both sides as secular, a clash of secular ideals and programs. But since 1967 it has become increasingly religionized, “sacrelized” on both sides as the fundamentalist movements which originally began by sort of reform as internal religious movements got sucked into the struggle. And I can see that this is time for me to draw my -- yes, very nicely put. Do I want to take questions now? Very kindly put instead of, “This is enough from you.”

(Laughter.)

And so I’ll just close. I’ll just draw to a close. I called this a revelation, September the 11th a revelation. The word apocalypse too, means revelation, unveiling. It revealed to us a reality that we hadn’t seen before. And one of those realities was that we are now living in one world. Before September the 11th, the big news story in the United Kingdom had been our asylum seekers, who had -- every night refugees from various parts of the country try to get into the United Kingdom. And they cling to the underbelly of trains, they try to -- 80 or 90 a night try to walk through the channel tunnel. Truck drivers will open their trucks and find them filled with people. Our ports suddenly seemed full of sniffer dogs and arc lights and police cars. And England suddenly seemed to be becoming like a rich, privileged, gated community in a dangerous city that tried to keep the hoards out.

Similarly, September the 11th showed us that we cannot ignore the plight of the rest of the world, we cannot walk away from the problems of the rest of the world and think that they don’t concern us, or imagine that we are protected by our great might or our oceans or our military or economic strength. If we turn our backs upon the world, the world will come to us, either in disturbing ways, like our asylum seekers, or in terrible ways, in violent, horrible, dreadful ways.

And so as we develop a new one world reality, one thing we must all do is look to those elements of our faith -- they’re in all our faiths -- that reach out towards unity. And those are the voices of religion that we need desperately to hear at this time, not the voices of hatred and contempt and suspicion.

Thank you.

(Applause.)

MIN. ABDERAHMAN: Ms. Armstrong has agreed to take some questions. And actually, upon the advice of politicians present among us here, we have devised the idea of writing your questions on the cards that are placed on each table and they will be collected. Abby and Gail (ph) will go around and collect them and we will pose them to Ms. Armstrong in the sake of saving time. But I would like to start by sharing with you some of the questions that were asked to her on our table about the status of women in Islam, and I think this is very good in the mind of everyone here.

MS. ARMSTRONG: Yes, indeed. And here I am, a woman standing before you, and I’ve often said, how can you defend Islam, which is such a misogynistic religion and is so oppressive to women? Well, let me say first of all that in my view no major world religion has been good for women, not one. Even my friend the Buddha, who I love, even he had a major wobble when it came to the question of admitting women to the Buddhist monastic order. But some religions begin well. Christianity was a religion that began well for women. Jesus had women disciples, it’s the women who had the first news of the resurrection, who dared to brave the -- go to the tomb when the men were still skulking and hiding. But after a few generations the men hijacked the faith and brought it back to the old patriarchy.

Islam too began well for women. Very well. Prophet Mohammed was, as I said at my table, one of those rare men who really enjoyed the company of women and needed and loved being with them. And the Koran gives women rights of inheritance and divorce, which are not as good -- equal to those of a man, but nevertheless, we in the West would have to wait until the 19th century before we got anything comparable. Women were not confined in harems to a special part of their house in the Prophet’s lifetime. You see the women in Medina taking a full part in the political life, and even after the Prophet’s death the wives of the Prophet were important religious authorities and even political leaders.

But what happened was the same old story, that gradually the religion got brought back into the old patriarchal line. The idea of covering up women and secluding them in various parts of the house really came in from the example of Greek Byzantium. The Greeks had long veiled and secluded their women in this way. There was no democracy for the women of Athens, and if you’d walked round classical Athens you wouldn’t have seen many women there. And so -- what happens too in fundamentalist movements, and this happens right across the board, that because fundamentalism is essentially a revolt against modernity, very -- one of the characteristics of hallmarks of modernity has been the emancipation of women. And thus many fundamentalist movements have overstressed the traditional role of women, and that’s happening very much.

There’s the whole question of the veil. Do we have -- or shall I -- the veil is a complicated issue. I’m against anyone being forced to wear a veil if they don’t wish to, I don’t like coercion. But a lot of women are voluntarily wearing the veil because they feel that this -- that you -- they want to show you don’t have to look Western to be modern. You can come to modernity on your own terms, want to get back in touch with the roots of the pre-colonial tradition. And there are very many complicated issues about the veil and the history of the veil.

So Islam, like the other world religions, must struggle now with the question of women. Christian churches are wrestling with the idea of women, rabbis, women rabbis are being, in some forms of Judaism, being ordained, but they still have trouble, and there are feminists in the Islamic world who are quoting the example of the Prophet and the early years just to reform Islam in this direction too. So that is going ahead. So initially it was good for women, things have deteriorated. The Shari’a was, like most pre-modern law codes, put women in a second place, and it’s only relatively recently that we’ve had -- and we’re not finished yet in our quest for full equality.

MIN. ABDERAHMAN: We have a group of questions that basically goes around the same concept of what went wrong with Islam beyond the era that you have described. And there are three questions that deal with that. Let me just very quickly go through them. One of them is, is it political Islam that has done this? And the second question is, what is wrong with Islamic countries in the modern world and whether they departed from the original.

MS. ARMSTRONG: Look, all religions depart from the origins. No religion can remain the same, otherwise they fossilize and die. Religions have to respond to events and change. Jesus would be astonished, I always think, if he attended the Lambeth (ph) Conference, or I have a secret fantasy that one die I might show him around the Vatican.

(Laughter.)

So things develop and change and Islam also went through a major course of change. What went -- what was the first of these questions?

MIN. ABDERAHMAN: One of them is about political Islam.

MS. ARMSTRONG: Political Islam. This is something I’ve glad you’ve raised, because it’s something that we don’t always understand well in the West. We have made, for excellent reasons, a clear distinction between church and state. And we did so because when in Europe we mixed the two up. The results were often horrific. If you think at our record of crusades and inquisitions and persecutions and holy wars of religion, Protestant against Catholic, et cetera. And here in America you have the first secular republic, and people are very proud of this and keep on saying, why can’t Islam separate religion and politics?

Now, in Islam it’s -- this is one of the themes of my book, is that politics has always been very, very important in the Islamic vision. Because the Muslims are commanded, the bedrock message of the Koran is that it is wrong to build up a private fortune, as I said. Good to share your wealth as fairly as possible and build up a just and decent society. And Muslims have taken this mandate very seriously indeed. And politics, you could almost say, in Christian terms has been what we might call it in the Christian world as sacrament. Something where you, in the effort to create the society, you experience the divine and you also make the divine accessible and more an immediate presence in the world.

But of course things can go wrong, because, as I’m sure you know, politics is -- who better -- often a very messy untidy business. And it’s not easy to mingle these high ideals with the pragmatic business of running a state. And so even though the ideal was endlessly to create a just and decent society, and even though, as I show in my book, political questions, political discussions, political anguish about the awful state of Muslim society, anguish meditations by Muslims, played a key role in the development of nearly all the major Islamic movements. It led to the development of Sufi mysticism, for example. It contributed to the development of the Shari’a, to Islamic historiography, to the effort of the -- the contemplation of history which is so often appalling, was not taken lightly by the Muslims and they continued to struggle with how -- what -- how do we create this just and decent society. What kind of person should lead the Muslim community?

These kind of debates were as about as formative as the great debates in the 3rd and 4th -- 4th and 5th centuries, about the nature and person of Jesus which formed Christianity and shaped it in an irrevocable way and the discussion -- these political discussions were equally formative in the development of Islam. But, as I say, politics is a difficult business. And when -- so Muslims found that in fact whatever the theory was, there was a de facto separation between church and state. Under the Abbasids the court was ruled by a very different ethos from the rest of the people. They were not living necessarily according to Islam. They had more wives than the four allowed them by the Koran, for example, and the Shari’a began rather as a counter-cultural movement against this aristocratic ethos of the court. And for many centuries the Ulama (ph) were in opposition and they had never -- in Iran they never lost their oppositional role as standing up to rulers, to unjust rulers and protesting against unjust rule.

So religion and in the Shi’a, in Shi’ite Islam religion and politics were, for centuries, separation on -- as a matter of sacred principle. When Khomeini became head of state, a cleric became head of state, he was overturning centuries of most sacred Shi’ite tradition and because it was thought that politics, all states, all government, was corrupt until the coming of the Shi’ite Imam, the Shi’ite Messiah, but that has changed. So political Islam is a political faith. It contemplates politics, it takes politics very seriously. So to call -- there’s a sort of -- a Muslim cannot be indifferent to the plight of his society and very often where Christian fundamentalists respond to the threat of modernity by evolving a doctrine such as a theory of creation, a denunciation of evolution, or the infallibility the literal infallibility of scripture. These are new fundamentalist doctrines. Muslims will often respond with a social policy, with a political vision, with a desire to create some -- to make -- put Islamic society back on track.

So it’s not political Islam itself that has done this. What’s done it is once you lose a sense of that overriding desire for compassion and justice for all, and respect for the sacred rights of others, then you’ve lost the plot religiously. And what happens when people use Islam for purely political growth, it’s also a complete misunderstanding of the nature of God. We often -- Muslims alone are not guilty of this -- are not the only ones guilty of this. We often think about God in such a limited way that we imagine God as a personality rather like ourselves, writ large with likes and dislikes similar to our own, whereas Allah-hu Akbar (God is always greater than we can conceive). But if you try and cut God down to size it’s all too easy to make God into our own image and likeness and get Him, in itself a bad pronoun, get Him to endorse our limit prejudices, our hatreds, our limited programs and give them a sacred seal of absolute approval. And this is one of the constant dangers of religion and it is I think -- I think it is a misunderstanding of the nature of God and a loss of the sense of compassion that must, above all, dominate all religious political life.

MIN. ABDERAHMAN: There is another set of questions and they all, I think, focus on the -- what you described as the peaceful nature of Islam and one of them at least suggests that the Prophet was not faithful to that peaceful nature. He broke some peace. The other is suggesting that maybe later on generations have abandoned this peaceful spirit and lastly someone is asking you, which is more peaceful, Islam or Judaism?

MS. ARMSTRONG: Oh hell, well, I’m glad you’re asking such little, limited questions. Now, okay, the Prophet. The Prophet certainly was a warrior not because he particularly wished to but because there he was. But, at the end of his life, at the end of his life he did, I think, abjure violence and conquered and overcame by a daring policy of non-violence. What he did was in the midst of the hostilities he announced that he was going to go on the Hajj and invited 1,000 Muslims to come with him. On the Hajj you may not carry arms, you may not even kill an insect or speak a cross word. There must be no violence on the Hajj. So he was going unarmed, right into Meccan territory and there -- and it was this extraordinary daring and frightening experience that the Meccans were shocked and rather put in the position where they had to come and negotiate. And he signed a truce which is the -- no, which is what I was talking about at table. He signed a truce, a peace treaty which was so -- seemed to be caving in on so many fronts that there was nearly a mutiny in the Army. They were dying to dash in and finish the job. But he said, “No, we sign at every point and make peace.” And it was this, the historian said, which changed the tide and that more people came into -- so I think, he himself, was feeling his way forward and he did finally work through to an ethos of peace, yes.

MIN. ABDERAHMAN: Two more questions actually about Bernard Lewis’ latest article in the New York Review books and one of them is asking whether you agree with him about the decline of Islam in the last century or so. And the other is asking what does Islam really have to say about purity?

MS. ARMSTRONG: Purity?

MIN. ABDERAHMAN: Purity, because --

MS. ARMSTRONG: What do they mean?

MIN. ABDERAHMAN: -- it seems that Lewis spoke about the obsession of all ideologies and religion during the 20th century with the idea of purity and the question relates to that whether Islam has a comparative concept?

MS. ARMSTRONG: Oh alright. Now, has Islam -- Bernard Lewis, I know, is a great historian and I’ve learnt a tremendous amount from Bernard Lewis’ books and works especially about the historical period, The Golden Age of Islam. It was he who taught me about Jihad in the days when I was working for television and was writing something about the Crusades and it was he who explained that by the time of the Crusades, Jihad was entirely dead letter. And there was no Muslim plan to take over the world or convert people -- or anything of that sort. Now he seems to have -- unfortunately he doesn’t seem to think that Islam has any valiancy in the modern world.

At the beginning -- I see in the sense what he means -- at the beginning of the 20th century it’s important to note that nearly every single leading Muslim intellectual, except one that I can think of, was in love with the West. There was no instinctive recoil from modern western society.

Muslims, and I’m thinking of Mohammed Abdul for example, the grand Mufti of Egypt, very important thinker, was very much at home with Europeans. He hated the British occupation of his country, hated that, but he knew an immense amount about European culture and philosophy and these people like him, they wanted their countries to look like Britain and France. They didn’t know about America at this point. And some even went so far as to say that the Europeans were better Muslims than the Muslims themselves because they, in their modern societies, they had been able to establish a more just distribution of wealth that was closer to the spirit of the Koran. And some advocated that Mullahs in training in the madrasses must study science and languages alongside their traditional Islamic and legal studies of Islamic law.

Now that’s all gone. Now I think -- I don’t think -- what I disagree, I think with Bernard Lewis, is to say well there’s nothing we can do. They are completely now -- Muslims have now lost -- a lost cause as it were. We need do nothing. This, I think, is quite wrong. There’s an awful lot of thinking in the Muslim world right now, but we don’t ever hear about much. All we hear about is Osama bin Laden. We don’t hear much from people like Kanadarwee (ph), or Sarush (ph), or other people who are doing some really serious thinking about Islam, about the nature of the Shari’a, bringing it up to date. It’s as though all we heard about -- as though Pat Robertson were the only representative of American Christianity. And we weren’t looking at all the other currents.

So there is vitality going on. Having said that however, the twentieth century has been one of great difficulty and suffering for Muslims. They had the colonial experience, which was very debilitating. Now I know Bernard Lewis has said, well it wasn’t so bad, after all. But I don’t think we can dismiss other peoples’ pain in that way. You know, we can’t say it wasn’t so bad if we weren’t -- I mean I can’t say it, I’m a Brit. We were doing the colonizing. And this was debilitating and it has impeded the Muslim approach to modernity.

The modern spirit as it developed in the West over a period of centuries had two essential characteristics that are essential to modernity. One is independence. The modernization in Europe and the United States developed with declarations of independence on all fronts. Religious, social, political, intellectual, as scientists demanded that they not be overseen by a coercive church. Independence -- your own declaration of independence here. Classic modernizing statement -- document.

The second thing -- so independence is one. The other was innovation. We were constantly doing new things. Inventing something new. There was a dynamic about it. Reaching out for unprecedented solutions, dealing with -- bringing something entirely fresh into the world. Now in the Muslim world modernity came not with independence but with dependence. And with political subjugation. And not innovation but imitation, because they were just trying to catch us up. And so there was something skewed and difficult about the whole thing. If you compare Japan which was not colonized and not subject to foreign influence of foreign domination in that way -- it’s had its huge problems and its awful growing pains, but it has made its own version -- highly successful version of modernity which the Muslims are finding more difficult to do. The colonial experience was dreadful.

This has been -- the sense of humiliation is acute, I think, in the Muslim world. There’s a sense of whatever -- Islam is so much a religion of success. Unlike Jesus the Prophet Mohammed was a dazzling success in his own day. A brilliant political leader as well as a spiritual, towering genius. And he achieved enormous success. The Islamic empire went from strength to strength to strength. Even when it had a major like the Mongol invasions in the Middle Ages it was able to respond creatively with a strong sufi revival and then with creating three new empires.

Now, I’ll move on. But this -- against the West they have been able to make no headway. This has been for some I would say, as disturbing for some Muslims as the discovery of Charles Darwin have been to some Christians. It seems to sort of say, ‘What’s gone wrong with Islamic history? The Koran tells us if we lived in a certain way we’ll prosper. What’s happening? And why are the godless West prospering and we not?” This is difficult and there’ s a sense of debilitation and conflict. I think in a place like the Middle East which as I say then sucks all these religious currents into its orbit and sort of sacrilizes the war in a very, very terrible way. Because then things become absolute and non-negotiable. And that’s happened on both sides, say of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

So let us not sort of sneer or leave them alone but reach out towards this and enter empathically with the real difficulties that Muslims are having and admire and applaud and appreciate the efforts that so many of them are making but which we never hear about much in the West. It would be good if we heard some more from -- if there were a publishing endeavor that could translate some of these creative Muslim thinkers and make people aware of the multifarious nature of the Muslim response to this challenge.

MIN. ABDERAHMAN: We have two minutes left and seven questions around what needs to be done. What should be done, both by Muslims and the U.S. to explain themselves the way you are doing? About the U.S. versus the Muslim world and how to encourage tolerance there, etc. And about Muslim and Arab countries, vis-a-vis the U.S. All the seven questions are around the same idea --

MS. ARMSTRONG: In two minutes?

MIN. ABDERAHMAN: You have two minutes.

MS. ARMSTRONG: Right. Now what can be done? I think Muslims in the United States have a key role to play here, almost as a bridge they can be, but they must come out strongly and be vocal and seen to be against terror. I know you are against terror. I have no doubt about that, but you have to keep impressing this upon the American people in creative, imaginative ways. And show the Muslim world that is suspicious of the West that it is possible to create a vibrant Islam right here in the United States. It is possible.

And I’ve seen -- before all this happened, I’ve seen some very exciting Muslim communities where they’re training their children to be good Muslims and good Americans. How can we heal this? I think knowledge. I’ve been impressed. I’ve been really impressed with the way Americans have responded to the horror of September the 11th by the descent upon the bookshops. Here you all are tonight listening to long disquisitions on Islam, to finding out about Islam. This has been very impressive to me. It’s not happening in the U.K. This is something -- and if something good can come of this horror, a greater understanding is important.

Something I think -- I’m not going to attempt to think politically. I’m not a political animal and you’re the experts here and know more about it than me. But something I think that could be done is that Americans could show the world how religious you really are. Very often people in the Muslim world, even in the U.K., we don’t realize that America is an extremely religious country. I believe I’ve been told it’s the second most religious country in the world after India. And it’s not a Godless society, but even in the U.K. what we tend to see is Coca Cola and oil and McDonalds and, you know, shopping-mania or else extreme forms of Christian fundamentalism.

We don’t see what I have been astonished and delighted and privileged to find on my travels round the United States, this really creative questing religious spirit. Show the world your religion and show that this is good creative plural religion. That’s what we need, our Muslim -- from the pulpit we need to hear Muslims giving this message of pluralism, and we too must do the same.

MIN. ABDERAHMAN: I will encourage others who I didn’t get the chance to get to their questions to approach Ms. Armstrong maybe later on and continue the discussion that we have to conclude here. Please join me in thanking Ms. Armstrong for a very interesting presentation.

(Applause.)

And I would like to thank you. You have been a wonderful audience, and I will just leave you with an announcement that our next event hosted by this Arab group for congressional staffers and members is going to be a reception hosted by the Embassy of Qatar on February 6th at the Golden Room of the Rayburn House Office Buildings, so contact the Qatari Embassy if you’re interested to attend.

Thank you very much and have a good night.