Pearls & Gem

My Personal Journey Thru The Quran : Surah Al Lail

2012-01-24T19:34:00.001+08:00

A young 'punk' writer wrote in malaysianinsider just 2 weeks ago:
[ it was sent to me by my 'virtual' friend , KD ]

Rejecting religious fascism

January 23, 2012

JAN 23 — It can be quite tough to recognise the emergenceand symptoms of fascism in this country, especially in this day and age.

There are neither cadres of people in brown, black, red orwearing scarfs of chequered patterns nor the sound of jackboots marching hereand there. Yes, there are those kids in punk gear and hairstyles wanderingconfused around town and getting mistakenly branded as black metal acolytes anddevil worshippers but those guys are really harmless. A little odd butharmless.

It is encouraging that the past week has seen Malaysiasounding the call for the formation of a Global Movement of Moderates. Theworld is very much in need of moderation in more ways than one. But here in Malaysia, ifthe call is to mean something more than a public relations exercise, we willneed to do some self-reflection and soul searching to see whether we ourselveshave passed the test of moderation, particularly when it comes to religion.

In one of my previous articles, I stated that Malaysia is onthe verge of religious fascism. It seems that when it comes to religion in thiscountry, we are unable to say no, to argue reasonably and rationally, or toeven use common sense. What is even more alarming is the use of religion tointimidate, repress and stifle discourse.

More than ever before, the line between public and privatereligion has become thinner and in some cases has disappeared altogether.Aspects of religion, specifically Islam, has begun to dominate and dictatevarious previously secular aspects of life in this country to the point that itis now erroneous and misleading to state that issues pertaining to Muslimaffairs do not affect or impact on non-Muslims.

We have seen the enactment of laws which allow for Islamicreligious authorities to raid the places of worship of other religions. We haveheard and experienced blatant unsubstantiated statements intended to createfear and whip up hysteria by accusing others of proselytisation and conversion.

It took 20 years before a church could be established inShah Alam due to the unwillingness and resistance put up by local authoritieswho felt that their own aqidah would be threatened forallowing a place of workship belonging to another faith to be established.Nobody told them that their personal faith should not be a factor in theirdecision making.

The list is longer when we include what is being inflictedupon the Muslim community itself.

Infants are judged illegitimate as a result of being bornprematurely. The parents are married? Doesn’t matter. If the kid was born lessthan six months from the date of nikah, he or she is considered illegitimate.The Jabatan Agama Islam Selangor (JAIS) is more known and infamous for itsnumerous vice raids than its acts of welfare and good work helping those inneed and poverty.

If you are a Malay woman, Muslim and a civil servant, thereis an unspoken rule that you are expected to wear only the baju kurung and ifyou are not wearing the tudung or headscarf, sooner or later you will be peerpressured into wearing it. Wear any other professional attire such as apantsuit and you will be quietly spoken to.

Like many others, I have long been concerned about thereligionisation of secular mechanisms and frameworks. Have you taken a look atthe e-Fatwa website recently?It boggles the mind to see the degree of influence, control and interventioninto our lives which has been granted to religious authorities who are largelyunelected persons who are unaccountable to the public. It seems that syariahmatters are no longer limited to personal law matters as originally underlinedand envisaged under the Federal Constitution.

It is disturbing to note that involvement of Islamicreligious bodies such as the National Fatwa Council appears to be required andeven have the final word on perspectives involving such things as electoralreform (i.e. the use of indelible ink), Mat Rempits, poco-poco dancing, publichealth policy and even the use of scanners at airports. In recent days,religious authorities have even acted as book critics and declared books haramsuch as Lee Kuan Yew’s “Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going”.

But the reason why this is all happening is because we areallowing it to happen.

There are many who lay the blame of the religiousexcessiveness seen of late at the doorstep of Malay-speaking rural communities.But you know what? I believe the problem lies instead among those of the middleclass living in the cities, particularly in the enclaves which exist in ShahAlam, Taman Tun Dr Ismail, Putrajaya, Malacca and Johor Baru.

In these almost ghetto-like Malay communities spring themany insecurities, intolerance, bigotry and racism which have manifestedthemselves on the national agenda and championed by persons such as Hasan Ali,Ibrahim Ali, the Perak mufti and the boys and girls of the Perkasa brigade.

The ideas originate from people who are not economicallychallenged, deprived or impoverished rather they are more likely to be theprivileged, well-educated, well-travelled and moneyed. They are more likely tohave been educated abroad. Yet, these are the ones who are most rabid about thealleged threats to the Islamic faith. Many of them are in their retirementyears, consider themselves devout and recently renewed in their faith. They areinfluencing the younger generation with their views and values.

Yet among them, religious piety co-exists with superstitiouspractices.

Consider the current trend of enrolling your kids in tahfiz classes.Parents are racing to get their very young kids into these classes where theyare taught to read and memorise the entire Quran. They aren’t taught what theindividual words mean or the historical context. Just memorise. So, your soncan recite whole chapters but has no idea what the story is about. These kidshave become the latest show and tell of parents and the latter’s store for gooddeeds for the hereafter. In the meantime, daughters are taught that it isnecessary to thoroughly wash sanitary napkins to prevent the Devil feeding onmenstruation blood and gaining access to one’s soul. Bomohs (shamans) are usedfor a myriad of purposes from weather control to dealing with business rivals.

These are all symptomatic of a strangeness currently inflictingthe Malay community. It seems that there are many who appear to be gripped insome sort of religious rapture. A race to see who can be seen and demonstratethemselves to be the most pious. The extreme manifestations of this have beenthe loud militant religious rhetoric, threats towards those of other faiths andthe enforcement of a single interpretation or religious worldview.

If a person is not a Malay and not a Muslim, that person isdeemed as having no right to comment on things affecting Muslims. If a personis non-Malay and a Muslim, we say things are done differently here in Malaysiacompared to other countries. If a person is a Malay Muslim, this person isdeemed to not know enough about Islam. If a person is a Malay Muslim with theright credentials, he or she could get censored, condemned and even accused ofsedition.

The loudest voices (and those who often get their way) arethose belonging to the people who are less tolerant and accepting of others,who feel the need to dominate others in the name of religion and ethnicity, andwho claim to be champions of the faith.

Taken together, many of these are the budding signs offascism which are no longer confined to fringe groups and have in fact becomemainstream.

Religious fascism is a tapeworm in the gut of modern Malaysia. It istime we recognised it for what it is.

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

your excellency KD,

try looking at things from a different perspective

it is a positive sign, at any age especially guys your ageand mine !

take it positively......................................

with ilm, ilm and ilm of course otherwise we go back tobomoh, shamans, talisman and all

overall increase in religiosity in ttdi, damansara heightsor even subang jaya does not cause more heart burns or ulcer

I take a contrarion view. positive always.....i am sure amore god fearing kd or even dato dc would not do the world at large any harm.

we are having too much of 'ads' anyway......akhirat deficitsyndrome....it is a chronic and serious inattention disorder in elderly adultsour age. . .not healthy at our age, if you ask me.

jmho

nik howk

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

Howk,

I live at TTDI, or at least at the fringe of it. And Iam in my retirement years, or at least at the fringe of it.

And yes, I am from the middle class and for some time nowhave had my faith renewed. And finally, I make

no apologies for not being a moderate in the practice ofIslam. Those who advocate moderation in such matters

ought perhaps also plead for moderation from the Almighty inHis exercise of forgiveness for their sins.

There is one sentence in that article that about sums up itsauthor's mind. It is:

"It seems that syariah matters are no longer limited topersonal law matters as originally underlined and envisaged under the FederalConstitution."

It is apparent that the author thinks that the applicationof the syariah with all its injunctions, commandments

and prescriptions were intended by God and the Prophet(pbuh) to be circumscribed by what a handful of men

led by the colonizer's representative, Lord Reid, determinedin drawing up the Federal Constitution. Originally

underlined and envisaged? Was that what God and theProphet (pbuh) originally underlined and envisaged for

the syariah 1400 over years ago when LordReid's grandparents were not even born, that its scope and application

should be determined by Lord Reid and a few other men?

To such like him perhaps when the talqin is recited overtheir bodies when their time comes and they

are asked by Munkar and Nakir what book they follow, theyshould answer that the book they follow is the

Federal Constitution.

Wassalam.

Adam.

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

Adam,

Well said.

Nik Howk

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

Doc,

Well said !? Really ?

You reject our Federal Constitution...Agong, Sultans,Parliament, Cabinet, Courts, Federal and State laws, Democracy, Rule of Law,Elections... Because Lord Reid, a "coloniser's representative" drewthem up? And what will you have in its place? A theocracy that will takeus back 14 centuries? A Wahabbi monarchy Saudi Arabian style? AyatollahsIranian style?

No. No, thank you.

DC.

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

Dato Dc,

acceptance of the 'status quo handed to us by history' with reluctance' is one thing dato'.

[ pas, ikwanul muslimin , justice party of turkey etcetc are the result of such 'acceptance with reluctance' ]

outright rejection of the 'the god given' alternative isquite another thing.

some would rightfully say this is bordering on theaqidah....i dare not go there or push my friends to play 'brinkmanship'.

we need to 'step back and give ourselves a lot of deep soulsearching.

before we sink deeper into this chasm we better stop here.

Nik Howk

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

You are right, doc, we all need to think through the majorissues we face. A nation's Constitution is a serious matter. Though man made,it is the bedrock of the nation that guarantees the rights of all its members.Its provisions can only be amended a two thirds majority of parliament. A fewclauses, the entrenched ones, cannot be changed without the agreement of theCouncil of Rulers.

It is well to recognize that our Constitution was not drawnup by a "coloniser's representative." Lord Reid was only chairman ofthe commission. The commission that drew up our Constitution comprised eminentjudges from several commonwealth countries.

Though Islam is the official religion, our Constitutionguarantees that our nation is secular. This is a basic right of all citizens,guaranteed by the Constitution. We will be governed by the rule of law, notrule by law, or rule by man through beliefs. When we think of the issuecarefully, these are inescapable thoughts.

Have a great holiday!

DC.

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

Howk,

Reading the latest postings, I guess there's another thenthat should give Munkar and Nakir the same reply,

Adam

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

Friends,

Let us take a break from this discussion. My collar isgetting heated up.

Let su go listen to some Shaykh.....young Imama Suhaib Webbexposition on Surah Al lail

Part 1,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrbs24gb07c&feature=relmfu

Part 2,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfKaJLsxaSs&feature=relmfu

My Journey thru The Quran : Surah Al Asr

2012-01-21T19:03:00.002+08:00

time : mid august 1984, wukuf time, the hottest of summer for many years
place: field of arafah, saudi arabia

was walking around our field hospital like a field general, dressed in ihram, overlooking 150 other anxilliary medical staff and doctors. temperature outside our tented hospital was 55 degree centigrade. inside no better, probably 50. medical orderlies with modified anti-malarial pressure pump strapped to their bodies, walking 2 step behind spraying ice water on to doctors and nurses . we had over 150 inpatients in varying degree of heat stroke on iv drips.......outside some 200, malaysians, pakis, arabs and afghans sprawled on the desert sand, getting medical attention.

i particularly remembered the afghans. brought in unconcious, ice-sprayed,iv dripped and resuscitated. once consious, got up, thanked our staff profusely and walked out. a malaysian dato on the other hand, onced concious, got up and cursed us blue in the face for conduct unbecoming. he thought he was back in kl and in pantai !

azan magrib sounded from the minaret of nearby masjid arafah, echoed by thousand other azan from the tented city of arafah , temperature had somewhat cooled down to 40.

we stopped for prayer
the imam read surah al asr and i wept and sob spontaneosly, unashamedly.
that was the magic silver bullet that pierced my 'qalb'............................
life, for me, was never the same again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oA9hbR9iMsQ
[ tgna: i am sorry it is in 'french' ]
for english version, listen to imam suhaib webb,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fK-_elKaPD8

ps :
do not compare the two. tgna was addressing the peasants 'french' people of pulau melaka and kedai buloh ; while suhaib webb was talking to an enlightened group of already arab speaking 'natives' of amerikaya............
the division in ilm ,ilm and ilm and native background need to be appreciated.
[ i meant to be naughthy here in future blog , already thinking of a possible scenario : faith without ilm = melayu ; much ilm without faith = levin, bernard apakahnamadiadah, esposito et al ]

similar articles in the blog :
on life, dying, death, and life after death,
http://drnikisahak.blogspot.com/2011/09/f-dying-death-and-life-after-death.html
Unto HIM is the journeying,
http://drnikisahak.blogspot.com/2011/02/unto-him-is-journeying.html
Some random thots on DEATH,
http://drnikisahak.blogspot.com/2008/05/some-more-random-thots-on-death.html

On Anwar...Scene 2 Act 2

2012-01-10T08:36:00.003+08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PvwSI2Kq_F8

If one has an open heart and not be too cynical,one can be happy that once in a while our judiciary oftentimes does show it's brilliance.

The lowest ebb of the judiciary being the Saleh Abbas's 'Mayday for Justice', not too long ago. Malaysian memory we must admit is necessarily too short.

If one is cynical though,then this represent a sleight of the magician's hand.

This could just represent one of the many more chess move coming pre PRU 13.
One can expect the magician to wrap up the 'NFC' fiasco by bringing Leh Budu et al to court [ http://drnikisahak.blogspot.com/2008/11/not-so-pearl-gem-malay-dilemma_30.html ] or reduce the damage to UMNO by getting Shahapakahnamadiadah to send in her papers...and finally probably top up by chasing the tails of those involved in the PKFZ multi billion dollar fraud. If he does all these, PRU 13 is more or less his.

Anwar is free. But there is a big 'but'. He and his company of merry men will have to work much much harder for a win, or even getting a narrow loss...not bad for a chap otherwise who would undergo another 5 to 20 years of nasi kawah, free board and lodging in Sungai Buloh.

The magician however comes out smelling like a rose and with that few more moves, can say ' you see , I inherit all the shits from Dr M and Pak Lah, but under my watch I will clean all the dirt'....the 'lalang' he is, bending to whatever directions the wind blows, his reputation of yesteryears will all be forgotten. Malaysian public memory is all too short. He does not need top notch Israeli advice costing million of ringgit with makeovers and deft moves costing more millions, just to stay in power. I am giving him one for free here.

" Magician, Sir...go after these bastards with a chain saw..the raayats will rejoice and love it ! "

For Anwar though, the stigmata still remain : did he do it or didnt' actually he not do it. I posed this question to Dr Siti Hasmah on the eve of Anwar's arrest during scene one act one. She said, ONLY GOD KNOWS ! Dr M was out riding his horses in kiara on the night of the arrest., even man of steel had to find his outlet in time of stress and perhaps of battered conscience................

A cynical view would be ONLY GOD AND AZIZAH KNOW. This will remain indelibly etched on Anwar's epitaph, Allahualam.

The religious,Islamic perspective is however very clearcut and precise despite many thinking that Islam is very backward,

it is most liberal in one sense :

Sex and sexual preference, in the privacy of one' inner sanctum, is a personal business. No individual has any business peeping into other people's keyhole examining other people's private sexual lives. Whether one wants to do it standing, sitting up, or upside down is one's personal business as long as one does it in one's own privacy......one just need to know the halal/ haram of it and be answerable to HIM at Mahsyar.

If you are still interested in peeping through the keyhole, then be prepared to get 4 witness of good standing along with you. If you cant, just bloody well shut up.

But if you choose not to, you will get 80 of the best on your backside !

Dr M, are you ready for that 80 of the best on your backside?..........

This is the very essense and beauty of Islam.

Allahualam.

Nik Howk

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

from Dato' Hamzah Cempaka :

I am not so sure. Not so simple. There is such a thing as a groundswell and momentum,

you know.

"There is a tide in the affairs of men which,

taken at a flood, will lead to fortune..." William Shakespeare.

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

One dissenting view from my 3rd cousin,

Sarfuddin Othman

May allah bless us for not having to undergo the experience of saiful,sukma,azizan,azmin and many more without 4 saksi, but only the delivery man and the jaguar car was there. If you do not protest then the promised hopefull light at the end of the tunnel is still dark. To me whether he really did it either by consent or force and many says only God knows then you are wrong becos beside Allah there are others Yang meliwat, yang kena liwat.

Yang saya lihat orang Islam like Ustaz Hadi, Tok Guru Nik Aziz, Dato Hashim Yahya (Bekas Mufti Wilayah) support sebegini manusia.

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

Deng,

I am afraid you are too 'blinded' and missed the spirit of the 'shariah' here. Life is not just about 'cari makan' Deng !

It is not for us mere mortals to be in someone's cupboard or dressing room to catch him doing whatever he wants to in the privacy of his house or whatever.

If you catch someone in Subang Park fornicating with a bird, then let us hang him upside down rightaway.

Nik Howk

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

From Dato' Nadzri London.

Sedih, ramai orang Islam yg cetek agama dan nipis iman mudah terpedaya dengan fitnah. Dlm kes pertama salah seorang mangsa yg diseksa polis supaya buat pengakuan disodomised oleh AI ialah staff saya, Dr Anis Munawir. Di torture hingga masuk icu. Jubur Anis dan azizan tak diperiksa pun. Dr Mahathir bawa AI masuk umno kerana AI ada imej islam. Mahathir tak ada imej islam dan masa dia jadi PM kebangkitan semula Islam merebak di seluruh dunia ekoran revolusi Iran. Kekuatan AI ialah imej Islam jadi untuk bunuh karektor AI mesti musnahkan imej islamnya. Sedih kerana org melayu tak boleh berfikir.

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device via Vodafone-Celcom Mobile.

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

From Nik Nadimah

Alhamdullillah if nothing else, we would not be questioned in the hereafter for not producing the 4 witnesses if it had been a conviction. In this case we need not lift a finger and not be questioned either which I personally feared most up to yesterday that was for not trying to have justice spoken. What comes next only Allah Swt knows though.... We have to continue to pray that we spared from further questioning on politics at least!

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

From Tan Sri Ming

Nikhowk, perhaps you should be neither happy nor sad, but merely detached and indifferent, If you were consistent with the 'everything is written on the loth mahfuz tablet from the beginning of time', a position you occasionally espouse with some conviction! It absolves one of all sins as well deny the strange satisfaction of victimhood!But if you are like me, who struggles with a sense of personal guilt and responsibility and the occassional hankering for getting even for slights and injuries suffered, one has to rejoice. While the acquittal does not prove as Rais Yatim would have you believe that justice and independence of the courts are healthy and well in Malaysia, it does prove several things that we have always suspected:

1. The bloody case should not have reached the courts in the first place, for the whole thing was farcical beyond belief;
2. That Jib and Wifey were hopelessly hare-brained as plotters and conspirators;
3. That the police are pretty insipid in the execution of badly concieved plots;
4. That the AG is incompetent, and
5. That money is pretty good currency for the purchase an unfettered lease on Saiful's rear-end or RPK's mouth.

So, my friend, rejoice for it's money and not UMNO that rules, and be mindful that the merchants have more of it. And until you have installed a system of governance and a set of governors that could not be bought and sold, perhaps we should hold back the rejoicing!
Salam,

Related articles in the blog :
Letter one would like our children to read, http://drnikisahak.blogspot.com/2010/07/aqidah.html

Alone in the crowd, http://drnikisahak.blogspot.com/2011/11/alone-in-crowd-looking-back.html

Bersih,http://drnikisahak.blogspot.com/2011/07/bersihbersihbersihbersihbersihbersihber_11.html

An UMNO or A Malaysian Spring ?,
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/101east/2012/01/2012111103958820427.html

On Race, Secularism and Islam....

2012-01-08T08:51:00.000+08:00

Mariam Mokhtar wrote in Malaysiakini :

THE COMATOSE MALAY BY MARIAM MOKHTAR FOR MALAYSIAKINI

Is this the sign of things to come in Malaysia? The organisers of
former premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad's talk on the 'Malay race and the
future' banned non-Malay reporters and television crews. Reporters
today, who next tomorrow?

And Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak just looks on pathetically?

The talk at the Tun Hussein Onn Memorial is an insult to Hussein Onn's
memory. He was highly regarded for fostering racial unity. His
firmness against anyone creating racial unrest, earned him the
soubriquet Bapa Perpaduan or 'Father of Unity'.

When will we accept that the solution to the problem Malaysia faces
can only be resolved when the Malays come out of their self-imposed
coma?

As a Malay who has benefited from higher education and exposure to
what the world has to offer, I am appalled at what Mahathir and Umno's
leaders are doing to the Malays.

Instead of leading us into the 21st century, they are still talking
about the golden age of yesteryear.

Instead on embracing change and catching up with the rest of the
world, we are still debating who this country belongs to.

Instead of being enthused by all the exciting changes that are
happening elsewhere in the world, we act like children in the
playground, and refuse to yield to reason.

It is simple; this country belongs to all Malaysians who are prepared
to work hard to see the country prosper. Its citizens will benefit
from the collective effort of the people.

In his talk, Mahathir said everyone had to accept that Malaysia
belongs to the Malays and that the country belongs to the culture and
language of the dominant community; however he added that 'Bangsa
Malaysia' has helped strengthen national unity.

Isn't this a contradiction of terms? How can you have 'Bangsa
Malaysia' and a country just for the Malays?

In his opinion, all races must accept that they are from 'Bangsa
Malaysia' to allow better cooperation between the different races and
guarantee the future of the country. Didn't he also say that the
country belongs to the Malay race? Don't these remarks clash?

He said: “….Peninsular Malaysia was known as Tanah Melayu……. We must be sincere and accept that the country is Tanah Melayu.”

He explained that the country's forefathers gave the Chinese and
Indians citizenship because they expected the communities to respect
Malay sovereignity.

He is telling the non-Malays that they are second-class citizens here.
He conveniently overlooks the non-Malays who have been more than
willing to identify themselves as Malaysian rather than by their
racial origin.

How dare he say that Malays will feel less threatened if the country
adopts the concept of 'Bangsa Malaysia'?

Insecurities exploited

Malays feel threatened because Mahathir keeps telling them that if the
relax their guard, they will be trampled by the non-Malays and that
the country will be sold to the Chinese.

Mahathir and the succession of Umno leaders are not leading the
country forward. Instead of opening up the Malay mind, they are
closing it.

Umno leaders are leading the Malays into a comatose state. Just like a
person in a coma, who is able to hear outside influences, the Malay
mind is unable to contribute towards the conversation and get out of
his vegetative state.

These leaders have worked on the Malay psyche to further their
personal cause. The Malays have always been a feudalistic and
fatalistic race.

Instead of bringing out the best in them, these leaders have worked on
their insecurities and kept them hopeless and pessimistic.

The non-Malays who came to Malaya were spurred by adversity and knew
that they had to work to make a success of their lives.

Not so the Malays who had always enjoyed the bountiful harvests of the
land - the rivers, seas or the smallholding that they could cultivate
whatever they wanted.

What Umno leaders have done is to control the Malays because - that
way - they control their personal fortunes.

Mahathir and Najib may have tried to give the impression that they
disagree with each other. Mahathir champions 'Bangsa Malaysia' and
denigrates Najib's '1Malaysia' concept. They hope that between them
they will win over all the Malays.

Grip on power

Only a fool would be deceived by that ploy. The truth is that both
Mahathir and Najib are one another's keepers.

If Mahathir falls, Najib knows he has no more protection and
vice-versa. It also applies to the rest of the Umno/BN hierarchy. Thus
it is important they keep their clique going for as long as is
possible.

Mahathir has the extremist Perkasa to release on the wider community.
The Malays who do not believe in such extremist views simply fall into
Najib's lap. That way the Malays are still under their control.

The Malay mindset has to change. There are many who think like me but
are fearful of speaking out for fear of a public backlash. That is
understandable.
If they continually stay in the shadows, how will their children and
grandchildren benefit? The policies of this BN government are not
based on fairness and equality. Not everyone can aspire to be an
Umnoputra.

They must realise that the method employed by Mahathir and Najib is
one of control. They keep the Malays hopeless and in a state of
pessimism. They frighten the Malays into thinking that if they are not
careful, the non-Malays will dominate their lives. Mahathir and Najib
are skilled in demoralising people.

Malays like me have managed to get out from under our tempurung. Malay
women like me have had to fight various forms of discrimination to
enjoy the benefits that the world has to offer those who are prepared
to work hard.

We did not do this in isolation but with the assistance of everyone:
male and female, young and old, non-Malay and Malay, Muslim and
non-Muslim.

Our fear is that extremist views will hamper the efforts of women to
improve themselves in the modern world. This is already happening with
the influence of ultra-religious views.

People like Mahathir and Najib know that their power is secured for as
long as they can control the Malay mind.

They both know that educated and confident people are much harder to
control and hence to govern.

MARIAM MOKHTAR

discussion:

Dato DC ,

As always dato' I am going to be a wee bit naugthy and provocative.

'Malays' is 10 millions . Or at the most 13 millions.

If we think nusantara we are talking of 250-300 millions. Dangerous thought during the early 60's , post ''konfrontasi'' era...my late grand uncle, Tok Guru Tuan Haji Hasan of Lemal, Pasir Mas , Kelantan, an ulama' running a a very dynamic and progressive pondok in Lemal, Pasir Mas, was thrown under ISA for years for just trying to think that way by no other than Tunku Abdul Rahman.

If we stop thinking of Malays and nusantara, the next big jump is of course, think of being 1.5 billion....Go universal,.think Islam.

Of course progressive chaps like you and ex ambasador KD would think this as a retrogressive step backward retrogressive. KD, if I can read his mind, would surmise, I am recommending us to go back to the dark ages. I do not know what they teach in Intan those days to produce such thinkers !

Mariam apakahnamadiadah[ she sounds more Mat saleh to me than Malay. Is she a ''kwailo'' or she is just masquerading as a Malay ] would have fits in her bed reading my outrageous [ by her standard , I mean ] recommendation, let alone listen to what the likes of Ustaz Azhar has to say.

Think Islam.......

Yes , think Islam

Yes dato', I am doing away with political correctness today and without reservation going to be provocative. Let us think 1.5 billion. Let us think Islam for a change

some more food for thot this lazy Sunday morning..............................

forget about politics, assume we all are apolitical....

let us listen to a 2010 pre-election speech by Ustaz Azhar Idrus of backwater Paka, Teganung...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4CMvLX6Qy8&feature=related

http://www.youtu.be/watch?v=GSwrAq-PMYs&feature=related

http://www.youtu.be/watch?v=wUZsL0kZVCI&feature=related

http://www.youtu.be/watch?v=cMNbf6TG41c&feature=related

As I told you dato', I am going to be provocative.....hudud to your oxbridge ears, and cheese flavoured stomach linings,probably is provocative enough.

But this was 2010. PAS approach has changed mind you. Malayisans will only be ready for hudud in year 2200 , perhaps......' Slowly, slowly', my Arabic teacher used to say

Nik Howk

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

Dear Doc Nik,

Really? 1.5 billion Muslims? Yes, you are being naughty. But, my friend, it is an old chestnut. Sure, 1.5 billion Muslims collectively possess potential, I repeat potential, power, IF they can be harnessed for a single purpose, and within a single political structure. Like China, or India. But the vast majority of Muslims are deeply divided by faith (!), are dirt poor, illiterate, and superstitious. There are more university professors who are Jews, than there are universities in the entire Muslim world. Among the 65 Islamic countries in the OIC, only 3 have the simulacrum, I repeat a simulacrum, of being an open and liberal democracy. Quo vadis?

It pains me, as much as it does you, but these are facts, and we have to face them. We can look at a vast mountain lake and say to ourselves, "Wow, this lake possesses billions of megawatts of electricity!" Sure. But it possess the potential to produce that amount of electricity, only IF it can be harnessed by a large dam, with a dozen turbines to spin and generate the electricity. Otherwise, it remains forever an idyllic potential.

You will argue that potential, per se, has its own value. Yes, I agree, but only as an irritant, a nuisance, such as suicide bombers and unruly crowds. We don't want to be that sort of negative force. We want to be a positive force for peace, for change, for education, for progress, for pride, and for human dignity. That is what our Islamic civilization was, but no longer is. That is what a non-Islamic China is, and is achieving for its people.

If you want to think of potential, let me remind you of an incident at a public lecture by a famous physicist two hundred years ago. He was speaking on a new theory of electric force that could, in theory, be generated by bisecting a magnetic field.

At the end of the talk, an elegant, aristocratic lady disdainfully asked him, "All that is very interesting, professor but, really, of WHAT USE is it?"

The old scholar looked at her, "Madam, of what use is a baby? It is in the POTENTIAL!"

In the case of the baby, of course, the potential COULD be realized. It could grow up to be a Shakespeare, or a Da Vinci, Picasso, or an Einstein, or a Beethoven, or any great mind to enrich the world of beauty and ideas. The potential was practical, and it was vital for the continuation of the species.

Can you convince me of the potential of your old chestnut? Or, am I being naughty?

Salam to you and your family, and a Happy New Year!

DC.

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

Dato DC,

No, you are not being naughty. You choose to be ignorant.

Yes I do agree with you that,

1.5 billion muslims..divided..nothing very much to shout about....no inventors the last 200 years....dearth of thinkers....shot at like dogs and cats and looked in disdain by most in some places....their hinterland divided and plundered this century without inhibition.

That is why we have to start somewhere ...at some point in time

That utube I put up is a naughty one......Meant to shock guys like you who are in deep slumber still despite knowledge and god given rezeki and rahmat. All on hudud which even PAS has abandoned as a manifesto for 2012.

That was 2010 election talk. These people are coming out of their kopiah etc etc . Just listen to people like Dr Zulkifli or YB Husam for a change. These yonug turks are changing the scene.

Welfare state...justice, universal equality transcending class and sexes

sans corruption, moral and financial

all there.

We need not reinvent the wheel.

We still have the book. Others have lost them or changed theirs a thousand time even human has been regarded as divine !

We have the seerah.

We, Muslims, still have substance , not the form now.

The West, alas , are all form sans substance.

Our ship, albeit a supertanker are still afloat, albeit slow to take corners, twists and turn.

The passengers are no doubt in a state of nausea, some vomiting, some even having dysentery.

But the crews are still intact.

As for the rest of the world, they are in the sea, some holding on for dear life to raft, bouys and lifeboats.
All have practically have abandoned their ships.

Just study the Arab Spring.

The Muslim Brotherhood people has grown wise

We have from within us wise people but we do not count them as numbers because we now only think cheese, Cambridge and Oxford !.

Dont underrate Islam and measure Islam on the same scale as secularism.

We have 50 years experiment locally here with secular modernity in Malaysia and it is not leading us anywhere.

The real Islam will prevail despite your pessimism....we have to give Islam a chance.

Give Islam 10, 20 years...it will hit this global village like a tsunami, dato.

Sadly, statistically speaking, you and even myself, may not be around to see it though.

Allahualam.

"When Allah's succour and the triumph cometh. And thou seest mankind entering the religion of Allah in troops, Then hymn the praises of thy Lord, and seek forgiveness of Him. Lo! He is ever ready to show mercy. "

Surah An Nasr, 110

Dont think Malay, Mamak, Chinese, Kwailo or Mat Saleh .....

THINK ISLAM.

Nik Howk

http://drnikisahak.blogspot.com/2010/03/tansri-could-we-use-isa-to-silence-this.html

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

DC,

I wonder if Doc Nik also included the Shias..I wonder if he thinks they're not really Muslims!

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

Your Excellency KD,

It is not important what I or you think , in this matter of aqidah

Leave that to HIM.

'bersangka baik'.

Nik Howk

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

Doc Nik,

First order of business, Doc, get peace between the Sunnis and the Shias.

First item on that agenda: do you accept Shias as Muslims? By implication when you speak of a 1.5 billion sized "supertanker" - you do. But I don't know for sure. Do you accept the Shia as an equal and true Muslim?

Second item on the agenda: Give the Organization of Islamic States SOME teeth. I was working in Wisma Putra when Tunku Abdul Rahman was its Secretary General, residing in Jiddah. I spoke with him informally when I stopped over there for few days. I cannot reveal the content of my conversations with him. But I ask you: Do you realistically believe that ANY Muslim country will surrender ANY part of it's sovereignty to the OIC? What is your view of the OIC?

Third item on the agenda: How do you reconcile the highly unequal income distribution and resource allocation? OIC can't even solve the simple problem of failing states in Somalia and Ethiopia. Or the repression in Syria.

Fourth item: Perhaps the most urgent, how do you bring order to Pakistan, that possesses nuclear bombs, and how to prevent nuclear bombs from falling into wrong hands? Of course, other countries, too, possess nuclear bombs, but they seem to have a secure hold on them.

Fourth item, perhaps the most important, do you really want a single Islamic empire, based on Hudud, now in the 21st century? Really? I have a friend, who is the head of the Islamic Centre in New York. The Centre is close to Ground Zero, and was in the news recently. He has a UK degree in Science. His father was the first Rector of the Islamic College here, and the young son went to school here at the VI in KL. He has many friends here, and visit often. Highly intelligent chap. He sees Islam as updated and more in tune with the 21st Century, modern, progressive, with richly varied and vibrant ideas, based on the market, and has a democratic base. He sees Islamic countries adopting policies that are realistic and friendly to other countries.

Is this consonant with your Islamic Empire run by a supreme Caliph? How is this Caliph elected, or appointed? Is it similar to the Papal Empire after the collapse of the Roman Empire? How are laws made and implemented? Who enforces them? How are resources allocated? Is there a check and balance in the branches of government? Or no branches at all in the government?

Dato DC

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

Howk,

If I may suggest, you should not waste your time over comments made by those who do not have the interest of Islam and the ummah at heart but who treat discussions on Islam as an academic exercise and as a tool of amusement.

You have, I believe, better things to do.

Adam Mat Lana

Little Britain, London.

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

Thanks Adam. So long I don't hear from you. How is your post-doctoral thing in Cambridge coming up ?

To me it is not a waste of time, I enjoy 'sparing' with these two gentlemen.

They somehow, represent two archaic example of our colonial past...I have lost the word for it....mental 'neocolonization at it's worse'. I hope I have the right word for it.

When I was in my sixth form in MCKK, in the late 60's, during the school holidays, we the Kelantan branch of MCKK boys made a boat trip to Perhentian Island, Teganung. There was no chalet there yet at that time. We sleep on the beach in the open. The next day we saw a naval boat docked by the beach nearby. Then a group of young navies bearing chairs and a table, with white tablespread. A sublietenant carrying a large champagne bottle with a few glasses. In the middle of the small entourage was a fairly dark looking man, in his late 50's wearing broad multi-coloured tie [ on the beach at 5 pm !] in a beige coloured suit. He was our deputy prime minister !

A lasting impression for all of us students at that time.......a drastic lesson in mental neocolonization !.

Adam,

From the ensuing discussion things has not changed very much since the 1960's...we are still being mentally 'neocolonized'.

Back to my friend, Dato DC,

If I can answer all his questions I would not be still putting 'stents' and opening blocked hearts even approaching my 60th birthday
I will be somewhere up there wearing a broad multicoloured tie or bow tie dispensing 'advice' to the prime minister or as the pm himself.

1st and foremost super bright people like you Dato' and His excellency KD, will have to be convinced about Islam. We have to work on that.' slowly slowly'. They have to throw their biases of the past. Reeducation of sort....give their minds a 'total brasso'.....that wonderful polish in the 60's.
ok some may already assume you guys may be gone case, then we work on the younger generation. ilm ilm and ilm....education..have to seriously re- look into the aspect of education.
not with the clowns we have up there currently of course.

Why think beyond our shores ?
The arab Spring is indicative of the catharsis and change going on in the muslim hinterland.....everywhere . Painful no doubt, but a necessary evil and despite my 'anger' earlier on on things going on in Libya, Egypt , Bahrain, Syria and elsewhere, things will percolate down to positive things for the ummah. insyaallah. Nearer home, if pru13 is totally clean we will have our catharsis of sort soon

Who is talking about the caliphate, my dear dato'?
And why touch on the shia/sunni dichotomy ? we are not God to decide the fate of some 200 millions souls. 'Ber baik sangka'. This is a matter of aqidah. Leave it to him.
Each individual muslim majority country has their own peculiarities. Let us all evolve in our very own way.

What is great for Mauritania may not be good for Malaysia. What is great for USA may fail in Iraq.

Why are you worried about hudud when even PAS is willing to put it aside for later consideration. Or is it just to throw the spanner in the engine.

On the nuclear front, what are you worried about...Pakistan has nuclear capability, Iran will get soon it and join the club. Saudi or whatever. Israel already has a couple of hundred nuclear warheads. And may I ask you dato' a historical question :
Who bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima.......Muslims ?

Who killed 1 million MUslims in Iraq ?

The chap you are alluding to is, Imam Feisal bin Rauf, the New York imam. Yes, we need more people like him. BUt Muslims in the US has to evolve their own way with their constraints and special liberties etc and etc. There is no one formulla for all.

My million ringgit question is why are muslims like you Dato' and His Excellency KD worried about Islam ?!!

This to me is what I term as 'Permanent head damage'

Give Islam a chance.
It is an idea that is long overdue.

Nik Howk

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

Gentlemen,

I spent time in Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman when I was assigned to the GCC countries in the late 70's. I was Under Sec. for South Asia an am somewhat familiar with Pakistan because of many bilateral meetings. I have also attended several OIC meetings at various levels & during our many consultations when I served at the UN. I was also exposed to how the Arab League operates. My experiences leave very little doubt in my mind that all these talk about the Ummah is pure rubbish because of the way it is often abused & exploited. The biggest victims of Arab exploitation are Arabs & other Muslims. The Wahhabis are probably the worst & they continue to control the minds of Muslim masses by their strong influence on a sub-standard education. What we see being perpetrated recently in Arab countries & before that on the Palestinians are a direct result of what the Muslim elites (political as well as religious) are prepared to do to perpetuate their hold on the so called Muslim "Ummah".
Unless we modernize & embrace change, what hope is there for us but to continue down this road? Or are Muslims only meant to enjoy the promise of Paradise in the After Life & not in this beautiful & bountiful world that Allah has given us?
The Good Doctor talks about Nusuntara & to think Islam..he forgets that there are more than 50 million Muslims in China. Islam has no racial boundaries. It is one of the great mysteries why Allah decided to create so many religions. Should we not accept & tolerate all these differences between men? I say let us start in our own country. Let us free ourselves from the shackles of ignorance, superstition, intolerance & everything else that keeps us imprisoned. If you truly believe in Islam would you not want to live in a time when Islam was great because it was tolerant & inclusive, at a time when Christians were burning their thinkers as heretics because they dared think differently? Think Alhambra..Granada..& all the contributions that Islamic thinkers contributed? Also think why we stopped making all those contributions to mankind.
I think I better stop here. I'm also getting very sleepy.
Good night to you gentlemen!
Salam.

KD

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

Your Excellency,

Precisely, precisely.

Unless we modernize & embrace change, what hope is there for us but to continue down this road? Or are Muslims only meant to enjoy the promise of Paradise in the After Life & not in this beautiful & bountiful world that Allah has given us?

The Good Doctor talks about Nusuntara & to think Islam..he forgets that there are more than 50 million Muslims in China. Islam has no racial boundaries.

Sans race, sans nationalism.
Let us give Islam a chance.

Nik Howk

On Tranquility, Happiness and Contentment..

2012-01-05T17:34:00.001+08:00

The great sufi saint,Hasan Al Basri concluded rather abruptly that tranquility, happiness and contentment in
this life and the afterlife rest on three things :

recitation of the Quran
Solat &
Zikrullah

Let us listen to Shaykh Yasir Qadhi on why this is so.........
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MDoWLhlK2o&feature=related

Sounds too simplistic for you. You are not convinced. Let us be academic and take the great ocean road of Academia and move on to the rarefied atmosphere of Emory University, USA to visit our friends, His Holiness, Dalai Lama, Reverend Katherine Schori, Chief Rabbi, Reverend Lord Jonathan Sack and Prof Seyyed Hoessien Nasr who will no doubt only 'confuse' us further on the nature of 'Happiness'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xfEcC2RXro&feature=relmfu

All of them trying to best each other and be politically correct, you might wonder ?
To 'deconsrtuct' the existing confusion, let us come home back to KL and listen to our very own Prof Sayyid Naguib Al Atas,
[ http://drnikisahak.blogspot.com/2010/10/prof-sayyid-muhammad-naquib-al-attas-in.html ]
who in not so many words, put the 'state of happiness' or rather its very opposite, the 'state of unhappiness' as being closely related to our present ability and/or inability to observe the 'right adab', the wisdom and/or the lack of wisdom to put 'things' in their proper place and perspective with respect to Allah.

Still confused !
At the end of the day we have to come back to 'experiential ' Islam and nothing beats the 'experts at this game' than the sufis, the people of the tassawwuf, the people who are masters at the blissful state of 'free from wants' !.

We are back to Hasan Al Basri's triology of :
Recitation of the Quran, Solat and Zikrullah.
Very simple yet we still would not want to recognise this

Still not fully convinced ?
Remember Karl Marx, agnostic/ atheist of the order of 6/6 on The Dawkin's Scale of things.
A hardcore atheist:
"Religion is the opiate of the masses "
Take this worldly advice from him, a thinker par excellence. Karl Marx had no reason to be biased and neither was he playing to the gallery. He was speaking from his most rational mind :

Recitation of the Quran.
Solat
Zikrullah.
Fullstop....................

That is the true religion.A formulla for tranquility, happiness and contentment in this life and the afterlife.
We cannot go wrong.

ilm, daawah, our 'not yet muslim brothers and sisters', marriage and family..... shaykh hussien yee

2012-01-02T09:51:00.000+08:00

i like shaykh hussien yee.
i think he must be younger than myself.

a revert to islam but knowledgewise and contributionwise many times over better than ourselves, born-muslims : islam given on the silver plate at our birth, men and women who were born with a'miraculous gift of islam' but not knowing fully its true content and priceless nature.

the difference between people like hussien yee and us are all about ilm , ilm, ilm and ilm......and faith in its totality leading to experiential islam.

here we are, shaykh hussien yee, two and a half hours of him....please enjoy him .

http://www.justin.tv/alkhaademyouth/b/303051657

http://www.justin.tv/alkhaademyouth/b/303552920

[ Surah Mariam, ayat 16-37, Marmaduke Pichthal's translation of The Holy Quran ]

And make mention of Mary in the Scripture, when she had withdrawn from her people to a chamber looking East, (16) And had chosen seclusion from them. Then We sent unto her Our Spirit and it assumed for her the likeness of a perfect man. (17) She said: Lo! I seek refuge in the Beneficent One from thee, if thou art God-fearing. (18) He said: I am only a messenger of thy Lord, that I may bestow on thee a faultless son. (19) She said: How can I have a son when no mortal hath touched me, neither have I been unchaste? (20) He said: So (it will be). Thy Lord saith: It is easy for Me. And (it will be) that We may make of him a Revelation for mankind and a mercy from Us, and it is a thing ordained. (21) And she conceived him, and she withdrew with him to a far place. (22) And the pangs of childbirth drove her unto the trunk of the palm-tree. She said: Oh, would that I had died ere this and had become a thing of naught, forgotten! (23) Then (one) cried unto her from below her, saying: Grieve not! Thy Lord hath placed a rivulet beneath thee, (24) And shake the trunk of the palm-tree toward thee, thou wilt cause ripe dates to fall upon thee. (25)So eat and drink and be consoled. And if thou meetest any mortal, say: Lo! I have vowed a fast unto the Beneficent, and may not speak this day to any mortal. (26) Then she brought him to her own folk, carrying him. They said: O Mary! Thou hast come with an amazing thing. (27) O sister of Aaron! Thy father was not a wicked man nor was thy mother a harlot. (28) Then she pointed to him. They said: How can we talk to one who is in the cradle, a young boy? (29) He spake: Lo! I am the slave of Allah. He hath given me the Scripture and hath appointed me a Prophet, (30)And hath made me blessed wheresoever I may be, and hath enjoined upon me prayer and almsgiving so long as I remain alive, (31) And (hath made me) dutiful toward her who bore me, and hath not made me arrogant, unblest. (32) Peace on me the day I was born, and the day I die, and the day I shall be raised alive! (33) Such was Jesus, son of Mary: (this is) a statement of the truth concerning which they doubt. (34) It befitteth not (the Majesty of) Allah that He should take unto Himself a son. Glory be to Him! When He decreeth a thing, He saith unto it only: Be! and it is. (35) And lo! Allah is my Lord and your Lord. So serve Him. That is the right path. (36) The sects among them differ: but woe unto the disbelievers from the meeting of an awful Day. (37)

More of Shaykh Hussien Yee in the blog :

Stress
http://drnikisahak.blogspot.com/2010/12/shaykh-hussain-yee-on-stress.html

Why I Came to Islam
http://drnikisahak.blogspot.com/2010/10/hussain-tee-in-conversation.html

The King Is Back !...The King Is back !!

2011-12-31T18:40:00.000+08:00

This Christmas holiday along with the New Year break I was supposed to drive over with my eldest son to Phuket via Sungai Golok plus minus on towards Cheingmai. Sort of a non structured holiday between father and son. In fact we initially planned a 'tail/head' kind of thing. If the coin shows 'head' we will head for Singapore, if 'tail' we head for Bukit Kayu Hitam and beyond. But we have already decided it would be 'hell' if it is 'head' since both of us cannot stomach Sinapo, so we decided to be more rational.

But providence had it , mid way in Tak Bai, Thailand, I met a long lost relative who for the last 10 years has embraced the 'tabligh movement' in Patani. I end up sleeping in a mosque by the beach in Patani for 2 nights. Cut short my trip to Phuket. Spent a night at the border town of Tumpat, near Kampong Rhu Tujuh [ my god ! Kelantan has very few public amenities and beaches and all of them are dirty like shit !....one of these days when I have time I would write to YB Datuk Husam...a few heads of our municipalities need to roll...they seem to work without imagination and with a total lack of passion. ].

Drove to Slow Temiang to see my boys, then at 7 pm, took the 110 kilometre trip from Felda Ciku to Kenyir dam. The Kelantan side was full of potholes and is narrow and almost estate-like,but once I entered Teganung it was almost magic...new highway,dual carriageway and all the works...[ .Tok Pha has been warming his backside for ages in the cabinet, one wonder what he is doing there, probably just getting fat !? ].

Kenyir Resort run by DRB HICOM, and Kenyir itself is a haven for nature lovers and holiday people but it is currently a well kept secret. Very few people visit Kenyir and fewer Teganuans stay at the resort. It is a wee bit pricey.

But for those who drive all the way from say KL, my advice is say at the resort. It is worth it. Stay a minimum of at least 2 nights and preferably book the lakeview chalets ..you would not be disappointed. Kenyir is for 'philosophers' and thinkers from amongst us. Be mesmerized by the beauty of the lake for hours on end. Be wokened up by the birds chirping. Listen to the wind passing by. A great place for prayer and dzikr and introspection. I revisited Sherlock Holmes' Hounds of Baskerville on the veranda overlooking the great lake. The last time I read him was when I was in form three, some 45 years back ! Masha allah !

"Does Tan Sri Syed ever visit this place ? ", I asked the assistant manager.
" No Sir.."
My god ! These corporate raiders, they are too busy 'raiding' and making 'money', places like this belonging to them they don't even bother. IT IS A GEM of a place. If I run it I would talk to Tan Sri Lee of Palace of Golden Horses and have a seaplane plying the place from these two great hotels and fill it up with rich Arabs and tourists

From Kenyir to Kuantan via Bukit Besi, Muktafi Billah and Paka it is TDM TDM TDM everywhere. Miles and miles of TDM palm estates !

We , Kelantanese have to salute the Teganung chaps for being one up. At least their lands and palm oil are not being raped fully by Chinese taukehs from Sinapo, Johor or Banting flaunting their seven mistresses, with little contribution back to Kelantan apart from their annual contribution which is pittance!
They are nothing special, all lived on borrowed money, the one from Banting get 7k RM back from the World Bank for every hectare he plant with rubber wood. They termed it 'reforestration.'.
We in Kelantan have missed the boat. From Loging to Gua Musang, and right thru to Kuala Krai, it is all gone ! ALL GONE.
When will these ustazs [ and I am being very polite here because I count YB Husam et al as one of my friends ] ever get beyond their 'proverbial' kopiah ?!
I am still very angry.

My only consolation from this short but memorable trip is when I reach Karak. Stopped by to have some durians : The KING.....Musang King in December, mashaalllah !

The KING IS BACK at just 15 RM per kilo.
Used to be 30 RM but Singaporeans this time decided to forgo the 'King' this year because of too high price. So even the lowly Ahmad, Maniam and Ah Kong can have it here.

Other related articles in ' Diary' :
Ramadan in KB in the 60's,
http://drnikisahak.blogspot.com/2009/08/ramadan-1960.html

Bersih.........
http://drnikisahak.blogspot.com/2011/07/bersihbersihbersihbersihbersihbersihber_11.html

Of Slow Temiang and Tales from Yala
http://drnikisahak.blogspot.com/2009/04/tales-from-yala.html

Prayer of the Cicadas
http://drnikisahak.blogspot.com/2011/04/gunong-stong-revisited-prayers-of.html

Alone In The Crowd........
http://drnikisahak.blogspot.com/2011/11/alone-in-crowd-looking-back.html

Case History ....The Most Successful Lorry Driver in Malaysia.

2011-12-25T07:09:00.001+08:00

The most successful lorry driver in Malaysia is not Tiong Nam [ i am here just assuming tiong nam, the transport giant starts as a driver, i think definitely i am awfully wrong ].
The most successful lorry driver in Malaysia in my humble estimation is my patient, Encik Eddy Warman of Shah Alam, aged 56.

He walked into my clinic some 10 years ago complaining of shortness of breath and easy fatiguability. His chest xray showed a heart as big as a football. His echocardiogram revealed a 'heart contraction' of only 25 %. In our linggo we termed it as LVEF [ left ventricular ejection fraction ] of 25 % ! You and me , normal mortals would be somewhere in the the region of between 55 to 80 %. He had dilated congestive cardiomyopathy, a disease affecting the heart muscle, reducing it's innate elasticity and contractility. I 'mentally' gave him a year, at the most 5 years, if god is especially kind to him.

25 % in real term should mean a chap should be even feeling breathless lying inclined on the bed. Eddy that time was still driving his 3-ton lorry, single-handedly.

"When is your medical student daughter coming back from Dublin, Eddy ? ", I asked.
"No Sir, she do not plan to come back yet, she will be a houseofficer there next year and plan to finish her MRCP before she comes back".
Wow ! how do I tell this simple chap that he may not have that 5 to 6 years for her to complete her exams !

Now 10 years on Eddy is still going strong, still plying his lorry trade and his daughter is already a specialist in training in one of the numerous medical school in KL and two other daughters have graduated as doctors from overseas.

He just saw me in my clinic yesterday.
Eddy , in my estimation , the most successful lorry driver in the world !
.
I consider myself priveledged to be given a 'peep' by Allah into the life of simple people like Eddy, to be inextricably involved in some small ways...
That is the surprise 'elements' in my daily practice that continue to keep myself 'ticking' and 'trotting' along.

Christopher Hitchens, Anwar Al Awlaki and DEATH

2011-12-19T20:29:00.005+08:00

KD & Doc Nik,

Christopher Hitchens died yesterday, Friday, at 62 of cancer. Death has silenced a powerful, sane voice in an insane world. He will be sadly missed by his readers.

DC

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

DC,

Yes very sad. He was very gifted & insightful, a true intellectual, but very down to earth & unpretentious. He had a very simple style which could be easily understood. Did you read his best seller "Hitch-22", or his piece on Saddam's execution in 2006?
> > In many ways he reminds me of an old time journalist: follows his conscience when he writes, fearless, hard hitting, very driven. But typical of most dedicated journalists, you can sense a deep cynicism that had become ingrained in him. He admits that he drove himself to cancer by his excessive smoking & drinking.

KD

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

KD,

Yes, it is a loss of a sane voice. His readers will miss him. Yes, I read all his books, and his articles in the Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, IHT, etc. His death reminds me of a heart-breaking observation, "After this lifetime, we will not see each other again." I try to enjoy as much time as I can with my family. Right now, I am in Bali, having breakfast with my Mrs and the boys by the pool, and catching up with my emails. Oh dear, the Internet here is so slow!
Cheers.

DC.

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

Dato',

With Christopher Hitchens's demise I am reminded instead of our own fate not too long from now with that inevitable 'hole in the ground'.
But unlike you Dato' ,I do not share the bleak pessimism that ' after this lifetime, we will not see each other a gain'. On Richard Dawkin's scale of things 'agnostic' he would rate Hitchens at a hardcore 6 / 6 . A true and true hardcore atheist [..and a bloody racist too ].

'After this lifetime, we will not see each other ' is the motto and the crux of agnosticism and atheism.
We are Muslims, may I remind you guys....
Hitchens in his lifetime, used the media and the internet to demonise Islam and Muslims to the max. I do not certainly miss him neither do I celebrate his death. From my perspective he is an ..sshole.

Life is a continuum Dato.
It started in Loth Mahfuz, at a 'time before time', in the 'spirit' world when HE asked,
" Am I not your Lord ?"
and we, all in unison, said,
" Yes , YOU are Rabbul alamin"

In utero, life is pretty basic...it is all black and darkness, a one cellular world multiplicating into a morulla, with tissues multiplicating and systems forming.
In this life, some of us become 'pig headed' and questioned HIS existence and significance. Some just become heedless. Very few stick to the primordial,
'Yes YOU are'.

In the 'Alam Barzark' life as we currently know is suspended. Al Ghazali though wrote volumes on its very nature in 'Remembrance of Death and Life After Death , beautifully translated by T J Winter of Cambridge U.
'Alam Barzark'is a long respite before 'the sirat'

It is only when 'the second horn' is sounded' that 'we all will meet again' and we can rediscuss about 'Hitchens and all his friends, porsches and ferraris, and kampong chaps like me , mull and ponder on the best d24 and musang kings' to our heart's content with the proviso that we are not with Hithens and his friends. Some of us may though may be unfortunate enough to join Hitchens and his friends in the furnace as 'firewood for hell' and would probably be too busy to discuss other things. Allahualam.

Yes, my friends, do not be too dismissive about this life. Don't be too pesimistic.
You Dato, and your 'doctor turned educator son', could still meet.
Where we meet remain our choice.

A' Happy New Year to you , Dato'.

Nik Howk

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

Doc,

Of course, I would devoutly wish to be reunited with my parents, and my wife and children, some day! But reason tells me it will remain an unfulfilled dream. And, I agree it is a non sequitur, many fellow Muslims piss me off.

And a very Happy and Healthy New Year to you, and your family, too. I hope it is not too Un-Islamic to wish you on a Christian New Year!! I may have JAKIM coming after me!!

DC.

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

Dato',

You over-rate your importance too much.
From JAKIM's perspective, you are not worth their overtime !

Consider these:
..At 70 plus, and you rate Hitchens, an atheist, a Muslim -Islam basher of the 1st order, as your hero !
..Believing that there is no tomorrow after your 'last curtain'
..Not changed a wee bit 'to the right' or to 'the left' even after a massive cancer scare in the family
..and feeling many 'fellow Muslims doing their 'religious' job,, pissing you off', etc etc and etc......

No Dato',in my reckoning JAKIM would certainly be not interested at all in you. You are beyond them. The French would term you ' les terrible, chronically invalide and permanently head damaged'

As for me, you are different.
My only interest in you is because you are very 'influential'
You and your people churn out hundreds of young elites, future leaders.
We want them to be 3 times more brainy than NTR or Dr M
Malaysia need that kind of stuff with something extra.
We need people with 'islamic' software too, inbuilt in them.!
People who do not believe in the existence of a tomorrow after today is an anomaly in Malaysia.

People who just got 250 millions 'super-soft' loan from the government and has the cheek and the gall to ask for another 200 from EXIM Bank loan at 1 % interest rate, has no place in the realm of things Malaysian in 2012.

That, Dato' is why I am working on you. I am not exactly truly all altruistic. There is a selfish element in the corner !

Now I am spoiling your Bali holiday already !

Nik Howk

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

Doc Nik,

Ouch! My, you are in a bashing mood!
No, you have not spoilt my Bali holiday. You are a decent guy, and I like you (not in the MCKK sense!). I am enjoying the evening, though a rainy one, watching Man United leading QPR.

DC

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

No Dato',

just having too much of Tariq Ramadan and Hamza Yusuf Hanson lately.
I am just in a pensive and 'daawah' mood, thinking mainly of my very own mortality.

I was in bali some 15 years back, attending some cardiological conference.
Went to a 'makan' place for a spot of lunch, the owner wearing a songkok.....

'Bapak mahu babi guling ?'
It was a cultural shock for a kampong chap like me to be asked by a man in songkok such question !
Now whenever I am in Bali and thinking about food, my oesophagus go into reverse 'peristalsis'. My wife always wonder I stuff a lot of maggi mee in my bag when I head for Bali.

I guess our 'constitution' back here in Malaysia has spoilt my way of thinking :
'Melayu mesti Islam.............it is a permanent head damage of sort and at the political- sociological level if academicians were to write phd's on this, the overall impact on the quality of Islam and Muslims per se in Malaysia would actually on the whole be negative. We take Islam as per joining a club. We behave and think like Jews of Mosses timw : I am holier than thou !

Enjoy your much needed holiday Dato' and a 'Happy New Year to you'.

Nik Howk

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

Doc,

My stomach cannot take even the thought of any part of babi. Yes, a Malay in songkok and babi guling are incongruous indeed!

But Bali has changed, doc, for the better. I was first here when I was in the NOC in 1969, when indeed babi guling was ubiquitous. After all, only 20% of the population are Muslim. I have been here about a dozen times since, and the range of good restaurants has expanded to beat any in KL. I was at Matisse last night. It was a combination of art gallery and fine dining. Tastefully donsuperb had a superb seafood dinner. Exquisite. My Mrs and the five boys loved it.

Tariq Ramadan? Sorry. I don't think much of him. Inconsistent in argument, and makes too much of his father's Islamic Brotherhood background. No, he and Hamza Yusuf Hanson do not repel me at all. I just have an honest divergence of opinions on a few points. That is all. And I respect, and am comfortable with, your dakwaah position. You have every right to it. And you are polished about it. But I AM pissed off by the local religious department zealots, the know-alls and their intrusions into others' private lives, and peeping toms and salacious religious bullies of couples and women.

Re my family's modest attempt in private education, you are being more kind than accurate. We are not influential to any significant degree. But I think we teach our students to think for themselves, to distinguish fact from opinion, policy from propaganda. We give emphasis to Math, Science, research and essays, and debates. Students are NEVER smacked down for their opinions, but asked to explain them clearly and logically. This prepares them well for a university education. Most of them go abroad to decent universities. Half my English essay class last year went to Oxbridge, London, Edinburgh, Princeton, MIT, Harvard, Monash, and Melbourne. Last week, one was invited for an interview at Somerville College, Oxford, for the 2012 admission. A straight A-star student, plays in the school orchestra, and Grade 8 on the piano. I wrote my evaluation of the candidate, and expect the tutor for admission at Somerville will let me know the interview result by the end of this week.

Yes, Doc, a few thousand of our students, of all races, went abroad, but only only a fraction return to develop this country. Those who return send THEIR children to us, the second generation of Cempakans. This is a source of some satisfaction to us. But the sad thing is that many of the educated Malaysian children, privately schooled at Cempaka, do not return...

So, how "influential" are we? In the lives of the students we teach, yes a lot. They are independent minded. A number are high in UMNO, in the DAP, PKR, etc. They are not sheep, they are diverse in their thinking and convictions. In the numbers that come back? Not much, I am afraid...

Salam. Happy New Year.

DC.

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

Dato',

You just need one 'Umar Abdul Aziz' to change the whole political-economic and sociological landscape of Malaysia. When will we ever get that 'Umar Abdul Aziz' from your institution, if you , the founder, do not take seriously that there indeed is a 'tomorrow after today ! '.

We have too many 'clowns' up there now crowding the cabinet and the supreme council who do not actually seriouly comprehend that '. Their lips and mouth may say 'yes we do' but their hearts are hardened, void and empty !.

With respect to Tariq Ramadan and Hamza Yusuf Hanson, under the circumstances they are doing a marvelous job speaking for Islam and the Muslims. We need more ulama' of their calibre speaking for us in the English speaking world. I know their level of scholarsip and probably piety could probably be not any where near compared to their seniors in the Arab world but this is 2012 : connectivity, 'marketing' ability and the need to be heard loud and clear in the current lingua franca of the world is paramount to the spread of the DIN. Even if it does not spread, it is OK, at least it must be heard. Truth should not be bottled up in books and kitab collecting dust somewhere in some obscure libraries. It must be argued vehemently and heard. If it moves mountain , alhamdullillah ! If it does not, we have done our 'job'. Changing hearts is not our preorgative . It is Allah's.

I salute them because at the end of our time, we would not only be asked as to how we get that Jaguar in the garage, or that expensive holiday house on a meagre government stipend, or that 25 million ringgit diamond from SA for our dear wife [ some clown tells us she has been saving since she was in standard two ! ],or how do we pay for that sexy, alluring trophy wife at home.... we would also be asked why we did not spread HIS good words to Mr Lee, our next door neighbour or to Mr Karupiah, the nice morning newspaper vendor or Mr Johnson, the First Secretary of the US embassy.. Why we allow them to remain in disarray, godless and rudderless etc and etc and etc.

Mr Ramadan and Hamza Yusuf Hanson, under their situation and constraints, I feel sure can account themselves fairly well.

CAN WE ?

Nik Howk

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

now let us hear anwar al awlaki's advisory on DEATH :

Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-x7EvPRCcI&feature=related
Part 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzOYQ0T59Vo&feature=related
Part 4:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQL4BziNVlY&feature=related

Addendum :
20 / 12 / 11 Mohamad 'Mustaffa' in memorium..........

This article is dedicated to the memory of my late uncle, Mohamed bin Jaafar aka ' Mohamed Mustaffa', one time Kelantan champion at 400, 800 metres and 400 metres hurdle in the early sixties before the likes of Asir Victor and A S Nathan took centre stage. He died yesterday at 11 AM in IJN from intractable heart failure aged 81.

In the late 60's he had to give up his ' cushy ' Royal Custom and Excise job because he refused to join the rest of his 'friends' from taking 'double' salary when posted to Penang free port. ' Double salaries' in some sensitive places like entry points, ports and tols areas,within the PDRM , Immigration and Royal Custom were the norm then, I do not know whether it is now ! There was the standard government stipend , and the was the 'swasta contribution' divided pro rata from top to bottom as per necessary...........

Had the single distinction, I think , of 'meeting' Nabi twice in his sleep. Never confided this fact to his friends or even his brothers. I came to know because I asked him a direct question which he could not avoid.

When I asked him 'why he think he was bestowed such honour and gift'.
He told me he was not scholarly or gifted with great mind or a cut above the rest but as an afterthought he confided probably his unfailing attempt and love of the 'night prayer' [ tahajjud ] probably did it...He ardently loved 'tahajjud' since youth.

My God !, 50 to 60 years of 'tahajjud'.
Yes, Mohamad Mustaffa was just an ordinary man, a failed custom officer, a champion middle distance runner in his youth, a small time gold smith in Kuala Krai.
50 to 60 years of daily 'tahajjud' sets him apart from us mere mortals.
One can be a Tan Sri, a Datuk Sri or a failed 'lembu entreprenuer'. These are not important to 'the people of the higher' circles, the malaikats. They do not discuss him. Tahajjud, sedekah and zikir, that sets you apart.

May his soul be amongst the blessed by Allah the Most High.
Al Fatihah.

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

22 / 12 / 11

Doc.

Please accept my deepest sympathies on the passing of your uncle Allayarham Mohamad bin Jaafar. Al Fatihah

DC

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

22 / 12 / 11

Dato'

tq dato. you are very kind.

quite uncanny dato, 12 hours after our discussion and my write up on 'death'.

he was just on the verge of being discharged from intensive care at ijn......such is the uncertainty related with any 'death'....we cardiologists are always aware of these uncertainties but if tested in a court of law, may look like a clown infront of a 'clever' lawyer and a judge lacking wisdom.

my uncle, he had a good clean life alright,insyaallah

simple, relatively uneducated folks like him refusing a good 'double pay' in the 60's is something......choosing the huge indignity of working under a father in law in the uncelebrated and lowly paid job as a goldsmith apprentice instead....... rather than face HIM later ,and unable to explain for that pittance of a pay taken unrightfully.

i write up on him just as an example of many other clean living, simple , ordinary folks who go unnoticed in this world of facetiousness and false facades.

totally faceless people like him ...and in the main with no 'story to tell and be told' because 'we' as a people are attracted to 'stories about celebrities , 'sultans' of industry, politics and power. their lives of hediousness and heedlessness and plenty.

people who shakes society and often times [ as we are unfortunately reminded from time to time ] breaks.....daylight robbers, failed 'lembu traders' and pirates etc and etc.

' people of the higher circles' [ the malaikats ] though look at us from a different light and angle....only we don't seem to care.

and if you are in HIS position, and have some 6 billion souls to judge from time immemorial, and having to decide where to place these 6 billion 'clowns' after their planet earth's sojourn. a great of majority of these 6 billion clowns : ungrateful, unschooled, ignorant and downright heedless.

your KPI must be quite simple, constant and broadly defined under a major' heading' : TAQWA.......
under which there will be subheadings such as solat, zikir, doa, remembrances, sedekah etc and etc and etc....
and leaving in some small print, for good measure , the possibility of a 'grand pardon' if some clowns at the right old age of 70 to 80, suddenly after a long life of heedlessness decides to do a taubat nasuha....
beyond 40, if one still do not touch base, very few at 70 or 80 do turnaround but those small print are meant for the very few that does....'.pintu taubat sentiasa terbuka'.

so dato' for guys like us, don't ever give up hope !
the 'door' to HIM is always open.

very philosophical this morning

death is quite commonplace to me.

inwardly i do not mourn his passing actually, as i think i roughly can guess the general direction where he is 'going'.... it is my own mortality and my offsprings which pricks and bothers me.
too much 'karat2 jahiliah' and attachment to this 'duniya'.

allahualam

nik howk

The Man Who Came to Dinner... or 'F#ck You America

2011-12-10T05:48:00.012+08:00

The Man Who Came to Dinner

John Swinton, the doyen of the New York press corps, upon his retirement , made the following speech:

“There is no such thing, at this stage of the world’s history in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dare write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my papers, before twenty four hours, my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting of an independent press? We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”

I do understand that you have to eat like all of us and therefore must keep your mouth shut. You are Jewish and so am I. (Sephardic).
For the sake of truth, I will give you here another side to the Libyan story. Just imagine a country where there is no electricity bill. Electricity is free to all its citizens. There is no interest on loans, banks were state owned and loans given at zero percent interest by law. Having a home was considered a human right. All newlyweds received US$ 50 000 from the govt to buy their first apartment and to help them start a family. Education and medical treatments were free. Before Qaddafi, 25 % of the population were literate. Today this figure is 83 percent. Should Libyans want to take up farming, they would receive land, a farmhouse, equipments, seeds and livestock to kick start their operation, absolutely free of charge. If citizens could not find the education or medical facilities they needed, the govt would fund them to go abroad, free of charge, and would get some US$2,300 per month for accommodation and car allowance. Cars were government subsidized to the tune of 50%. Fuel prices were $0.14 per litter. The country had no external debt and its reserves amounted to some $170 billion, now frozen globally plus some 27 tons of gold, which the new regime found safely in the National Bank. Any graduate unable to find a job would get the average salary for the profession, as if he/she was employed, until employment found. A portion of oil sales were credited once a year to every citizen bank account. A mother who gave birth, immediately got some $5000. Forty loaves of bread cost $0.15. 25% of citizens have a university degree. An immense project bringing water from aquifers in the south made it available all over the country, free of charge.

That is what that “tyrant” Qaddafi gave to his people. There are some 150 tribes in Libya and a strong hand was necessary if the country was to remain in one piece. Every citizen was in possession of a military weapon. Qaddafi was not frightened of his own people. The so called rebels who took over, so we are told, would not have lasted a few days without NATO air power, British and French commandos and thousands of mercenaries. Those are the winners.

Now another Karzai has been installed in Tripoli, and the country can be plundered at the victors’ whim and fancy. It takes $1 to extract a barrel of Libyan oil and today’s price is over $100. Total the French company has already grabbed some 30% of the Libyan state oil company. BP is starting exploration. And of course massive contracts for the reconstruction of Libya will be handed over to US and European companies. Of the sovereign fund, only some 1.2 billion have been released out of the $170 billion. With the state of the European economy, I doubt very much if Libya will see the rest any time soon. Now Libyans are free as you say, but as Janice Joplin used to say…freedom is just another word for nothing else to lose, as Libyan queueing for funds at their bank’s door are finding out. Qaddafi is gone and so are the perks. What will be left is a terrible civil war. The price of democracy!

“It is the joyous jiggling dance Americans do –USA! USA!- when their government slaughters someone illegally. It is primitive, but it is positively Libyan”. Wrong. It is positively American! Just saw a movie on the training of the US Army before going to Iraq. Soldiers running and singing:”Kill the women! Kill the children! “Then we are shown the results when civilians are gunned down in the streets by those braves. All on film. When they come back home, realising what they have done, they just commit suicide! These are ordinary Sunday soldiers with families.
We can hide the truth with prison sentences, but the truth eventually come through, and unfortunately for us we cannot plug the dyke any longer.

I told you guys when they are at it in libya........it was for cheap Libyan oil, it was because Ghadaffy has grown too big for his shoes; it was because Ghadaffy himself had become cleverer and gone into Africa, Chad and all to compete for oil.

Same thing with Saddam. He was getting to big. But at least during his time Shia was not slaughtering Sunnis and Sunnis , Shia; people did not live and eat where they shit.

Yes Saddam and Ghadaffy by Western standard can be called 'tyrants' but where are we now ?

Nik Howk

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

Yes doc, you did, and you were absolutely right. Many of us felt the same way.

But dictators, "elected" or otherwise, tend to ignore the rule that a leader must have the cachet of legitimacy. This legitimacy must be demonstrated institutionally by transparent, fair elections. Such elections not only serve to establish the cachet of legitimacy, but it also provides the mechanism of a peaceful change of government. We live in the 21st century industrial state, not a 9th century tribal society. Elections are an indispensable institution of a modern state.

In the absence of such a basic institution, rulers tend to believe that they are there permanently by divine right. In such a situation, change can only be affected through violence. Pressures build up internally. A situation is, thus, ripe for foreign intervention to lance the boil. Case in point - Saddam Hussein of Iraq.

In Islamic countries, there is often the romantic yearning for a 'benign caliph' to lead the country, and dictators often view themselves as this benign caliph. This is the seed of their own destruction. This is the lesson that Hosni Mobarak of Egypt, and Zainal A'bidin of Tunisia, demonstrated. This is a lesson that the generals in Egypt have yet to understand.

DC.

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

Dato',at least in Saddam's time people had their decent meals and they did not have to live within their own sewer and Sunnis were not killing Shia and Shia killing Sunnis..
When will we 'stupid Muslims' ever going to learn that the so-called 'secular' descendents of the old days ahlil kitabs are not our friends ? And I am putting this too mildly.....

Where is my friend, Nadzru....he is being too quiet now. I wander whether his construction business in Libya picks up with the new regime ? Good luck to him.

Nik Howk
ps : ...and by the way if you have to deal with 150 tribes, all hard core jahiliah type, typical of Arabs of the desert and Northern Africans, it is not easy to rule. If you are 'lembik' like NTR or Pak lah, and not spilled some recalcitrant 'brains and blood' on the tarmac, you cannot run countries like Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq.

A million Muslims, men, women and children have died in Iraq since the 'crusaders' took over. So what is the meaning of 'democracy' Dato , if I may ask ?
What price 'democracy' if that damn place is not yet ready with institutions and people for i ?.
Let us not join the bandwagon of parrots longing for 'democracy, democracy, democracy....

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

from Grand pa :

You right doc Nik Howk.if the philosophy in your life is to have 4 square
meals every day without fail: Perhaps Iraqis should wake Sadam up from the
dead and rule again and flog Iraqis and instill fear into the people of
Iraq again so that they can have that 4 square meals every day in the
living hell of their life.

In the first place he is known to have killed hundreds if not thousands of
Kurds- Kurds are Muslims. That is genocide. I would kill Sadam even if I
was not an Iraqi (Figure of speech)
Wassalaam.

Grand Pa

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

From Ruslan,

GPa,
Always remember that the news we get internationally are from ''intellectual prostitutes''.
At least locally, we have two ''versions'' of newspapers to read, but internationally, we have no choice but to read & rely on what were given to us, whether they are from Arabic or non-Arabic sources.
Salam,
LanK

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

My sentiment exactly like yours Doc.... Countries like that need strongman rule.... what we leant in history as 'benevolent despots', ... except after 20-30 years in power they dropped the 'benevolent'. and add 'ruthless'.

But I agree with you... Iraqis under Saddam or Libyans have 4 square meals... maybe 3... but they are not at each others throats.

Dato' Nik Sidek

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

Other articles on the blog :
A world gone mad, click here
The Ugly American, click here
Noam Choamsky Interview, click here
'.

morning has broken..................

2011-12-07T04:00:00.013+08:00

From an individual perspective, each man is the center of his own universe.....
Once his conciousness temporarily cease through sleep [ minor death ], and 'permanently' [ at least from the secular, non spiritual perspective ] through death, his 'universe' literally ceased.

One trick out of the handful of spiritual 'tricks in the bag' to making and feeling ourselves very special is to change our paradigm, relook at our 'very own small universe' through an entirely different prism :
When morning has broken, the Lord of the Universe, ya Rabbul alamin, reorientates and realigns all HIS billions of stars and planets in HIS galaxies in the Milky Ways, to give each individual man yet another day to start afresh, to repent for the heedlessness and corruption of yesterday, to look forward with the freshness of an unblemished, clean sheet of white cloth.

GOD"S RE-CREATION OF A NEW DAY !
One need to just, with utmost sincerity and humilty, doa the following :

1 .‘All praise is for Allah who gave us life after having taken it from us and unto Him is the resurrection.’

2 .‘All praise is for Allah who restored to me my health and returned my soul and has allowed me to remember Him.’

3 .La ilaha illal-lahu wahdahu la shareeka lah, lahul-mulku walahul-hamd, wahuwa AAala kulli shay-in qadeer, subhanal-lah, walhamdu lillah, wala ilaha illal-lah wallahu akbar, wala hawla wala quwwata illa billahil-AAaliyyil AAatheem. Rabbigh-fir lee
‘None has the right to be worshipped except Allah, alone without associate, to Him belongs sovereignty and praise and He is over all things wholly capable. How perfect Allah is, and all praise is for Allah, and none has the right to be worshipped except Allah, Allah is the greatest and there is no power nor might except with Allah, The Most High, The Supreme.’
And then supplicates:
‘O my Lord forgive me.’

If he then performs ablution and prays the fajr prayer, his prayer will be accepted, insyaallah.

However, The Key to the Garden is :
How many of us do this with sincerity and humility every morning ?
How many of us do comprehend fully what we say and pray ?
How many of us put our 'hearts' into our prayer ?

Similar articles in the blog:
Light, click here
Key To The Garden, click here

Fundamentals of Tassawwuf..............[ part 1 & 2 ]

2011-11-25T04:32:00.029+08:00

[ of Tassawwuf, Aqidah, and the kalimah Shahadah.....a Ma'al Hijrah special ]

I have always been curious and open-minded about a particular group of Muslims labelled as sufi/ tasaswwuf / tarekat [ ter- ikat, to their Malaysian detractors as per 'tied by the necks', an unfair labelling no doubt without firm basis and without any scholarly dissection ! ] etc etc.

To be frank, personally , beyond the straight 'jacketing' and dry stuff of the 'fuqahas',[ who oftentimes resort to serious name-calling ] I do find these 'travelers' have more to offer to millions of ordinary people like you and me who want to get beyond the level of practising Muslims, towards love for HIM, improved spirituality and Ihsan.

But this is just a personal opinion. This is still a free world, even within the realm of faith and Islam.

They called themselves, 'travelers in this life'.
What make these 'travelers'/ salik/ lovers, tick ? How they 'thinks'? What moves them ? etc etc and etc.

They come under many labels but as we already know, labels are pretty misleading. Let us examine a 'traveler',Dr 'Shakyh' Hussien Abdul Sattar. By most standards he seemed pretty young, 39 or at the most 40. He lectures here on 'The Fundamentals of Tassawwuf. Give him say 3 hours of your valuable time, just listen to him. Make your own judgement on Tassawwuf after that. The 1st lecture is quite didactic but I find the 2nd part very meaningful. If we can 'tolerate' him I will publish his remaining discourse later, if we can't, we will throw him into the dustbin of obscurity, and forget about him.

About the speaker :
........................

"Shaykh Husain [may Allah preserve him] was born in Chicago (USA) in 1972. After completing his primary education at schools in his hometown near Chicago, he joined the University of Chicago where he studied Biology, Arabic and Islamic Civilization. It was during this period that he began his study of sacred knowledge, studying Arabic grammar (nahw), Hanafi Fiqh and Usul al-Fiqh under ulama (scholars) in Chicago. In 1994 Shaykh Husain also began training in tasawwuf (Islamic spirituality) under Shaykh Zulfiqar Ahmad, one of the leading shaykhs of tasawwuf.
After obtaining his undergraduate degree, Shaykh Husain enrolled in the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago. Along with his medical studies, he continued his studies of sacred knowledge. In his final year he took leave from medical school to focus on his religious studies, traveling to Syria and then Pakistan, where he studied a traditional curriculum for a number of years under some of their greatest scholars.
Throughout his years of study, Shaykh Husain continued his training under Shaykh Zulfiqar Ahmad. He was blessed with the close company of his Shaykh, learning the science of the purification of the heart. The deep taqwa and firm adherence to the sunnah and Shariah that characterized his teacher were eventually transferred to the student and Shaykh Husain was formally authorized in tasawwuf by Shaykh Zulfiqar in July 2001.
Shaykh Husain has completed medical school and currently works as a Physician at the University of Chicago Hospitals. During his free time, he teaches and lectures across the United States on various subjects of Islamic knowledge, including purification of the soul.
Shaykh Husain is presently engaged in editing and publishing the translations of his teacher’s books into English. In addition, he is completing his own written works including the popular series, “Fundamentals of Classical Arabic” and a manual on Hanafi fiqh entitled, “The Stairs to Bliss.”

Introduction to Tassawwuf:
click here

2nd part:
Allowing the soul to blossom; Looking for that 'one moment in time'
click here,

It is imperative and goes without saying that, a 'traveler' need a very firm, unshakeable foundation of faith [ Aqidah ] and this had been discussed previously by Dr Abdullah Yasin in this blog.
Dr Abdullah Yasin was in my neighbourhood last night giving a scintillating lecture, as typical of Dr Abdullah yasin, on Aqidah, Tauhid Rabbibiyah, Tauhid Maksud etc and etc.
Down here I load a previous lecture of his on Foundation of Aqidah. Please give him some time and listen. Aqidah is foundational and of prime importance. It is a difference between eternally gravitating as the living firewood and fuel of Hell or gracing the High Heaven, despite a life full of prayer and ignorant piety :
click here,

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi, dealt in great length and depth on the meaning and ramification of The Shahadah, "La ila haillllalah, Muhamadarasullallah "
A 6 hour lecture altogether. We Muslims in this Nusantara take lightly our understanding of the kalimah and thus our aqidah, stressing too much on the details of the solat etc and etc, to the point we as an ummah are easily mislead into the greater error of 'syiriq' and 'bidaah'.
click here,

Today is the eve of Ma'al Hijrah. I am presenting to you guys a soothing symphony of 'Bach & Mozart' equivalent for your souls. Do listen and ponder.
Islam is for those who THINK!

May Allah give us all blessing and Rahmah in the Here and the Hereafter....

Al Ghazali, The Man and His Teaching : The Beginning of Guidance

2011-11-23T21:36:00.006+08:00

Before we embark on Part 1 of this highly rarefied theological discourse, cut and dry stuff of 'The Beginning of Guidance' by Al Ghazali , let us revisit him in a documentary, ' The Alchemy of Happiness '
click here

What triggered Al Ghazali's existential crisis was in part due his sufi-poet brother, Ahmad Al Ghazali, who challenged his relative 'bookish' and non-experiential approach with respect to faith.
click here,

'The Beginning of Guidance' is a compendium of short treatise written by Al Ghazali for seekers of knowledge. A road map of sort.

While the IHYA is his magnum opus, 'The beginning of Guidance', much less voluminous than IHYA, is no less important. Beginning this week I would 'insert' once weekly this 30 or so segment of the book, discussed by Mufti Abdul Rahman Yusuf, of Darul Uloom, UK
Part 1,click here,

Alone In The Crowd : Looking back...........

2011-11-16T22:36:00.024+08:00

Sha,

You asked Papa to list out Papa's top 50 blog articles for your perusal.

My God !
That is a lot of work , having written more than 450 articles over the last 3 years.
The last 3 years Papa have been writing only with you guys in mind, and only for posterity, and you are telling me indirectly you have not yet peruse through. You guys are too much , you and your brothers.

To be frank though, I wrote to keep Papa's sanity. If I dont write I would end up shooting someone very important. That is the amount of anger a simple raayat like Papa had to endure looking at the clowning and the clowns going about their daily business in this 'Malaysia Boleh' of ours. That is the political part.
95 % of the rest is pure daaawah...this constitute pleasure. Proselytising in our profession is not politically correct but Papa, on a daily basis do see more people than patients who has problem within their souls than 'pain' from their hearts !

All are my favourites, as most are written from the heart. Like the 1st one on Lina Joy. You guys were sleeping then, Papa could not sleep thinking of the future fate of all the Lina Joys of the world.

At my age I can't help but occasionally feel 'alone in the crowd' knowing some of the people I 'see through' today,I may not see in the next 6 months; knowing I need to seriously realign some 'souls' close to Papa but out of political correctness and politeness I cant; etc and etc and etc.

Here are my favourite 20 or so.

Wrote about my form-mate Hasan Marican some 6 months before he was'unjustly' sacked from his position [ in my book, he was sacked , they don't even dare give him a farewell dinner at Petronas ]. Now Madame 'R' has been noted to visit The Tower with impunity. My God ! tak cukup lagikah 'precious stones', bajus and shoes of this lady ?? !

I enjoyed visiting the Grand Old Man of Kota Bharu. Despite walking around with an implantable defibrillator now, in the affectionate words of Tuanku Sultan sometime ago, "TGNA is an 'old diesel engine' and despite all, very tahan lasak" . I am happy that TGNA and the young sultan are getting along fine. Monarchies in the Non Federated States enjoy more unwritten 'power' than their brother sultans elsewhere. Cordial 'Istana- MB' relationship is of prime importance in states like Kelantan, Kedah, Perlis and Teganung.

Papa had a brief but very telling altercation with the present NSTT and Prima Apakahnamadiadah CEOs during the BERSIH period. Our rogue politicians had their ways mainly because our journalists have no balls ! I dont apologise for repeating this !
To Papa, a free press is more important than a free judiciary. A free press is 'more preventative medicine', 'judiciary' is ' repairative' after the damage has been done.

Your dad had 'played god' in his favourite sport 'endurance' several years back. The current state of the sport is dismal, full with people who are always ready to please but nothing positive to offer. Despite millions of tax payers money spent in the last local WEC, we are going no where vertically. Short on substance , very huge on forms ! As usual.Typical Malaysia Boleh. Thank God, Papa has retired from this sport. NonethelessIt is very painful to see and watch from the sideline all the nonsense going on in a sport that papa and the good old Dato Awang helped popularised in the early 98's.

Papa am a firm believer in exercise but exercise per se without doing something to our mind is a lot of wasted time, thus, " Mixing The Profane and the Sublime' article. Ther was also a series of articles on longevity and my favuorite amongst them is 'Longevity : A Muslim's perspective"
Sometime last year papa felt elated in being able to 'turn around' a dear friend who had some small quarrel with his God.

Sha,

As you know, Kelantan is 95 % Malay and Muslim. Papa has no quarrel with Dr M but all of us Kelantanese can hold him accountable in a big way, rightly of wrongly, for the level of poverty and iniquities happening in that state. Read 'From Libya to Tok Bali' for a full account.

There seem to be a lot of flak in the parliament lately about the Corporate Lembu. I brought it up some 4 years ago when a friend also in the lembu/kambing business complained his lot did not get the 250 million soft loan. I told him it must be OK and should not complain as they already got MAS earlier on !

And finally Sha, what have Sutan Amir Kaharuddin [ Mandor Diman ],Tok Jeleha Raub, Tok Gajah, Mat Kilau, King Ghaz, Tun Dr Siti Hasmah and Haji Yusuf Rawa share in common with us ?
We are migrants from Pagar Ruyong some 200 years back. We are Rao's.
Our fighting motto is : 'Bior mati di terkam harimo, jangan lari di kejor anjing ! '

You and Papa Sha, we have got to work on all our fours....let us not go for all these nonsense, TIDAK BERKAT .

Our prophet advised us that a clever Muslim lives in 2 worlds, The Here and the Hereafter. It is not meant to make us less than excellent in our conduct and thinking. On the contrary by so doing we should be the perfect khalifah for the world. In all papa wrote 18 articles on ' Death and Dying'.

وَقَالَ ٱرۡڪَبُواْ فِيہَا بِسۡمِ ٱللَّهِ مَجۡر۪ٮٰهَا وَمُرۡسَٮٰهَآ‌ۚ إِنَّ رَبِّى لَغَفُورٌ۬ رَّحِيمٌ۬ (٤١)
Bismillah himajreha wa mursaha inna Rabbi la Ghafur ru Rahim.
{Hud , 11 : 41 }
[ In the name of Allah be its course and its mooring. Lo! my Lord is Forgiving,
Merciful.]..Prophet Nuh alaihisalam on the eve of 'The Big Flood'.

Children,

In life, do not be afraid to 'be alone in the crowd', because at the end of our time we all will be alone in that small hole in the ground.
The quantum that will differentiate us, is at the end of the day, our individual level of piety [ taqwa ] and remembrance of HIM [ dzikr ]

Papa.

Lina Joy Revisited, click here
Alone In The Crowd : Power of Dzikr, click here
Hasan Marican, click here
Case History, click here
TGNA in Conversation [ French ], click here
BERSIH, click here
Playing God, click here
Mixing the Profane and the Sublime, click here
A Letter To An Agnostic Friend, click here
Life Changing Lecture, click here
Advice I Wish My Children Will Read and Heed, click here
longevity, A Muslim Perspective, click here
From Libya to Tok Bali, click here
Redza , click here
Remembrance of Death, click here
Unto HIM is the journeying, click here
Let us All Burn The Quran , click here
Tan Seri, Let Us use The ISA !, click here
Read My Friend, Read This Universe, click here
Prayer of The Cicadas, click here
Leh Budu, Corporate Lembu, Shah Apakahnamadiadah, R'fidah and all that jazz, click here
Big Bang, Surah Al Anbiya and A Century of Science, click here
Bior mati diterkam harimo, jangan lari di kejor anjing, click here
On Life, Dying and Life after Death, click here
Let Us Have One School System PLEASE ! ,click here

Alone In The Crowd : The Power of Dzikr

2011-11-12T21:07:00.026+08:00

I was a wee bit 'un-eased' last night.
Tossing about in bed unable to sleep. Three hours earlier just back from a glittering Malay wedding reception held in a KL five star hotel, sitting dinner and all; guests resplendent in their best three piece suits; innumerable number of young people going up stage giving their glowing eulogies to the bride and groom; served a fusion 10 course dinner and finally a 'band and dance' to top it all up. A glittering event indeed. A A1Malaysia event par excellence. Najib Tun Razak would have been proud of this.

Could not pinpoint was it the 'fusion dinner' or was it the chay kwaey teow with 'kerang' I had for lunch. Something was not right,perhaps I am getting too old for my age.

3 AM, still could not sleep. My hp rang. A friend [ a much junior medical colleague actually ] in JB rang to tell me that his dear father who was just admitted into the medical ward of GHJB for observation of a recent onset 'central chest pain' [ 'unstable angina' in medical parlance or acute coronary syndrome, will be dealt later in another blog article ] , suddenly collapsed at 1 AM in the general medical ward while under 'observation'and now transferred to a CCU bed, in coma.

Duly intubated and ventilated. Pulse thready and BP on the floor at 60/ ?? Despite being on heroic measures of quadruple inotropes [ intravenous heart muscle stimulants ]. Sounds to me like his father had had a massive heart attack followed by cardiogenic shock following too much muscle loss. Dismal prognosis from the sound of it. The GHJB guys have lost that 'small and short window of opportunity' to change the 'possible outcome'. A primary infarct angioplasty and stenting earlier in the evening before the 'complete closure of the coronories' could have made all the difference. A common fallacy and mistake in being admitted for 'observation' but not really 'observed'.

Maximal modalities of medical treatment all up and situation still dismal. Doing too much now but too late . The 'bus' has already left the terminal. Muscle loss from the infarct has occurred. All the 'iblis Ifs' playing in my mind at 3 AM.

I consoled my friend but told him him that 'as it is now', situation sounded dismal.
" Please do not leave your father. Have someone always reading the Yasin into his ears. He may not be able to hear it now , but his soul may. It sounds like it is a matter of hours before the old heart will pack up ! ".
I was not sure how this kind of advice rub on my friend but at 3 am that was the best I could offer. The window of opportunity was already lost in the evening of 'observation'!

How people respond to your sincere and honest counsel/ advice ??
In my experience,at the worst of time, it differ greatly from people to people depending on their level of piety and ilm, or rather their level of 'secularism' for want of better term. A perfect position and timing for 'the messenger' to get shot !

Could still recall an incidence some 15 years earlier. A Tan Seri in his late 70's, not my regular patient, suddenly admitted with a massive heart attack [ his third one this time ]and shortly in the ward, also had a stroke. All modalities of possible treatment used up and to no avail. The old heart wanted to just go and stop beating.He was dying, full stop.
I summarily called a meeting with close family members and told them the plan : A NO PLAN.
"I have run out of all plans. All that need to be done has been done. Prognosis is dismal. We have reached the end of the road.Your Dad is dying. Let him go gracefully. let us do the 'Yasin' bit.", all to that effect. Family accepted it calmly.

All went OK. The old man died surrounded by close family and all. 'Alhamdullillah' I thought to myself, 'this is the typical ideal Muslim setting related to death'. Prayers and all, no 'ai ya ya ', no howling etc etc.
Four days later, two daughters and son came barging into my outpatient consultation room and demanded an apology from me for use of 'language' inappropriate. 'Their mother utterly depressed because of that !'
I thought I was doing well, but my Malay may have been 'lousy'. They got my 'apology'.
That is medical practice for you. It has it ups and down. Even when you think you are doing right, you can be perceived to be 'wrong'. With these sort of people, if you dont apologize readily enough you could get a very hot lawyer's letter on your desk in no time !

I put all these to our current relative lack of REMEMBRANCE and on this aspect let us all listen to Shaykh Al Yacoubi :
click here

quotable quotes on dzikr :

'The Chain of Quintessences'............
The quintessence of the world is man. The quintessence of man is religion. The quintessence of religion is prayer. The quintessence of prayer is invocation. Here lies the meaning of the Quranic verse: The invocation of God is greater [than anything else]. If man had no more than a few instants to live, he would no longer be able to do anything but invoke God. He would thereby fulfill all the demands of prayer, of religion, of the human state.

'The Two Great Moments'.............
There are two moments in life which are everything, and these are the present moment, when we are free to choose what we would be, and the moment of death when we no longer have any choice and the decision belongs to God. Now, if the present moment is good, death will be good; if we are now with God -- in this present which is ceaselessly being renewed but which remains always this one and only moment of actuality -- God will be with us at the moment of death. The remembrance of God is a death in life; it will be a life in death.

Martin Lings

Other related articles in the blog :
On Life, Dying and Life After Death, click here

Stressed ??..try 're-intrepreting' your reality

2011-11-10T06:25:00.011+08:00

Feeling stressed lately ?
Tell me who is not stressed in this world !

As Muslims we do not need Yoga to deal with stress. We are in contact with HIM at least five times a day.
We have Tahajjud.
We have DOA.
We have Zikir.
We have Astagfirullah. WE have Istikarah.
We have 99 beautiful names, Asma al Husna.
And finally, we have REDZA
A whole load of 'system' and armamentarium to help us deal with 'Stress'.

Use them in your daily struggle thru this 'stressful life' if you have to.
Use them.

I want to share my 'secrets' with you guys on my personal 'destressors'.
Whenever I am stressed or feeling down, I 'mix' the 'profane and the sublime'. It has become an art form of sort to me after doing this for years !
I may be swimming 20 laps in the pool and doing my mental sum with the '99 beautiful names'. I may be 80 feet down at the ocean sea bed doing the 'subha nallah'. I may be riding on my horse for hours doing the 'zikir'.
If every thing failed, I go back to my Quran. There somehow I will stumble on some 'ayats' that would make the pain and suffering 'endurable' and clear up the misty , black clouds above me.

Some of you guys may want to try the 'Quran'. Try you must.
We Muslims must have ilm and forget about Yoga , pleassssseeee !...
[ I know Datuk Marina and Zuraidah Apakahnamadiadah of that certain Cancer NGO like Yoga and could not see and comprehend why majority of the scholars are against it.
Wise up Madams ! Why expose our already fledgling 'Aqidah' to uncertainties when we already have a fail-safe system on dealing with STRESS ? ]

Listen to this young man here,insyaallah we may benefit from him :
Reality is in the interpretation, click here
Choose your own Reality, click here
Check in your feeling, click here
The concept of 'Muraqabah' in interpreting Reality, click here
Fear, click here
Tuned to the DUNYA, click here
...and finally,the journey is INWARD, not outward, click here

Similar link on the blog :
Shaykh Hussien Yee on Stress, click here
Mixing The Profane and the Sublime, click here

Living With Ourselves : Prof T J Winter aka Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad

2011-11-05T18:57:00.008+08:00

WUKUF,
at Arafah,
Makkah :

On this very eve of the opening of the 'veils within the seven heavens' between the abdals and 'The Master', when there is no 'check and balances between your prayer and doa and HIM, on this very important moment in time that only occur for a few hours in any one year, I find Prof T J Winter's discourse on ' Living with Ourselves' very succinct.

We live in an age where forms over rides substance, where words no longer carry its proper meaning, where being politically correct seem to be more important than being true.

We live in an age where we know the particulate and the subatomic, the vastness of the universe is so and so billion light years from one extreme edge to the opposite extreme edge.

But we also live in an age where the souls are subjugated to the body and mind, at least in people who still believe they do have souls at the centre of it all. We live in an age where the profane and the secular take center stage. As to the sublime, who cares ?

Let us listen to this December 2010 lecture by one of my favourite Muslims in the West. Prof T J Winter :
click here

Under The Shade of The Quran.......Sayyid Qutb

2011-10-08T07:55:00.037+08:00

Many things were said about Sayyid Qutb. Unsavory, unpleasant things both from his enemies and from Muslims.

The West, post 9/11, regards him as 'an intellectual ammunition and high octane stuff' for the radicalization of Islam. The absolutist/ so-called Salafis/Wahabis who think they and only they have the absolute understanding of the Quran and hadiths stop short of saying that he was 'heretical'. Huwallahhualam.

I always hold the view , does not matter whether you are a grand Shaykh of Haram or Medinah or Al Azhar, that no one and I repeat NO ONE has a total monopoly of TRUTH.
It is Allah's mercy that HE allows differences of opinions and ijtihad amongst the learned. HE is the Absolute.

It is not our role to scrutinize word by word what previous scholars of Islam wrote and 'hammer' them. It is not fair because they are not here to defend themselves. I just take what I think is good from my reading of various scholars and do not presume that they are 100 % correct 100 % of the time. The Prophet aside, all the rest are not 'maksum'. With all due respect to them, they are human and they lived and think within their time frame and age, within the 'sciences' and wisdom of their time.

With this approach in mind, I do find Sayyid Qutb's 'Fii Zilalil Quran' very readable and illuminating. His cadence of language is beautiful. His reading and understanding of The Quran, subliminal. His writing can move mountains and change hearts !

I always keep Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad's [ Prof TJ Winter of Cambridge ]advice to heart when I read religious text:

The Qu’ran speaks of the God that’s utterly unlike ourselves, but also says God is closer to us than the jugular vein. He is with you wherever you may turn, wherever you turn, the Qu’ran says, there is the face of God. And whatever we see in terms of beauty in the world, in people’s faces, in humans, mutual compassion and love, there we discern that basic thirst that human beings have for the source of nourishment and richness and fullness that is in God. So it’s a kind of nostalgia. Religion is about awakening a nostalgia that we have for the place where we were before we were born, and the place that we hope we’ll return to after our death.

The ummah of Muhammad is like a supertanker. It's huge and does not change direction easily. There are no doubt voice of dissent and discontent here and there but by the grace of Allah we are still on the ship while the rest of the ahlul kitab have abandoned their ships, and out there somewhere in their life boats and for some even in the sea !

It is to these lost souls and lost sheep that we have a duty to help out.
And we cannot help other people when our hearts also are in need of a proper 'brasso'.
We have 2 choices. Either we go back to the desert of 620 AD and be stuck there with the camels or live in the 21st century with Steve Job's wonderful IPOD's, and all the paraphrenalias of this age, guided by the spirituality and imprinting that was branded by Mohammad [pbuh], the final messenger of God.

Sayyid Qutb is contemporary but even with Sayyid Qutb, whenever I have problem I would return back to the Quran, counter-check with other views. That is the beauty of Islam. Nonetheless it is ridiculous for us to walk around with blinkers like some people do, who when they see Muslims visiting graves, say ' these clowns are grave worshippers !'. This kind of mentality is detrimental to the unity of the Ummah. We have to get real and move on !

I hope you will enjoy 'Fi ZILALIL QURAN'. I find it a great read. If through your reading of him your hearts can change, alhamdullillah. A wee bit today and a wee bit tomorrow, is better than not changing at all. click here

Has bunallah wani' mal Wakeel
Unto Allah we put our trust. HE is al Wakeel [ Disposer of all things ]

Related article on the blog :
Redza by Abdal Hakim Murad, click here

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

letter from Dato' H to Nik Howk:

Doc Nik,

I am puzzled and repelled by all the unspeakable things that have happened in the past, all in the name of religion. And they continue until today...

How do you explain the horrendous pain that men have wrought upon one another in the name of the religions of the Book. We can go back to the days of the Jewish King David (when Yahweh spoke directly to destroy the other tribes - men, women, children, their cattle, sheep, goats and crops), to the years of the crusades (three waves of Christians gone mad with faith and bloodlust), to the terrible Inquisitions by Christians upon Christians (Catholics torturing and killing fellow Christians and Jews). I can list and describe the forms of tortures used at that time, all in the name of religion and God, from the "Rack" that pulls you apart, to the "Catharine Wheel" where they broke your bones, tie you spread eagled to the wheel, and then spin the wheel, to the delight and entertainment of the onlookers, until you die from the excruciating pain.

(As a matter of interest, Catharine was charged with having doubts about her faith and God. She was tortured and died on the horrible wheel. She was later made a saint, and a Cambridge college was named after her. Our Tunku attended the College. The College crest has the wheel on it. If some humor is allowed in this context, Oscar Wilde, when complaining about reports in the newspapers, wrote "In the old days, they had the Rack, now we have the Press.")

Again, the centuries of persecution of millions of poor old women in almost every town and village in Christian Europe on suspicion of being witches, who had short "trials through torture".
I can list for you the kinds and classification of the tortures that the poor, defenceless, old women had to endure before they were killed. Just because they were old, thin, toothless and ugly. They had no defence in the legal system at that time. Any lawyer or witness who dared to come forward would be roped in,, and similarly charged.

Such laws were in the books of several European countries for centuries, until the middle of the 19th century. As a matter of interest, such persecutions never happened in the centuries when the pagan Romans occupied Europe. Of course there were strict Roman laws that require everyone under Pax Romana to accept the gods of Rome. They were ruthless about it. Jesus was crucified because his teachings threatened the Roman system of beliefs. But the real fun really began after the collapse of the Roman Empire, when Christianity and Islam began to spread.

The torture and killing in the name of God and religion goes on today especially among Muslims, and between Jews and Muslims. In Palestine, the orthodox Jews believe that God wants them to reoccupy the Israel of the land of King David. In Iraq, the Shias electric drill the penises of Sunnis, and vice versa, before slowly beheading them with a long dagger. Women in Somalia continue being stoned to death because they were "tainted" - because a group of men had raped them. A woman in Afghanistan had her nose slashed off and left to die in the desert, just because she left her abusive husband and returned to her parents. All on the name of religion. And that is alright.

In any war or conflict, God is claimed to be on both sides. Even in civilized debates, every side of the Book, all three sides, and every Peeping Tom from JAIS, claims that God is on its side, and its side alone is right. All the others are wrong. Logically it makes no sense, unless all three share the Omnipotent God. But no, God forbid, that simply won't do!
So what does a simpleminded person like me do? Of course I am told the old, empty mantra, "Iman" and "ilm, ilm", "ilm". Scholars in books and videos, however, echo one another about faith and the sophistries of Sufism. The old, hoary, war cry that 'we are right, all the others are wrong' still permeate religious discussions, and that echo chamber puts me off. I do not accept that God behaves like prejudiced human beings, and takes sides in stupid human disputes.

Doc,

You have serene outlook in your faith. You must have overcome the turmoil of anger over the centuries of war, death, pain, and misery, and the holding back of knowledge, and science, by religion, and the demands of beliefs. Personally, I think that if the religions had had their way in suppressing science, we would all still live in the hovels of the Dark Ages, hungry, sick, miserable, with a short life span of thirty years, and believing that diseases are caused by God's anger and retribution for our "sins". We would live and die superstitious and ignorant, knowing nothing about microbes and viruses, and that death is caused by them, and by forms of carcinoma, or high cholesterol, hypertension, high blood sugar, etc.

Science, despite being blocked many times by religion, continues to expand our knowledge and our horizons. There is no Christian Science or Islamic Science. In our schools here, the talk is all about Islamic science. Students are not taught that there is just Science - a pursuit of knowledge based on facts, evidence, and rigorous methodology. There is no Christian Cardiology or Islamic Cardiology. There is just the science of cardiology, based on empirical facts, methodology, and procedures. The cardiology that you, yourself, practise. The healing profession must be based on science. Faith healing is humbug, and preys on the gullible. God knows the depth of the irony that the world is full of gullible people!!!

Dato' H

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

Dato'

Well said Dato'. Your argument , though nothing new in its content, it does reflect erudite scholarship and a certain era long gone.
But you are over generalizing too much and myopic and I am not surprised since you are from Cambridge

You chose to forget that when Tariq Ziad, the Berber, crossed over the Strait of Jabal Tariq in the 7th century AD and freed Europe from barbarism,
the civilizing influence of Islam on Europe extended close to 10 centuries until it ended with the terrible Spanish inquisition. Barbarity and intolerance is not an Islamic virtue.[ click here, for science and Islam ]
I am not a student of history, I am a man of science. Thus I do not share your myopic view on history.

One, especially if schooled in the West, would easily tend to forget and disregard easily the civility of the Ottomans, who ruled some three quarters of the civilized world then,from the Adriatic Sea to China, until its later decadence and degeneration due to putting The Book aside.

Muslim lands were safe haven for European Jews for over 13 centuries. That piece of history, the West and Jews in particular would not like the world to know.
The Jews of today have much to thank the late sultans of the golden Seljuk era and even the Muslims of Cordaba and Seville era for their existence today. If you had left them to the Trinitarians , they would have long disappeared from the face of this earth ! So much for putting 'Jesus' on the cross !

Now the Palestinians and the Arabs are bearing the burden of guilt of the Europeans. But then only the victors write and dictate history, unfortunately.

I do not wish to get into another prolong pointless polemic with you over Islam versus Humanism Dato'. I say Islam here Dato and not religions as a whole because I do not wish to fall into the modernist's trap that 'all religions are the same'. This is the age of political correctness but we Muslims must extra careful. This touch the very basis of our AQIDAH.

No ! Islam is not the same. We are still intact. Our Book is still there despite all the noise here and there within, we are still on the 'ship'. If the others of the ahlil kitab have by now 'abandoned their ships and floating in the sea, we are still very much on board. We Muslim must now stop apologizing, like you do, and instead realize our good fate.

If at this late age in your life you must still insist we are still the same as others , I must wish the best of luck to you Dato.

Nik Howk

postscript :
Yes admittedly we are now quite down and out but if we give ourselves time, we will again be a civilizing influence on this present mad mad world. We just need to know our position in the realm of things. We have to feel proud to be Muslims !
We need to feel deep pain and anguish when scholars like Anwar Awlaki [ click here ]got 'droned' by clowns like Obama et al. We have to think Islam.

We have to separate the foliage and the trees and branches, and see the forest.
If Leopold Weiss aka Muhammad Asad can think for us why can't we do the same ??!!
Lo and behold, we are back to ilm, ilm , ilm and ilm.

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

Reply from Dato' H :

Dear Dr. Nik,

It is always a delight to hear from you.

First of all, I did not go to Cambridge; you mistook me for my baby sister, Zuraina. She is the smart one. She went to Cambridge, and then won a doctoral scholarship to Yale. She later became professor of archeology at USM. She is now prof emeritus, and advisor on Heritage to Dato Rais Yatim. She has written several technical books on archeology, is discoverer of the Perak Man (that pushed Malaysian history back by 30,000 years). She is highly regarded by the people at the Smithsonian and at UNESCO. We meet from time to time over dinner, in fact we had dinner just last week. I am proud of her, but I do not have her credentials, I am afraid.

However, if university education has done anything for me at all, it has made me forever curious, and not easily taken in by claims without evidence. As a diplomat, and a civil servant, I had always been driven by the need to have fact and/reason-based policies. (Perhaps this is something today's civil servants may need to think about.)

I agree with your comment that I am not learned in the history and philosophy of Islam. True. Shallow? Hmm, in a way, perhaps. But myopic? I don't think so. I can see the contours of history clearly, of course without the details that academic historians and theologians have. I see them in clear outlines - from the formation of the planet out of a cloud of cosmic dust, its hot birth and the billion years of cooling period to create its surface crust, and releasing the gases to make water, nitrogen and oxygen; another billion years for unicellular life to form in the primordial soup, rich life forms in the sea before they gradually came up to the land, and the early plant and animal life on the planet.

These evolve very, very, gradually, over a billion years, until the dinosaurs (of thousands of species) ruled the earth for nearly half a billion years. After they were wiped fairly recently by a cataclysmic event, just 65 million years ago, the mammals and birds (the birds being the descendants of dinosaurs) had a chance to survive, evolve, and branch out into various species. Very recently, one such species developed into apes and, only six million years ago, this species branched out again, and one branch went on circa 200,000 years ago to develop gradually into modern man. The history of man, over the last 200,000 years, was marked by periods of near extinction, from hunger, diseases, and the ice ages. At one point, our population dwindled down to less than 10,000 individuals. We only knew a settled community and understood its structure, and the psychological demands of that structure, circa five thousand years ago. Very, very recently, in terms of actual history on the planet.

Well, the above is a very brief paraphrasing of evolution and history - a veritable red flag to you. Now you are really, really angry, and ready to gore me to death. But, dear Dr. Nik, hold on. The above line of reasoning is backed by various lines of evidence, from fossil and archeological to genetic. The evidence is overpowering. The fossil evidence is there. And the genetic evidence, showing the gene similarities with other creatures and birds and trees and plants are all there. Modern biology, as all universities now teach, is evolutionary biology. Can all universities be wrong?

How can anybody argue against such evidence? As a doctor (certainly trained in the methodology of science when you were in London) you cannot deny evidence. We must go where the evidence takes us. But, having said that, I also agree that absence of evidence is no evidence of absence. True. This is where Tariq Ramadan (a St. Anthony's College guy) slips his argument in, placing faith in the mechanism of logic, using the very rigour of logic. I anticipate this is where you, too, will come in. Cutting to the chase, this is the very nexus of the intellectual debate on science and religion.

As KD described it, you are more inclined to the "cut and thrust", well that is how I would put it in its most concise way. Doctor jantung, this is the cut and thrust you like. The rest are details and byways. I was once taught that an academic will look at a piece of jewellery, choose a stone in it, and polish that individual stone till it shines. In short, they specialise, and many scholars contribute to add our overall knowledge, until the whole piece of jewellery shines brightly. Few individual scholars are inclined to take the larger view, like Acton, Toynbee, AJP Taylor, Robert Fisk, etc. and offer us a full narrative.

A great danger facing the world is the proselytizing zeal among the three religions of the Book. You will disagree, of course, my dear Doctor. But one can see the irrational zeal and violence of the people involved in it. The recent assassination of a cabinet minister in Pakistan, the death sentence passed on his assassin, and the resulting irrational uproar of the Pakistanis is frightening. You know this case well, I am sure. It will tear Pakistan apart. Humanity and reason vaporize instantly in that atmosphere. Somehow, religion ignites a dangerous, irrational response in people.

Now, dear Nadzrul is doing some research and will fire all starboard cannons at me. I can see the grey puffs of smoke against the blue skies - the explosive shells are on the way!

Regards.

Dato' H

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

Dato',

I can see that you are still well stuck to your evolutionary zeal.Oh my God!
Who say I do not believe in 'evolution of the species' ?
Just because your scientists cannot really tie up 'evolution of the species' and complete the 'million mile' dots with the 'introduction' of the primordial man, Nabi Adam on this planet earth, does not necessarily negate evolution.

I am keeping some pieces of metals and wood in my garage.
Who knows in a couple of millions years we can get a Bentley Turbo out of it.........

Of course you and I would not be around to celebrate it and drive it then.
In my realms of things, you might say jokingly that I would be one of those struggling souls trying to figure out how to cross the 'Sirat'.

Nik Howk

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

From Dato' H :

Doc,

I am puzzled how a few sticks and pieces of metal can ever become a Bentley! An attempt to scoff at Evolution? Are you alluding to the discredited argument by the clergyman William Paley who, while walking on a beach, found a watch in the sand. He thought it was an irrefutable argument that such a delicate, intricate piece of mechanism MUST have had an intelligent designer and maker, and ergo, we all must have had an "Intelligent Designer"! Of course, it was silly, and his argument was quickly proved false.

Dato H

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

Dato',

Precisely. You got it on the dot !
This is a digression from our 'Fi Zilalil Quran' but not entirely out of order. Quran is after all about HIM and HIS creation and created beings !
Since this 'old man', a new lover of science, must insist, we will carry on.

I reckon you are an arts man. You are just a new lover of science, all your life being in the arts.
Science to you mean everything.....theories, hypotheses and conjectures become incontrovertible facts! Life for the new lover of science is easy. The dots connecting the 'facts and fancies' in science can be a million miles apart, as your highly talented archeologist sister would tell you, but since science is a toy to people like you , you can swallow them all, the facts, the craps and all.

Evolution for the species do happened. There are incontrovertible evidence for it. I accept that.

Cannot you accept that MAN was planted on earth after millions of years of evolution of species.
Why cant you accept that ?
That God ,that create the Big Bang and the evolution of species, with a 'Kun Fayakun', can plant the primordial man, Adam and his partner on planet earth.
What is so difficult about it. You mean your 'god' [ I mean knowledge ] does not allow God to be there !?

Let us visit the Quran and have a peep:

--sura 21, verse 30:
"Do not the Unbelievers see that the heavens and the earth were joined together, then We clove them
asunder and We got every living thing out of the water. Will they not then believe?"

--sura 41 verse 11:
on the earth's creation:
"Moreover (God) turned to the Heaven when it was smoke and said to it and to the earth..."

The reference to a separation process (fatq) of an primary single mass whose elements were initially
fused together (ratq). It must be noted that in Arabic 'fatq' is the action of breaking, diffusing, separating,
and that 'ratq' is the action of fusing or binding together elements to make a homogenous whole.
This concept of the separation of a whole into several parts is noted in other passages of the Book
with reference to multiple worlds. The first verse of the first sura in the Qur'an proclaims, after the
opening invocation, the following: "In the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful", "Praise be to God,
Lord of the Worlds."

Of course you will say, what the heck , Dr Nik ,'doctor jantung', a man of science, is just quoting from Maurice Buccaile, another man of science.

But this is getting a wee bit protracted and tedious and I promised my grown up daughter once not again to get into another prolonged debate with you regarding creation, so let me end with this surah :

Verily in the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the alternation of night and day - there are indeed signs for men of understanding; Men who remember Allah, standing, sitting, and lying down on their sides, and contemplate the creation of the heavens and the earth (with the thought) "Our Lord! Not for nothing have You created (all) this. Glory to You! Give us salvation from the suffering of the Fire."
ali imran, verse 190-191.

You, your belief, me, mine Dato'
Warmest Regards,

Nik Howk

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

Related Articles in The Blog :
Letter To An Agnostic Friend, click here
Letter To An Agnostic Friend : A Rebuttal by Dato' H, click here
Same Universe, Same Physics but a Dichotomy of Perspective, href="http://drnikisahak.blogspot.com/2011/03/secular-and-sublime-perspective-from.html">click here
Of Stephen Hawking, The Big Bang, The Universe and The Arash, click here

Life Changing Lecture...Shaykh Ninowy on Spiritual Secrets of Hajj

2011-10-05T08:09:00.032+08:00

This is the hajj season.
I am reminded of 1983, my 1st hajj.
Prof Dr Harun Din reminded us then ' Hajj is a rehearsal of death'.

I read 'The Hajj', a short treatise by Ali Shariati. No, I am not a Shiah ! But I find Ali Shariati's 'The Hajj' very illuminating. It deals with the spiritual aspects of the Hajj. An excellent read. He was an excellent young Iranian scholar, a dissident during Shah's time based mainly in France. Died young. 'The Hajj' is not easily available here but I think it could be surfed in the net if you are IT savvy enough. Worth looking for it.Avoid the last chapter when he went 'ballastic' against us Sunnis. You do it that way, 'Hajj' would be an excellent read !

This morning, while thinking of all my friends going for haj this season, and as to what advice to give to them, I stumble on Shaykh Ninowy's gem of a khutbah on 'The hajj' . The good shaykh talked about 'detachment' and 'attachment'. This ability to remain 'detached' and at the same time 'attached' is an important proviso for a successful 'hajj' campaign. I call it a 'campaign' because one need to have a good strategy in doing one's hajj, just like going to war.

This could be our life changing lecture if we can read in between the lines.
Listen to him:
click here
click here
click here
click here

Postcript :
For those Tan Sris, Datuk Sris and especially the Puan Sris and the Datins,
one important reminder and my sincere advice....please leave your titles and 'excess baggage' behind in Kuala Lumpur when your flight leaves KLIA. Travel to hajj incognito. It would help you greatly in your quest for hajj mabrur.
Our'egos' are the excess baggage.[ banyak sangat 'songeng'nya, it would certainly affect the spirit of our hajj. ]

I have done a couple of 'hajj' over the last 3 decades and my most memorable, and I hope insyaallah my most successful, was probably the one I did with utmost simplicity: sleeping on bridges while waiting for 'melontar' and mixing amongst poor Somalian, Bangladeshi and Sudanese pilgrims in the Haram. These poor souls arrived in Jeddah usually with just 'a sling bag on the shoulder, one ihram and a few hundred Saudi Riyals in the purse and an old worn out sajadah to sleep on'.
Amongst them I felt almost there but not quite. I returned from The Haram almost daily to a decent hotel with plenty of water,superfluous meals and air-conditioned comfort to freshen myself and above all, at the back of my mind,had a five-figure salary and a 'great life' to go back to after the hajj.

Just how do one beg with earnest sincerity and clarity in front of Maqam Ibrahim and eslewhere in HIS house in this 'attached' state ?

They say, one measure of knowing you have done fairly well is to feel some change in the direction of your life when you come back home.

Imagine yourself at Padang Mahsyar. INCOGNITO , no excess baggage except your few recognizable, meagre, sincere deeds which you have 'posted' forward and relying 99.99 % on mainly your hope and anguish for HIS 'grace and rahmah'.

To the very poor and the dispossessed of this 'duniya', this automatically come with the territory.

Previous related article on the blog :
Ilm, Iman, Amal,...click here
Key To The Garden, click here
Hajj...A Poem by Nasir Khusraw, click here
A Letter To An Agnostic Friend, click here
Talk To Your Monkeys !, click here
On Life, Dying, Death and Life After Death, click here

A World Gone Mad........

2011-10-01T22:42:00.035+08:00

Shaykh Anwar al Awlaki, was the imam that Obama et al had successfully 'droned out' yesterday. Insyaallah, now his soul is 'one of those small green birds playfully chirping away at the periphery of Jannah '.

Just listen to this voice 'beyond the grave' and decide for yourself who the terrorist is ?

First, words from the 'sponsors' :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsGFWJQkosg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NblrwTYcTRo&feature=related

Ok, now let us hear from the so-called 'terrorist' himself,
[ he though sounds more like a traditional scholar to me, a scholar who speaks his mind and does not mince his words...not the RAND Institute type of sanitized 'scholars they 'prescribe' for Muslims. A quick check in the Wikipedia will show that Awlaki did not go thru much 'formal clerical background', they say. But that is Islam today : it is not a homogenous unit. You have the Salafis, the Sunnis, the Sufis, the modernists, the liberals ....etc and etc. There is no Pope, thank God. It is not for the Rand Institute or Obama to say, this or that is acceptable to them and the very 'verbal rest of the crop could be 'droned out' as and when the Uncle Sam wish . ]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0uQ5TUTY04&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=845sqvbJbGo&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvBnFuTlAMs&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0AKJctvNzg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsWMBmO4JrM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG6s0FiRfaU&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxi0hc-a164&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BjJAJDetbI&feature=related
The Dust Will Never Settle Down, click here
Battle of Minds and Ideas, click here

It seem now that if USA REPEAT A LIE A MILLION TIMES [ over CNN, BBC, CNBC and lately even ALJAZERA ]it is possible that outright lie could become gospel truth ! This, my friends, constitute a world gone mad !
Awlaki's error perhaps was that The West has no ammunition against TRUTH and that TRUTH is actually a 'painful and bitter' pill to swallow.
Either drown the voice of TRUTH with half truth via the international media or as is fashionable nowadays, 'drone it out'.

Inna lillah hiwainnailaihirojiun.
To Allah we belong, to HIM we return.
May his soul be placed amongst the blessed.

ISLAM IS AN IDEA THAT IS LONG OVERDUE. NOT EVEN THE COMBINED POWER OF Sarkozy, OBama, Angela Meckel, Bush or Blair et al could delay, derail or contain it.

سُوۡرَةُ النّصر
بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ

إِذَا جَآءَ نَصۡرُ ٱللَّهِ وَٱلۡفَتۡحُ (١) وَرَأَيۡتَ ٱلنَّاسَ يَدۡخُلُونَ فِى دِينِ ٱللَّهِ أَفۡوَاجً۬ا (٢) فَسَبِّحۡ بِحَمۡدِ رَبِّكَ وَٱسۡتَغۡفِرۡهُ‌ۚ إِنَّهُ ۥ ڪَانَ تَوَّابَۢا (٣)

In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful
When Allah's succour and the triumph cometh. And thou seest mankind entering the religion of Allah in troops, Then hymn the praises of thy Lord, and seek forgiveness of Him. Lo! He is ever ready to show mercy.

Related articles in the blog:
The Ugly American, click here
9/11 Revisited, click here
State Terrorism : Noam Choamsky, click here
On Osama Bin Laden, click here

Life Changing Lecture Series....Ilm, Iman & Amal

2011-09-29T07:02:00.026+08:00

This month and a few to come I would 'insyaallah' walk through some Utube lectures [ and real time lectures if I happned to come across them ] that I think can change and give direction to our lives. I had recently attended one such lecture held in PJ, a short discourse on Ilm, Iman and Amal by Dr Abdullah Yasin.

The lecture remained well imprinted in my mind as a life changing lecture for me as it's content coincide to me with my long held belief that a life examined should really start with our continual striving for 'ilm, ilm, ilm and ilm '.
From there we would be able to graduate to 'Fikr and Dhikr '.

It underlined my previous occasional forays into things religious and philosophical early in my life. Started in late primary with Datuk Yusuf Zaki's philosophical and religious rantings in his very own Pustaka Dian publications; Reader's Digest; Dale Carnegie's writings and even Rev Dr Norman Vincent Peale's motivational writings. I was a voracious reader even those days. In the early 60's, books were rare,and money even rarer !.

I had to walk miles from my Jalan Teliput house to the only library in Kota Bharu near 'Opeh Salbia', as we locals call it, [ local linggo for the State Survey Office right smack in town] , the Carnegie Library, for free reading of even such texts. In my early secondary schooldays, even laid my hands on Dr Herbert W Amstrong's Plain Truth Magazine, weekly posted free to school children my age. A California based missionary work with a capital Z for super-zealous effort to spread the Christian Doctrine.That was in the early 60's, the age of innocence. We grab anything we can. Children in the 60's talk and dream in English !

In my late secondary school life at MCKK, to nurse my pangs of loneliness and homesickness, I immersed myself into the humanists, Schopenhauer and Immanuel Kant, Bertrand Russel and Descarte. Found them all depressing...the same whole circuits of tragicomedy of secular life revolving around the perpetual lust for pleasure and happiness, which finally without fail end up in abject depression with failing health, broken and unfulfilled hopes and aspirations, and failing cognitive faculties.

Life, to these thinkers revolve around only the HERE and NOW.
How hollow and stupid can one be when one think one is too clever !

From there I graduated to al Ghazali's Ihya Ulumiddin, which inevitably lead me on to HAMKA's Tafseer al Azhar in my early 30's. And the rest is history.

Subhanallah, Alhamdullillah, I did not get lost along the way despite being exposed early in my life to Amstrong, Carnegie and Rev Vincent Peale! Perhaps the counter 'normalising' effect of having to attend ToK Guru Haji Nor's [ Kelantan's mufti in the 60's ]weekly lecture at Kampong Panambang kept my young and impressionable soul intact !.

My late mother, Nik Kelthom Nik Daud [ she was unschooled,cannot even read, remembering many surah of The Quran only by heart ] always insisted on this despite we the younger children not having any clue as to what the grand old man was talking about. Every other Friday morning or so we all of the Wan Abdullah clan would be coerced into taking that 7 mile journey to listen to this old man. May his soul be placed amongst the blessed !

Back to IHYA, If I could recall anything, it is that al Ghazali,[ and numerous other traditional scholars of his time ], once stated that the difference in 'barakah' between the prayer of one with Ilm compared to one without is the difference between heaven and earth, or between day and night, or something to that effect.

What a digression, now back to what I recalled of Dr Abdullah Yasin's short but meaningful discourse :

ILM, IMAN and AMAL
He started by saying that at 40, Rasullallah had the experience with Jibrail's 'RECITE, RECITE IN THE NAME OF YOUR LORD !"
That by itself give preeminence to ILM in Muslim theology.

For the initial 13 years during his 23 years of prophetship, the ayats were all coming just to build ILM and IMAN. At the end of year 13th, came the command for MIKRAJ,[ the heavenly accent ], and from the realm of the quintessential border beyond border, 'The Quadratul Muntaha', the command for Solat. Later , on 'terra firma', subsequently the need for Zakat, Ramadan, and finally Hajj.
The essence is, while solat forms the ' beam and pillars' of Iman and Muslim theology, the foundational basis of Islam was and is still back to ilm, ilm and ilm.
That explained the 13 long years before any substantive 'rituals' was included.

With respect to ILMU, there are 2 substantive 'Books', The Quran from HIM, and Book of nature ie men's study and observation of his universe. That constitute ILMU, the former has preeminence over the later but both important.[ very nice to hear this from Ustaz Dr Abdullah Yasin, given his leaning ]

Iblis, according to one hadith, according to him, is more happy if one chap with ILMU dies, over a few hundreds with just AMAL without much ilmu. Quality over Quantity .

Then he went on to discuss LIFE.:-
LIFE, according to all ulama muktabar, is PERMANENT !
PERMANENT,Fullstop!
One cannot opt out of this life. One can opt out of this 'duniya' by killing oneself but LIFE is essentially PERMANENT. This 'duniya' is just a small beginning stage in four stages of LIFE.
9 mths or so in the FOETAL stage, 60 to 70 years in the DUNIYA stage for the average, then an X number of milleniums in the ALAM BARZAKH stage, and finally an eternity in the ALAM AKHIRAT. There are only 2 stations in the Alam Akhirat needless to say....Heaven and Hell.

2. YOu reap your 'rewards' continuosly while you are alive and when you are in the Alam Barzak as well. If you teaches, preach or write books read by others, or build masjid , orphanage, or establish 'bridges' figuratively and literally etc and etc you continue to reap its reward in the Alam Barzak. Death is just a transitional station, it is not even a stop. When one dies, the veil is suddenly opened and one start the actual LIFE. Mashaalah , Ustaz Abdullah is talking like a sufi ! How true.
Conversely speaking if you do' ' tyranical things and establish satanic practice or wrong ilmu followed by others,encourage kufr practice in your lifetime and has your followers, you also reap the collective'negative' rewards.

For example, when one, inundated with much ill gotten wealth from corruption or 'illegal hoarding until you can see practically dollars and ringgit coming out from his every orifices, send his young children for example to 'public schools' in the UK for study, he came back after some 20 years of secularization,fully corrupted in his lifestlye... one continue to reap one's rewards in one's grave. Do not expect 20 years of secularization to produce a son that continually doa you to have compassion from your Rabb when you are lying in the Alam Barzakh.[ for that matter, do not expect your young and pretty trophy 3rd wife to do likewise. She would be too busy doing things with your ex-driver with the ill ogtten millions you left her. That is about 'barakah'...sorry,this is my addition, not from Ustaz...but to stress yet again, you reap the negative effect ]

3.Then he touched on the Quran. It is back to ILMU, ILMU ILMU and ILMU.....that is refreshing to hear from Ustaz Dr Abdullah Yasin.
Your Quran need to be READ and RECITED, if possible with Tajweed
It need to be understood
Its injunctions need to be AMAL and its prohibitions need to be avoided. Out of 6600 plus ayat in the Quran only around 80 are said to be 'consisted of 'rules and regulations'.
The message of The Quran above all need to be spread....minimum to your immediate family.
There again it is back to ilm ,ilm, ilm and ilm.

Now let us leave Dr Abdullah Yasin and move on to the dry, cold and analytical ambience of Cambridge University, the world most premier university, and peep into the world of Dr T J Winter aka Abdal Hakim Murad [ best remembered as translator of al Ghyazali's ' Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife '. A bloody good read indeed ! ]. He was giving a long academic lecture/discouse on 'Muslim Theology and Islamic Mysticism ' to a small group of post doctoral students in comparative religions.

In Cambridge, all things, profane and secular, sublime and religious, undergo scrutiny,' microscopically' examined and defined by 'dull profesors in grey suits and white coats'.Let us now peep into this world of academia. If we can come out with something substantive and life changing, alhamdullillah. If not , that is just around 2 hours of our earthly life wasted!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=CbvG4KffgSI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylx7bDbEA3U&feature=relmfu

"And if all the trees on the earth were pens and the sea
added to seven seas (were ink in the writing), (yet) would
not the Words of Allah be exhausted; Verily Allah is the
Mighty, the Wise."

Muhammad Asad aka Leopold Weiss in his 'Message of The Quran' ,
wrote these 4 important words :
" FOR THOSE WHO THINK "
Those of us who have stopped reading the Quran and derive lessons from it, we are the heedless.
Those who have not even read the Quran yet, they are afraid of thinking !

9/11 Revisited

2011-09-25T05:32:00.018+08:00

My friend, 3 time world champion endurance rider, Ms Valerie Kanavy sent me this following images below. I rode agianst her twice, 1st in Dubai's 160km World Endurance Championship in 1998 and second in Jerez, Spain at the World Equestrian Games in 2003. She was America's best export, an ambassador par excellence in her sport. At 65 now, still very active in endurance.

The images she sent are both painful and tragic. It somehow epitomize the resilience and true grit of the ordinary American people : the boatmen and firemen ,ordinary citizens unfortunately caught in the middle of a senseless global debacle and total failure to see reasons and facts,to separate the root cause from the maladie of symptoms and emotions, a failure for fellow humans across the globe to embrace compassion and peace . click here

My reply to her was this :

Tragic Valerie. Truly tragic.
Unfortunately there may be more 9/11 if presidents, dictators and politicians of the world choose to be extremely myopic and refuse to not learn lessons from the past.

We in Asia, and for that matter all nations across the globe except some NATO countries perhaps, thought Obama is gonna be a breath of fresh air after Bush.
But he is a big disapointment. His post inaugural speech given in Cairo several years back seem to us that this finally is an American president who can make a difference. But it is not to be. Just today, on the eve of yet another momentous event related to world peace, America is again a total failure. Your veto of the new Palestinian initiative at the UN speaks volume of America's impotence and selective myopia and biase.

America can churn and mourn 9/11 for years and decades to come but if your guys within the governmenr and administration choose rather to get lost in trees and leaves and fail to see 'the green forest' outside and fail to address the root causes, the anger and the grief of others, the injustice..... there will be no world peace..

America cannot afford to go to war against 1.5 billion humanities. You guys are already on the verge of a moral, leadership and economic bankruptcy !
Some degree of sanity must transcend all these madness and blatant selective myopia.

Just look at these images here for you guys to be able to appreciate how the rest of the world view American, The Bully. The Ugly American of the 60's has come back with a vengeance. click here

Related articles on the blog :
Conversation on Islam : Karen Amstrong , click here
Conversation on Islam part 2 : Karen Amstrong , click here
Empire of Faith, click here
Does Peace Has A Chance in Palestine, click here
A Common Word between Us and You, click here
Hamzah Yusuf Hanson , ON The West and Islam, click here

My Personal Journey Thru The Quran : " What is that ?..."

2011-09-23T17:25:00.017+08:00

"WHAT IS THAT ?"
click here

I must confide a personal secret here that when I first viewed this classic Greek trajicomedy in the privacy of the doctors common room at SDMC, I did shade some tears and even sob a little. I was lucky there was no one there. It would be embarassing for me to be caught sobbing. I was surprised actually: How come a most hardened specie of 'mankind' like me, shade a tear ?. My God ! It was a relief though.

I am quite human after all.

In the not too distant future,
perhaps a couple of years now down the lane for even some of us,
a decade or two for some lucky blokes in our batch :
when faculties start failing us,
when generalities and the specifics merge to just become one continuous blur image,
when days and weeks no further has real meaning,
when that creaking joints and limbs no longer able to follow exact instructions,
when we even need help to have a good pee,
"what is that" do indeed become a frightening reality.

Have we prepared ourselves and our offsprings for such an eventuality ?
Have we ever sat down with them like what one Lokman Hakim did a couple of millenium ago?

يَـٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلنَّاسُ إِن كُنتُمۡ فِى رَيۡبٍ۬ مِّنَ ٱلۡبَعۡثِ فَإِنَّا خَلَقۡنَـٰكُم مِّن تُرَابٍ۬ ثُمَّ مِن نُّطۡفَةٍ۬ ثُمَّ مِنۡ عَلَقَةٍ۬ ثُمَّ مِن مُّضۡغَةٍ۬ مُّخَلَّقَةٍ۬ وَغَيۡرِ مُخَلَّقَةٍ۬ لِّنُبَيِّنَ لَكُمۡ‌ۚ وَنُقِرُّ فِى ٱلۡأَرۡحَامِ مَا نَشَآءُ إِلَىٰٓ أَجَلٍ۬ مُّسَمًّ۬ى ثُمَّ نُخۡرِجُكُمۡ طِفۡلاً۬ ثُمَّ لِتَبۡلُغُوٓاْ أَشُدَّڪُمۡ‌ۖ وَمِنڪُم مَّن يُتَوَفَّىٰ وَمِنڪُم مَّن يُرَدُّ إِلَىٰٓ أَرۡذَلِ ٱلۡعُمُرِ لِڪَيۡلَا يَعۡلَمَ مِنۢ بَعۡدِ عِلۡمٍ۬ شَيۡـًٔ۬ا‌ۚ وَتَرَى ٱلۡأَرۡضَ هَامِدَةً۬ فَإِذَآ أَنزَلۡنَا عَلَيۡهَا ٱلۡمَآءَ ٱهۡتَزَّتۡ وَرَبَتۡ وَأَنۢبَتَتۡ مِن ڪُلِّ زَوۡجِۭ بَهِيجٍ۬ (٥)

O mankind! if ye are in doubt concerning the Resurrection, then lo! We have created you from dust, then from a drop of seed, then from a clot, then from a little lump of flesh shapely and shapeless, that We may make (it) clear for you. And We cause what We will to remain in the wombs for an appointed time, and afterward We bring you forth as infants, then (give you growth) that ye attain your full strength. And among you there is he who dieth (young), and among you there is he who is brought back to the most abject time of life, so that, after knowledge, he knoweth naught. And thou (Muhammad) seest the earth barren, but when We send down water thereon, it doth thrill and swell and put forth every lovely kind (of growth).
al Haj , 22 : 5

وَقَضَى رَبُّكَ أَلاَّ تَعْبُدُواْ إِلاَّ إِيَّـهُ وَبِالْوَلِدَيْنِ إِحْسَـناً إِمَّا يَبْلُغَنَّ عِندَكَ الْكِبَرَ أَحَدُهُمَا أَوْ كِلاَهُمَا فَلاَ تَقُل لَّهُمَآ أُفٍّ وَلاَ تَنْهَرْهُمَا وَقُل لَّهُمَا قَوْلاً كَرِيمًا وَاخْفِضْ لَهُمَا جَنَاحَ الذُّلِّ مِنَ الرَّحْمَةِ وَقُل رَّبِّ ارْحَمْهُمَا كَمَا رَبَّيَانِى صَغِيرًا
And your Lord has decreed that you worship none but Him, and that you be excellent to your parents. If one of them or both of them attain old age in your life, say not to them a word of disrespect, nor shout at them, but address them in terms of honour. And lower unto them the wing of submission and humility through mercy, and say: “My Lord! Bestow on them Your mercy as they did bring me up when I was young. (Isra 17:23-24)

Related articles in the blog :
HE does not want to see you....click here
Lina Joy, she started me blogging....click here
Ustaz Dr Abdullah Yasin on Surah 17 : 23-25 , click here
Let us all burn The Quran , click here
Go Figure It Out , Mr Obama !, click here
The Silver Arrow that Pricked My Heart, click here
Oh My Dear Son !, click here
Is Malayisa being run by a bunch of Morons ?....this one done in 2008 is definitely unrelated but I like it, click here

PKFTZ for the layman like you and me....

2011-09-22T15:11:00.014+08:00

'AT last count the PKFTZ scandal stood at 12.5 billion RM. It started with 2 RM psf secured from poor Malay fishermen and farmers in Pulau Indah, sold to Government of the day at inflated price of 25 RM psf , and if you think that is already bad enough, finally after extrapolating and computing future interest and loss and what not, finally settled at a whooping 50 RM psf '

That, my dear friends, is great governance from a government that profess 'Malaysia Boleh'

If one visit the scene of the crime now one can see acres and acres of huge buildings build at 5 times inflated price for 'god knows what function ?'

Across the board now it is beginning to look like a special 'muhibbah type' of National Looting with both MCA and UMNO playing the lead roles.
Unlike 'cimB' [ Cina, India ,Melayu bodoh ], Seem Velloo et al is most significantly missing in this Malaysian only suspense thriller of 'daylight robbery' that has far outstripped all previous 'daylight robberies'.

In our short history as a nation we have had too many of these nonsense. We are a stoic type of people. We have great propensity of tolerating pain and humiliation as a nation. Great stuff, we Malaysians !

At the end of the day, by virtue of the nature and gravity of the individuals involved, it would most likely end up as an open verdict.
You rub my back I rub yours.
Finally it is the common people who pay, thanks God !

Teganung and Kelantang.....

2011-09-18T15:42:00.029+08:00

Those were the days
Teganung and Kelantang........
The Mat Che Su and Dali Omar days in the late 60's and early 70's.
When over a football match, a whole bus could get burnt in Jertih.
Kelantan could win over giants like Singapura [ Wilfrid Skinner and Majid Ariff come to mind !]or Selangor [ Ghani Minhat, even the Koreans feared him ].
Teganung could even lose to minnows,Perlis
But when Kelantan meet Teganung...all hell broke lose.

And why Jertih, where buses of either side got burnt or stones and abuse hurled.
It is still very well at least some 15 kilometres in Teganung territory but Jertih in Besut represent 'disputed' territory. Just like the West Bank in Palestine. Disputed borders probably some 100 years back, rightly belonging to Kelantan, I was told. So disputed that the then Kelantan Sultan at that time, probably out of wisdom, decided to 'lose' it sportingly to his brother Sultan from Teganung over a 'cock' fight.

Up to today, The people of the Teganung district of Besut bear dual 'stateship' : They are 'orang Teganung' in technical term but in spirit and in linggo they are Kelantanese.A Kelantanese when meeting a Besut chap in neutral territory say KL, would say, " Demo orghe kito.... ".

The Besut chap would not say no with rare exceptions, except perhaps ex YB Idris Jusoh. Even then perhaps because of 'Petronas Wang Ihsang'. [ Tok Pha, of Kelantan now is in similar predicament,you can see it coming out of his orifices even ! ].I am still wondering though why he did not last long as A Teganung MB ! A one term MB, just like what is currently feared most by Najib Tun Razak....
A one term PM, oh my God !!

There is a definite stigmata to being a 'one term anything', since usually the 1st term is usually more the rule than not that it is usually a gift from someone or va gift from the 'inbuilt' system like the archaic UMNO intra party presidential electoral system .

ISA is a gift from Najib Razak to us Malaysians. It certainly does not come free or due to any feeling of altruism from the beleaugered PM !. Your guys have to thank BERSIH etc etc and etc and etc,last but not least to hundreds of bloggers like me who collectively add up to the total collective National 'animal noise' going on in the country that finally break Najib Tun Razak who certainly does not want to see the spectre of a 'one term PM'.

A PM has very little choice when his trusted SB tells him he would not see the light of the day come next General ELECTION ! I can imagine the PM and his Mrs waking up in the wee hours of the morning, breaking up in cold sweat :
"One term PM, Darling ! No way, we have to do something !",
said the clever one of the two.

My God ! Tun Razak would certainly turn in his grave !
Whoever in the past predicted that the proverbial 'lallang' rarely moves!
When it move, IT MOVES. Thank you Najib!

Back to the subject of Teganung and Kelantang,one similarity though which Teganung and Kelantan share very well is the preponderance of 'ulama' who unlike the 'West coast variety' are always ready to speak their minds freely and openly, from 'time immemorial'. One of my current favourite is Ustaz Azhar Idrus. He has a 'funny' and candid way of giving 'daawah and ceramah' :
click here,for 'Melayu dok leh masuk shurga'
'Asal usul maknusia', click here
'Pakailah topi keledar', click here
He is 'funny', even on serious matters. His Teganung linggo is 'classic'.
But his message , we need to give some serious thots !
I like him.

Some relevant topics on the previous blog :
One Billion RM Frigate ,click here
Are We Ready for Good Governance ?, click here
BERSIH, click here
From Libya to Tok Bali, click here
Mohd Hassan Marican, click here

'Talk to the monkeys !'...

2011-09-17T13:37:00.033+08:00

A newly appointed GLC CEO to the world biggest plantation conglomerate ,one year ago, talked down to his people that they need to 'double their input to increase the profit'. This kind of 'talk' is cheap. Any fresh MBA graduate can talk this way....work harder and double the output !
Creative accounting and asset stripping are two other common and cheap way of showing the profits !

Too much of that in the recent past happening in our GLC's : selling off MAS Building by our very own celebrated Mat Derghih Yala to make the books look good, and recently Sime's sale of it's troublesome Oil and Gas Division. For the millions we pay these CEO's, it is fair that we should be able to expect them to perform better than 'over glorified overpaid clerks'!

Selling asset and disposing non performing branch of the company is not exactly rocket science. I am sure they can do better.

And if your core business is in petroleum for example, and you want to go into medical, expect to lose a couple of hundred millions [ 500 million RM to be exact at last count]..They call it tuition fees..I know Petronas has a bottomless pit but why waste on unnecessary tuition fees.

Likewise, if your core business is 'PLANTATION' and you decide to go into banking or real estate/construction which is not your forte, expect to lose a few hindred millions as well as well. And we just lost 1.2 billion RM out of the Qatar debacle. Some 1.2 billion from Sime Bank several years back and we never seem to learn lessons. I say 'WE" here because this is my money and your money. Sime Darby is PNB. PNB is bumiputra money. Our ASB and our ASN. Not some dirty politician's war chest or grand father's company.

Sime should be in Africa, Latin America, Fiji, Papua New Guinea opening cheap tracts of lands for food production and estates, not duplicating another construction company up north and paying thorugh the nose for it. Leave that to the small boys. We have the software, the hardware and the money to go beyond our shores. Our planters are world class. Our genome collection of palm seeds are incomparable.

Sorry Sir', I beg to differ. You may be my top boss but I am not impressed so far!
You have to do better than what you are doing now to earn people's respect all round ! I see ex central committee members, middle range managers, junior managers and your bottom rung boys from the plantations everyday. I know what is the mood 'downstairs'. Dont just listen to your 'still wet in between the ears' corporate guys. Do also talk to your 'boys' downstairs. You could get a better feel of the business. Coming from TH or FELDA is nothing great.

You guys should actually need to take a leaf or two from Pak Mat Nyadap of Padang Pa' Amat, Pasir Puteh, Kelantan who did his 'mba' at Idongoto University :

" DR NIK HOWK, IF I WANT TO DOUBLE MY COCONUTS I TALK MORE TO MY MONKEYS. OFTENTIMEs I HAVE TO BRIBE THEM WITH FRESH COCONUT WATER AND LOTS OF PEANUTS !"
That coming from Pak Mat Nyadap of Padang Pa' Amat, Pasir Puteh, Kelantan. And he usually get his ways with his monkeys.

By the way, Congratulations to Ahmad Jauhari Yahya on his recent appointment to the hot seat at Malaysian Airline.
Yes Dato', do 'turun padang' and talk to your monkeys !
We have faith in you Dato'.
Malaysians have had enough of this nonsense of 'crops of over glorified clerks replacing another crop of overglorified clerks'.
Our CEO's manning the GLCs have to be thinkers

Of Life, Dying , Death and Life After Death........

2011-09-15T02:26:00.024+08:00

Alif. Lam. Mim. This is the Scripture whereof there is no doubt, a guidance unto those who ward off (evil). Who believe in the Unseen, and establish worship, and spend of that We have bestowed upon them; And who believe in that which is revealed unto thee (Muhammad) and that which was revealed before thee, and are certain of the Hereafter. These depend on guidance from their Lord. These are the successful.

The above, representing the English translation of opening five ayats of Surah Al Baqarah [ 'chapter' two ]from the Holy Quran, enumerate succinctly in essence of what it is to be a Muslim :
A belief in The Unseen, The Al Ghaiba,
A worshipful life,
A life dedicated to others ie your neighbour, the indigent, the fellow traveler, the poor.
A life following the way of Muhammad, the last messenger who followed a long line of brother messengers before him : Jesus, Mosses, Jacob, Isaac, Abraham, Lot, Noah and subsequently Adam.
And finally a life cognizance of living, dying, death and Life after death.

Life after death, involve in the main, the 'alam barzark', a millenium or two or hundreds perhaps between now and the second sounding of 'The Horn', and the eternity that followed beyond 'The Horn' : The Mahsyar, The Siratul Mustakim, The Judgement and subsequently depending on which hand you were handed 'your book', our 'final abode'.

And the trumpet is blown, and all who are in the heavens and all who are in the earth swoon away, save him whom Allah willeth. Then it is blown a second time, and behold them standing waiting! And the earth shineth with the light of her Lord, and the Book is set up, and the prophets and the witnesses are brought, and it is judged between them with truth, and they are not wronged. And each soul is paid in full for what it did. And He is best aware of what they do.
Az Zumar , 39 : 68-70

Shaykh Abdal Qadir Al Jilani in his book,'Sublime Revelations' said ,
"The clever ones amongst us live two lives, one foot in the here and the other firmly planted in the hereafter", echoing what was said some 300 years earlier by the perfect man, Muhammad, messenger of God.

Death and Dying are issues we mere mortals do think about, and for the 'unfortunate' some like me, see very often in the course of our short lives. But 'life after death' is part of the Al Ghaiba. No one has ever come back to tell us what it is about anyway. It is part of the Al Ghaiba.

The expose' here by Shaykh Ninowy of Georgia, USA is just about the opening gambit of life after death, the initial soul's journey...The Al Ghaiba complex : God, angels, souls and life after death,.... and the nebulous and difficult to understand concept of qada' and qadar.
click here

Elsewhere in the blog :
Steps to Jannah, click here
Unto HIM is the journeying, click here
Some Random Thots on Death, click here
Prayers of The Cicadas, click here
Light, click here
Tan Sri, We can use the ISA on him !, click here
Tok Guru Nik Aziz interview in French, click here
Democracy, Islam and present day Muslims, click here
Divine Decree, click here
Hamza Yusuf Hanson, click here

The Ugly American.......

2011-09-13T06:53:00.008+08:00

America hypes, mourns and churns 911 year in and year out,
while the rest of the sub-human people of Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan are expected to keep mump, stomach it and fade away..........
Let us look at America's very own 911 over history....and judge for ourselves whether indeed America can qualify as a 'Terrorist' state !

Palestine:
click here
click here
click here

Iraq :
click here
click here
click here
click here

Lebanon :
click here

Somalia :
click here

Libya :
click here
click here
click here

Chile :
click here for Allende's assasination

Vietnam :
American war crimes in VIetnam
click here

Korea :
American war crime in the Korean War
click here

Nagasaki and Hiroshima :
click here

...and finally my expose ends with Robert Fisk's short but succinct essay on
" Lies We Tell Ourselves on 911 " in the Independent on 3rd Sept, 2011

Lies We Still Tell Ourselves about 9/11
Have we managed to silence ourselves as well as the world with our own fears?
by Robert Fisk

I'm talking about the volumes, the libraries – nay, the very halls of literature – which the international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001 have spawned. Many are spavined with pseudo-patriotism and self-regard, others rotten with the hopeless mythology of CIA/Mossad culprits, a few (from the Muslim world, alas) even referring to the killers as "boys", almost all avoiding the one thing which any cop looks for after a street crime: the motive.

Why so, I ask myself, after 10 years of war, hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths, lies and hypocrisy and betrayal and sadistic torture by the Americans – our MI5 chaps just heard, understood, maybe looked, of course no touchy-touchy nonsense – and the Taliban? Have we managed to silence ourselves as well as the world with our own fears? Are we still not able to say those three sentences: The 19 murderers of 9/11 claimed they were Muslims. They came from a place called the Middle East. Is there a problem out there?

American publishers first went to war in 2001 with massive photo-memorial volumes. Their titles spoke for themselves: Above Hallowed Ground, So Others Might Live, Strong of Heart, What We Saw, The Final Frontier, A Fury for God, The Shadow of Swords... Seeing this stuff piled on newsstands across America, who could doubt that the US was going to go to war? And long before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, another pile of tomes arrived to justify the war after the war. Most prominent among them was ex-CIA spook Kenneth Pollack's The Threatening Storm – and didn't we all remember Churchill's The Gathering Storm? – which, needless to say, compared the forthcoming battle against Saddam with the crisis faced by Britain and France in 1938.

There were two themes to this work by Pollack – "one of the world's leading experts on Iraq," the blurb told readers, among whom was Fareed Zakaria ("one of the most important books on American foreign policy in years," he drivelled) – the first of which was a detailed account of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction; none of which, as we know, actually existed. The second theme was the opportunity to sever the "linkage" between "the Iraq issue and the Arab-Israeli conflict".

The Palestinians, deprived of the support of powerful Iraq, went the narrative, would be further weakened in their struggle against Israeli occupation. Pollack referred to the Palestinians' "vicious terrorist campaign" – but without any criticism of Israel. He wrote of "weekly terrorist attacks followed by Israeli responses (sic)", the standard Israeli version of events. America's bias towards Israel was no more than an Arab "belief". Well, at least the egregious Pollack had worked out, in however slovenly a fashion, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had something to do with 9/11, even if Saddam had not.

In the years since, of course, we've been deluged with a rich literature of post-9/11 trauma, from the eloquent The Looming Tower of Lawrence Wright to the Scholars for 9/11 Truth, whose supporters have told us that the plane wreckage outside the Pentagon was dropped by a C-130, that the jets that hit the World Trade Centre were remotely guided, that United 93 was shot down by a US missile, etc. Given the secretive, obtuse and sometimes dishonest account presented by the White House – not to mention the initial hoodwinking of the official 9/11 commission staff – I am not surprised that millions of Americans believe some of this, let alone the biggest government lie: that Saddam was behind 9/11. Leon Panetta, the CIA's newly appointed autocrat, repeated this same lie in Baghdad only this year.

There have been movies, too. Flight 93 re-imagined what may (or may not) have happened aboard the plane which fell into a Pennsylvania wood. Another told a highly romanticised story, in which the New York authorities oddly managed to prevent almost all filming on the actual streets of the city. And now we're being deluged with TV specials, all of which have accepted the lie that 9/11 did actually change the world – it was the Bush/Blair repetition of this dangerous notion that allowed their thugs to indulge in murderous invasions and torture – without for a moment asking why the press and television went along with the idea. So far, not one of these programmes has mentioned the word "Israel" – and Brian Lapping's Thursday night ITV offering mentioned "Iraq" once, without explaining the degree to which 11 September 2001 provided the excuse for this 2003 war crime. How many died on 9/11? Almost 3,000. How many died in the Iraq war? Who cares?

Publication of the official 9/11 report – in 2004, but read the new edition of 2011 – is indeed worth study, if only for the realities it does present, although its opening sentences read more like those of a novel than of a government inquiry. "Tuesday ... dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States... For those heading to an airport, weather conditions could not have been better for a safe and pleasant journey. Among the travellers were Mohamed Atta..." Were these guys, I ask myself, interns at Time magazine?

But I'm drawn to Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan whose The Eleventh Day confronts what the West refused to face in the years that followed 9/11. "All the evidence ... indicates that Palestine was the factor that united the conspirators – at every level," they write. One of the organisers of the attack believed it would make Americans concentrate on "the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel". Palestine, the authors state, "was certainly the principal political grievance ... driving the young Arabs (who had lived) in Hamburg".

The motivation for the attacks was "ducked" even by the official 9/11 report, say the authors. The commissioners had disagreed on this "issue" – cliché code word for "problem" – and its two most senior officials, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, were later to explain: "This was sensitive ground ...Commissioners who argued that al-Qa'ida was motivated by a religious ideology – and not by opposition to American policies – rejected mentioning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict... In their view, listing US support for Israel as a root cause of al-Qa'ida's opposition to the United States indicated that the United States should reassess that policy." And there you have it.

So what happened? The commissioners, Summers and Swan state, "settled on vague language that circumvented the issue of motive". There's a hint in the official report – but only in a footnote which, of course, few read. In other words, we still haven't told the truth about the crime which – we are supposed to believe – "changed the world for ever". Mind you, after watching Obama on his knees before Netanyahu last May, I'm really not surprised.

When the Israeli Prime Minister gets even the US Congress to grovel to him, the American people are not going to be told the answer to the most important and "sensitive" question of 9/11: why?
© 2011 The Independent

Case History 2.......

2011-09-11T17:35:00.030+08:00

When I was research registrar at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, some 3 decades ago, come Fridays we registrars on call for the weekend always cannot help feeling 'abandoned' and that familiar deja vu feeling of melancholia invariably seeped in. Why not ! We could feel the rest of the hospital medical staff, juniors and seniors already in 'weekend' mode. By 2 pm, 50 % already disappeared to some pubs [ some lucky blokes with eager-to-please young student nurses in tow ] somewhere near Smithfield Meat Market [ the biggest meat market in Europe during those old empire days ] around the vicinity of Little Britain and EC1A area.

Weekend calls those days were pretty long and 'lonely' affair, at least for me : Friday, Saturday, Sunday and you see your bosses only on Monday morning. Of course they are contactable but the unwritten rule is, if you are 'worth your salt', you don't call them.[ 'God' is there all the time, but you don't call him on Sunday ! ] You are the substantive registrar and 'consultant' and you hold the fort! I find being the boss and 'coolie' at the same time in a substantive Central London teaching hospital, at my level of incompetence at that time, for an extended period of 3 days, very daunting and stressful experience plus plus. Till Monday you are the boss lording over an active cardiac unit with your senior house officer, unless of course someone almost at the same level of the Queen of England get admitted in Bart's. Only then would you have the reason to call 'god'. [British medical consultants those days have a class and style of their own.]

In egalitarian London of the 80's, that would be rare. The Queen's hospital was St Georges anyway, and I think still is at the present time though Prince William was delivered at St Mary's, another hospital of mine before I moved to the more fashionable and more reputable St Barts.

St Bart's, though in the City and surrounded by lawyers offices, barristers and Queen's counsels and brokers, was still working class, a wee bit stiff in the upper lips, but not yet quite enough!

I would come on Friday morning, with some 'gloom' already working up in my head, with a big loaf of bread and a turperware full of my favourite dish,' beef or mutton kuzi' cooked by my dear wife, to cheer me up, nicely stored in the junior staff quarter's refrigerator. The frozen 'kuzi' would be cut a block at a time and defrosted for breakfast , lunch and dinner for the next 3 days. By Monday morning , just mention 'kuzi' and I would want to vomit. They did serve steak and fish and chip at the cafeteria but despite reading HAMKA and all [ HAMKA is quite liberal in these situations ], I find these 'junks' could not get beyond my glottis!

St Bart's is one of the oldest hospital in London , if not the oldest. History has it that in the old days, when the internist physicians could not treat their cases of carbuncles, tumours and growths, they 'refer' these rather troublesome and embarassing cases to the excellent butchers across the street. These 'gentlemen' by virtue of their 'working class standard' usually creeped into the hospital and 'operate' by night. In the grand round the next day, the internist physician would lord over their patient and claim the glory of success. That, I was told by a senior, was the beginning of surgery as a speciality. No wonder the British still calls them 'Mister' and not the usual honorific 'Dr'.

Even now, years as a 'big time' consultant I still take weekend calls as a pain in the neck....2 days [ Saturday and Sunday ]you find yourselves unable to go anywhere or plan anything. I am on for this week.
Just as I was about to go home for lunch this 52 year old gentleman, a Malay chap. supervisor at a factory somewhere in PJ owned by a multinational company [ on a scale of things, MNC and Japanese companies treat even their non executive staff well, not like most Chinaman companies ! GLC quite OK, TNB and Bank Negara are best. Petronas, I dont know why, is slipping quite significantly on their staff care !!!! RM factor ? ].,was admitted with central chest pain and breathlessness of sudden onset. Risk factors :Diabetic and hypertensive over 4 years, with poor control and surveillance and a smoker. Diagnosis : Hyperacute phase of an inferior myocardial
infart.

Standard operating procedure : Admit for primary myocardial infarct angioplasty.
Angiogram showed severe triple vessel disease with culprit right coronary artery totally occluded. Passed guidewire across occlusion, aspirate clot plus plus. Lost wire access in the process and unable to rewire across lesion due to probable change in the plaque configuration.

No improvement to wire access even after a bolus shot of RHEOPRO [ 5 ml of this precious fluid cost more than gold ! ]. Last ditch effort since a life at stake, add 5000 units of METALYSE [ more expensive than rheopro ]given intracoronary, wire still not crossable. Patient's haemodynamics stable ! Mashaallah ! Alhamdullillah !
10 minutes post intracoronary infusion, another cine taken. RCA still totally occluded. Call it a day since patient still stable and procedure already 1.5 hours.
Patient had VT/VF [ cardiac arrest on the table ] prior to transfer to CCU. Duly defibrillated successfully. Alhamdullillah ! That is a good sign of delayed recanalazation by chemical fibrinolyis [ rheopro and metalyse ]. Totally dead muscles usually are quiet. Semi dead muscle due to microcappilary re-canalization ' fibrillate' and thus has reperfusion arrthmias such as VT/VF needing even defibrillation [ electric shock]. My Cath lab staff went blue. 'Dont worry,Good sign. You guys will see him Monday, God willing !', I told them .

Today, Sunday, patient in CCU stable and well.
For check angiogram tomorrow expecting to see some reopening of the occluded RCA. Check Angiogram this time to prepare patient for possible bypass surgery in 2 months time. If RCA reopens somewhat he goes for CABG. If not, we will have to optimise his medical therapy. We seldom refer patients for CABG these days unless they need at least 3 vessels to be bypassed.

..........

Just now 5 pm get called by Dr Shu, neurologist on-call to see a young Indian girl, 32 years old, with Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura [ ITP , ie severe dysfuction and reduction of platelet due to unknown cause ], moribund, in coma and fully ventilated in ICU. Her BP is on the bfloor at 50 / ??, had a run of VT. She had earlier being on state of the art therapy under hematological consultant who successfully upped her platelet to al most normal count. Today brought in with severe headache and shortly after admission had massive intracerebral bleed needing to be ventilated in ICU and in deep coma .Urgent referral plus plus.

Over phone order:
IV bolus xylocard 100 mg given STAT.
IV infusion of dopamine and noradrenaline, BP normalised in 10 minutes to 120/ 70.
Earlier MRI brain showed huge, 6 cm diameter intracerebral bleed in the motor cortex and building bigger with time. Wth stable hemodynamics now we needed to bring in the primadonna, the surgeon. Neurosurgeon on call still busy operating . Got to call 2nd neurosurgeon.

2nd neurosurgeon in KGNS improving his golf shots.
He has to come in and decompress the brain right away, otherwise this nice looking young girl will not survive the night..........and given the bleeding tendency, she may not even survive the op. Hobson's choice but what choice do you have when faced with a young 31 year old dying due to a 'burst and leaking' pipe in the brain and a bleeding disorder problem ?

Reminded me of this poem we standard six school children of the past memorized by heart. Was it by Anonymous or was it by William Henry Davies, I have forgotten ? I think it must be Davies :

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

post script : Monday morning, 7 am,

The young girl had emergency burrhole and decompression surgery done late last night.
This may not even be helpful for her as her bp plummeted down this early Monday morning to unrecordable despite being on full dose triple inotropes. I do not see any prospect of survival. Primary physician, the hematological consultant discuss and explain in lenght grave prognosis to close family.
....again an example of the transience and fragility of life.

The 52 year old diabetic factory supervisor survived the weekend very well. Check angiogram done at 2 pm today showed 'recanulated' right coronary artery. I resisted a natural urge to just dilate , balloon and stent this lesion in view of the fact that his left system is adequately diseased as well though not totally occluded.
He is for CABG [ bypass surgery ] 4 to 6 weeks time.

And that young body builder [ case history 1 ] got married this weekend.

وَقَالَ ٱرۡڪَبُواْ فِيہَا بِسۡمِ ٱللَّهِ مَجۡر۪ٮٰهَا وَمُرۡسَٮٰهَآ‌ۚ إِنَّ رَبِّى لَغَفُورٌ۬ رَّحِيمٌ۬ (٤١)
Bismillah himajreha wa mursaha inna Rabbi la Ghafur ru Rahim.
{Hud , 11 : 41 }
[ In the name of Allah be its course and its mooring. Lo! my Lord is Forgiving,
Merciful.]..Prophet Nuh alaihisalam on the eve of 'The Big Flood'.

Berkeley's Conversation with History : Tariq Ramadan

2011-09-11T03:50:00.004+08:00

Host Harry Kreisler welcomes Oxford University Professor Tariq Ramadan for a discussion of his new book, "What I Believe." Reflecting on the formative experiences of his life, Professor Ramadan traces the influence of his family, his education in Western philosophy and Islamic studies, and the impact of his different careers including high school principal, philosopher, and Islamic scholar. Articulating his commitment to universal principles and resistance to inequality, He analyzes the tensions facing Muslims in an era of globalization as they strive to be fully engaged as citizens committed to Western values.
click here

Elsewhere in the blog,
click here for A European Muslim
click here for ' Conversation on Islam' with Prof Wan Mohd Nor

Case History

2011-09-07T02:24:00.034+08:00

I am 'insomnic' tonight. How to sleep!? Just back from my 'energy sapping.' Ramadan umrah' and now on call. From 12 midnight till now 230 Am, I have had 3 nonsense calls from the hospital. Dr Syed at ER is not giving me any reprieve. He is currently at it with a vengeance !

Something crossed my mind, CASE HISTORIES.

A year ago,
AHW, 22 year old young Malay man. Could have called him 'boy'.[ My 2nd son is younger and much much heavier thanks to his mum who think she has to remain champion cook in Subang Jaya ]. Trainee bank officer, just slightly overweight for his height of 170 cm, ie 78 kg. Central chest pain and heart burn whole day . Seen and scoped by gastroenterological specialist colleague, no obvious redness or ulcer in stomach. About to be discharged with some antacid and proton pump inhibitor, Controlloc. His GP father, who was my student during his med-school student days, obviously not quite happy, requested me to see as a second opinion prior to discharge.....

Coronary angiogram later that same evening showed a myocardial infarct, fortunately involving a non major artery, that was why the presentation was non classical !
Culprit : smoking and trainee bank executive ,with stress plus plus and uncertainties. Young trainees nowadays made to work for several years on probation on pittance [ someone has to look at the banking industry, especially the goings on in Ex Bank Bumiputra's CIMB,...with bumiputra Nazir and Charoen at the top, the rest at the bottom and middle, I dunno ! I am being very cheeky here. ]...??. Cholesterol neither too high nor normal, nothing spectacular.

Just now at 7 pm : Seen at ER, KRS...
27 year old Malay gentleman, ex body builder. 2 years on cyclical oral anabolics with two weekly intramuscular injection of stanazolol [ 'Doc, 100 %of body builders on anabolics '!, he said as a matter of fact ...]. A maddening 30-egg, 2 whole chicken daily suprahigh protein diet. Came to ER with heart burn and chest pain that radiated to neck. Resting ECG looked suspicious but not aggressively abnormal. KRS is 85 kg with a body like Arnold Apakahnamadiadah Susahsangatnakeja. Even I could send him home on anti gastric medication had not the TropT blood test showing some positivity [ We heart doctors and ER doctors sometime live on our wits and could get to be in our under-wears if we get sued often enough. Patients do not come with the diagnosis emblazoned on their foreheads !. Oftentimes just a sixth sense that something is amiss, do help us... most time if we are unsure, admit for observation when things begin to unfold to give a fuller picture ! ].

Told mum upfront,the current observable cold statistics : procedure mortality risk 2 % with primary infarct PTCA/stentin. Conventional chemical thrombolysis treatment, if just involve proximal anterior descending artery, chances of opening blockade, 70 %, mortality risk 30 %. If Left Main Stem involved or near Left Main Stem, whatever we do conservatively, mortality risk 90 %. Our hands more or less are tied towards PTCA/stenting whatever the risk. Time of intervention is of the essence. Must conclude I have never met a most decisive mum this side of the Southern Hemisphere.
She did not bet an eyelid.Made our side of the 'business' easy.

" Please proceed Doc, He is only 27. He is getting married to his fiance next week "

Pushed straight to the cath lab from ER for primary infarct angioplasty and stenting[ Angioplasty, 30 years old technique now, or PTCA as anacronym, is European, Swiss in origin by Andreas Grunzieg 1980's; stenting, an extension of PTCA, is an American innovation] :
a 90 % blockade at the ostium of Left anterior descending artery [ Federal Highway numero uno ], barely 0.5 mm away from 'The Widow Maker's Junction' [ Left Main Stem artery...my God ! ]. Immediately crossed lesion gingerly [ Malaysian, with a wee bit of prayer, just the ubiquitous and truncated, 'bismillah' without the Hirrahmanirrahim ]with BMW 0.014inch guidewire [ German or British ], clot aspirated with an Export Catheter [ American ], advanced in a 'monorailed' fashion[ a technique initially popularised by the Japanese and the French ] advance via guidewire guidance. Thereafter, culprit lesion dilated with Terumo/Ryujin balloon [ Japanese] at 10 atmospheres. Removed terumo/Rugin ballon and advance a 3.5 millimetre diameter,15 mm length, Xience Stent [ American ], over the BMW Guidewire, and duly implanted at site of narrowing deployed at pressures of 19 and 21 atmospheres respectively. Another tense moment and another series of 'Bismillah'. A burst artery at this juncture could spell doom. 'Bloody' Stent moved a wee bit forward on implantation as very close proximity to 'Widow Maker's junction make very precise positioning crucial but the 'damn heart' of course cannot stop moving and shoving. BP/Pulse hemodynamics stable, patient concious, cooperating and importantly well sedated and quiet, not in distress. A series of 'Alhamdullillah' here is in order.

Doctor's heart dropped to the floor and his BP transiently skyrocketed to the roof following a sudden purge of internal adrenaline......followed by a small cursory four letter 'curse' and another "bismillah". Have to implant another stent, slightly shorter proximally, juxtaposing and kissing the 1st stent, as the 1st one did not cover the culprit lesion wholly due to the slight shift due to heart's continuous movement. Done."Alhamdullillah". Everything in place and OK and patient seem quiet and happy and hemodynamics stable. End of procedure.

Called anxious mum and family in and discussed the cine loop on video. Patient on the table ready for transfer to CCU. Mother and son had a small chat and both seemed relieved. Fantastic feeling.

Patient alive and well at CCU in half an hour asking when he could start his body building programme again ???? My God these young people nowadays, they are in a hurry !

Reminded me of my distant cousin, aggressive businessman, whom I managed some 20 years back, Mr FY, must be around 45 then, who had had a massive infart and left with a left ventricle hardly pumping [ LV ejection fraction of 15 % ], who asked on his 3rd hospital day:
" Doc Nik Howk, when can I start my badminton again ".
He died in his house a month later of cardiac arrest. Tired heart.

Now Dr Syed of ER is calling me again, this time no false alarm : He is admitting a 26 year old Malay gentleman, with a heart as big as a football , bp 170/90, in pulmonary oedema [ euphemism for heart failure or 'water in the lungs' ]. This gentleman has IDIOPATHIC DILATED CARDIOMYOPATHY and on follow up with my junior colleugue Dr Nizar, but absconded on his medications for a week. Nizar still 'skiing' his hard earned 'ringgits' with family somewhere in Europe. Nice and lovely to be still young and hopeful !. And Hari Raya and Ramadan can sometimes make us do stupid things [ our patients , I mean...like missing on the meds ]!

Idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy, reminded me of my St Mary's Hospital,Praed Street Jewish mentor some 30 years back, the late Dr Peter Kidner, cardiologist par excellence :' We doctors are IDIOts because we do not know the actual cause of this problem, and our patients generally PAtheTHIC, because our line of management could only at best be conjectural and 'cookery'... ' ]

From my vantage position,I must accept now that, at best, LIFE IS PRETTY FRAGILE !....and very unpredictable too.
Always tell my friends and patients that, for some special men, CEO's and those 'gladiatorial', type A sorts especially, to the chagrin of their missus if they are around during the discussion, that LIFE REALLY STARTS AT FIFTY FOR MEN. But the damn clock starts ticking well before their proverbial forty.

Go figure out how you want to live your life with these two incongruous variables.
If I ponder and discuss over it too long you would not call me a 'Doc' anymore. An 'Ustaz' prefix would seem appropriate.

I must be going now............that young man with water in his lungs is waiting in the cardiac ward. Our CCU is 'chockerblock full' to the brim !

That young body builder, I was told by the CCU nurse in charge, is still dreaming good dreams in cloud nine. He is going to be married in a week's time. Insyaalah he should be fully recovered by then.

Mashaallah, this is my life.......
It is cases like these that keep me coming back and glued to my job.
A vocation that continually remind me on a daily basis the 'fragility and transient nature of this life'.

Hublum minallah....Love of Allah.
Hublum minan Nas.....this is is the difficult part for most of us mere mortals.
We easily get clouded by greed, nepotism, crass materialism, ignorance and intellectual impotence.

Rivalry in worldly increase distracteth you Until ye come to the graves. Nay, but ye will come to know! Nay, but ye will come to know! Nay, would that ye knew (now) with a sure knowledge!
For ye will behold hell-fire.
Aye, ye will behold it with sure vision.
Then, on that day, ye will be asked concerning pleasure.

al takathur, 102 : 1-8

For similar articles on Heart Attack and Angioplasty on this blog,
click here

Democracy, Islam and the present day Muslims..........

2011-08-31T17:22:00.042+08:00

Malaysia is 54 years old today !
Despite all the debates we would like to view ourselves as a democratic, constitutional monarchy, for whatever it mean.

As a Malay Muslim I would love to think beyond our 15 millions or so. We live in a Nusantara that transcend 250 millions. Beyond this 250 millions, some other 1.4 billions share the same faith and aspirations as myself and yourself. 1.6 billion humanity [ and growing ]within 6 billions people on this planet earth, that is a very significant figure.It is high time we think aloud our agenda and aspirations and not let the 'meeks' of the world determine our future and our direction.
Allah exhorts us to think big, not 15 millions or 250 millions or 1.6 billions but in term of 6 billions.....the whole of humanity.
If one limits one thought and energy to the constraint of 'Darul Harb' and 'Darul Islam', that space become small. If you are Indonesian or Malaysians, you are limited to your neighbours and friends.
But if the whole world is all about 'Darul Daawah', then whole wide world is your playing field. That obnoxious Lee Ah Lek, Dave Freeman or Dewi Ramasamy become your bridge to heaven. You can afford to be big hearted: With one stroke of rethinking, they become your friends. You also improve. You have to be on your best behaviour.

Hublum minallah [ Love for Allah ] is not very difficult.
Hublum minan Nas[ Love for humanity ] is !
6 billion humanity to work on.....Islam is a universal message for Mankind but currently the big game out there is through 'labels ' and 'mislabels'.
'Democracy' is one of them.

Democracy means many things to many people.
To present day Muslims, Democracy can be very confounding and controversial. Depending on what shade of glasses one wears, which continent and country one is situated, Democracy has it's spectrum of meaning and connotation.

Let us 1st view it from a 'literalist' perspective [ I am using the term literalist loosely here to mean people steeped in Medinan and Meccan school of thinking within the Muslim domain ],
click here for Abdul Rahim Green's opinion on democracy

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson, an American revert to Islam, long time student of Islam from Morocco and Mauritania, steeped in the tradition of sufism, co-founder and Dean of Zaytuna Institute USA, has his views here on Democracy in an exceprt of his debate with Dr Friedman,
click here

And finally we come to Prof Tariq Ramadan, Egyptian by birth, Swiss by nationality,European by content and Muslim by faith....and as some rightists in Europe and America might want to have it included, Muslim Brotherhood by genus....to remind us again the power of 'labels'.

I like this man. He is a thinker par excellence!
Let us listen to his thots, click here
click here for part 3
click here for part 4
and lastly, a BBC special, click here

We can turn the table around and make 'Democracy',work for us. 'Democracy' is good for Muslims. In this borderless world nothing is impossible.
We will play their game with their rules.
Truth will prevail, God willing.

What are your views ?

Hasbunallah wani' mal Wakeel
[ Allah is sufficient for me, HE is Al Wakeel, disposer of all affairs ]

Let us listen to Prof Noam Chomsky, controversial and celebrated Western thinker, has to say about the historical perspective of contemporary 'Democracy' in the West ie America,
click here

On the extreme end, make no mistake about it, Bernard Lewis, current doyen of orientalism, who knows Islam like the back of his palm,[despite all his knowledge and wisdom or lack of it depending on which side of the world view you are on], has this pessimistic view about the world:
click here

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

Nadzru Azahari IR
Substantive CEO,
Ranhill Worley [Sdn]? Bhd.
Son of failed UMNO politician in the 1960's. Spent substantive years in Cairo when father was information attache to Malaysian Embassy there. Arabist par excellence. Able to speak Arabic in different Arabic lingo and nuances local to Egypt, Morocco, Algeria,Libya and Saudi. One of his many skills involve even selling 'sand and olive oil' to the Arabs ! Having a 'big headache' now in Libya now due to substantive overexposure during the Ghadaffy era. But this 'Anak Kelatae', like most who grew up with me in the 'Dato Asri' era is a survivor. We do not have the pleasure of NEP or UMNOPUTRaISM to give us the extra stool to keep on par. We just struggle on, on all our 'fours' if need be and do not depend on state handouts.

To Nadzru,this world is his village ! Currently in Thailand for over a month. I hope he is not planning to take over Thai Petroluem ! He will be OK insyaallah.

My classmate at Sultan Ismail College, Kota Bharu, in the early 60's between form 1 to 3 before both of us left the state for greener pastures..me to Malay College, he to Sultan Abdul Hamid College, Alor Setar, and 'informally' from his Arabist father in Cairo.
His views on 'Democracy and Islam', click here

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

Oftentimes with my friend Nadzru, even in school I recall his weakness being long winded. He failed his precis in form two.
We somehow got lost somewhere in the trees but we do get his point.
Let us move on to Dato Nadzri, formerly numero uno of the 'good old Berita Harian' days, who has this to add :

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

Salam Dr Nik,
Soal demokrasi dan Islam yang you bangkitkan itu sudah berabad didebab tetapi belum ada jawapannya. Belum ada satu model negara umat Islam yang dapat dicontohi. Bagi saya tidak ada negara Islam, republik Islam, bandaraya Islam (kb) di dunia ini. These names make a mockery of Islam. Negara Islam hanya wujud di akhirat.

Di dunia ini kita boleh ada umat Islam, keluarga Islam, mungkin perkampungan Islam. Tapi negeri atau negara Islam mustahil. Yg penting bukan sistem tetapi insan yg melaksanakan sistem itu. Allah membentuk peribadi muhammad sehingga usia 40 tahun baru lantik beliau jadi rasul dan menurunkan wahyu kepadanya. Jadi yg penting ialah pemimpin bukan sistemnya. Sistem yang cacat tapi pemimpinnya kamil boleh melahirkan pentadbiran yang baik. Sistem yg baik kalau ditadbir oleh pemimpin yang tidak baik akan merosakkan sistem dan negara. Barat mungkin melihat pentadbiran nabi di madinah sebagai autokratik kerana sumber kuasa dan keputusan dari nabi sahaja, tetapi kerana nabi role model insan yang terbaik, adil dan ehsan maka umat yahudi dan nasrani tunduk dibawah pemerintahan beliau. Apakah sistem pentadbiran zaman khalifah arRashidin? Ulama menyebut 4 khalifah itu sebagai rightly guided kerana peribadi, insan kamil, taqwa mereka. Mereka mencontohi Nabi. Umayyah, abbasiah, othmaniah, fatimiah, ayubiah dan seterusnya berupa dynasti, monarchy dan adakalanya anarchy. Sama ada sesuatu sistem itu dari barat atau timur, utara atau selatan, semuanya berasaskan akal -mantiq yang dianugerah Allah. Kalau ikut maqasid syariah, tidak ada satu sistem yang perfect untuk semua ummah, prinsipnya sama tetapi perlaksanaannya mestilah mengambilkira persekitarannya, adat dan budaya masyarakat. Bagi kita umat islam prinsipnya mestilah mengikut al-quran dan sunnah, dan perlaksanaan mestilah berlandaskan maqasid syariah.- isteri ajak pi pasar nanti kita sambung.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device via Vodafone-Celcom Mobile.

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

pokok nya dato', tak jauh berbeda dari tanggapan tok guru nik aziz, tuan guru hj hadi et al, dan kalau kita 'mengextrapolate' diri kita ke ummah islam dibarat, termasuk juga pemikiran prof tariq ramadan.
saya pernah halakan persoalan ini ke prof wan muhammad dari istac beberapa tahun terdahulu. jawapan beliau pun seakan sama tetapi lebih berupa allegorical

" with resepct to the garden [ in malaysia ] the bushes are everywhere, trees are a wee bit unkempt, oftentimes we need not change the whole system or the garden itself, just cheaper and more practical to change the gardener "

if i recall correctly his answer !

nik howk

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

from Dato Nadzri:

Yes change is the word used by Obama during his presidential campaign. . Hijrah from Mecca to Madinah constitute structural change for Prophet, Islam and Ummah. Tapi orang Melayu tak suka change!

Tiap-tiap tahun tazkirah pasal hijrah tetapi orang Melayu reluctant to change. Mentally, spiritually, physically they prefer to stay at their comfort zone. I met nik aziz yesterday and brought up the issue of Baginda Rasulullah. He admitted he never thought the consequences and promised not to use that title for Rasulullah anymore. Well Hj Hadi, Nik aziz, you, Nazrul, myself and the others are only human being. If prophet himself being corrected and reminded by Allah few times, who are we? He repeatedly stressed in al-Quran to think, learn, seek knowledge and don't forget the meeting day. 10 brains better than one, so musyawarah to find the best solution for present time and present generation is the best approach. To do this we must change. May I end this note by asking my learned cardiologist to do surgical analysis on the term deliberative democracy and musyawarah. Salam

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

I totally agree with you Dato on us 'orang Melayu' having great inertia for change.
Currently I am reading Muhammad Asad 's [aka Leopold Weiss ]'The Message of The Quran'...must be the best ever English translation and commentary on The Quran.
This is a digression but a necessary one...Interestingly he added " FOR THOSE WHO THINK "

Just yesterday, I met my favourite patient, a 69 year old sailor from Norway who has made Kuantan his home and married to a nice Malay lady his age from Pahang. Perfect physique this Norweagian. Runs 10 kilometres a day and has a resting heart rate of 45 bpm !

"Why do you choose Islam of all religions, Mr Koplande", I asked.
" Because I think. Islam is for those WHO THINK . I read Asad, and he encouraged me to think. Those who are not yet Muslims, I think personally, they do not want to read because they do not want to think".

Mashaallah. I got my 'high' yesterday.
Likewise, back to our problem of democracy and present day Muslims,we need to think.
Our local garden is full of 'semak and danau'. The fruit trees are not fruiting. The flowers and bees are all gone. Even the fences are not well manage. Whatever fruits and flowers and honey there are, the gardener and his family think they are theirs !

We need not burn the garden or allow our neighbours to manage it or help burn it for us.

WE just need to change the gardener.
Other gardens esleswhere, their weeds and parasite problems may be different from us. The solutions to their problems may be different. We are all unique.

SINCE THE CURRENT POPULAR BALLGAME WORLDWIDE IS DEMOCRACY, LET US PLAY BY THAT RULES.
CHANGE THE GARDENERS IF WE CAN, INFLUENCE THEM IF WE MUST, OR AT LEAST LET THEM KNOW THEIR WORK ETHICS ARE NOT ON,IF WE CAN'T.

Nik Howk

Zakat harta / ? Pendapatan......a short advertorial

2011-08-08T23:42:00.015+08:00

My friend Dato Abdul Razak Kechik, former Director of Health, Kelantan has been doing daawah work amongst the orang aslis in Malaysia for the last 35 to 40 years or so, initially under the auspices of ABIM, now probably on his own under the acronym, IOAK, whatever it stand for. Duly recognised for this lifetime of selfless and oftentimes dangerous work in the jungle around Malaysia by HM The Sultan of Perak and recently conferred a dato'ship. In the jungle one faces with malaria, dengue, dysentery and Japanese B encephalitis, leptospirosis etc etc apart from the time spent away from your loved ones.

I wrote some time ago about him, but could not retrieve the article in the blog because I could not recall the sub heading. His main area of operation currently is mainly in Perak and the Kelantan- Pahang border. Survive mainly on his own collection from friends and contribution from Majlis Ugama Islam Perlis.
[ sorry, I got it at last ,click here ]

His modus operandi is that he collects zakat harta from friends paid to MAIP [ Majlis Agama Islam Perlis ], from which a fraction will be given to his group to finance his daawah activities. A dhaif type of financing no doubt, but the best that could be done given the circumstances. According to him , nothing like the finance of The Churches of Malaysia in this area of daawah. Invariably Doc Dato Razak will post to you the receipt from MAIP and this I can assure you is 100 % tax deductible. I have gone thru this for several years now.

Send your cheques to :
Dato' Abdul Razak Kechik
Pengerusi IOAK,
74C, Kampong Melayu,
Sungei Buloh
47000, Selangor

you can call or sms him at hp for confirmation : 0135040070
your cheques in favour of : Majlis Agama Islam Perlis,
with your name and address at the back.

MAKE YOUR ZAKAT HARTA / ? Pendapatan go that that extra mile rather than building some god-forsaken building somewhere or as happened a few years ago buying some pajeros for JAIS or MAIS.

Why I put a ? Pendapatan there is because there is no precise way to quantify what is basically enough for us. One can earn 50k a year and live modestly and still pay zakat . On the other hand one can earn million RM a month, has a penthouse apartment in Belgravia,London and a holiday getaway in Tioman and Brisbane, and a posh villa in Kenny Hill,with 3 Benzes, 2 BM and a Jaguar sports in the garage and a negative net liability of -5o million Rm due to bank loans for business, and thus technically, could even qualify to get zakat fitrah !

We have to be honest with ourselves. If you are earning that much, allow yourself in such circumstance a 'hypothetical' four bedroom 'bungalow', and a decent ' hypothetical' spending money monthly, the rest should qualify to be computed for zakat ie at 2.5 % per annum.

Otherwise only the poor Pak Mat Nyadaps of Kuala Ketil and Padang Pa' Amat end up having to pay zakat harta because their lembu, kambing income from their padi fields are easily calculated and downright stated in the hadiths and the Quran. The RMs, Nazirs and the Toyos of this world escape scott's free because there seem to be no end to their satiety and need and they are permanently in debt one way or the other.
How can they ever be free, when they had just moved on to a bigger mansion and a 100-foot yatcht , they look yonder and lo and behold, a neighbour has a much bigger mansion and a 200 -foot yatcht!

Allahualam.... I am no fekah expert but that is how I see and compute life.

*********
Actual, nitty gritty details on zakat payment :Calculation of present day income,properties, bonds and shares, and liabilities......
click here

Perennial Philosophy : A Rebuttal Against.....

2011-08-04T23:03:00.019+08:00

It seem like America was not there until Columbus discovered it. This Nusantara was non existent until the Europeans discovered their fervour for gold, spice and religion. It work the same for 'democracy'.No democracy means you are a 'pariah' state. This frenzy for the right anointment and that final right to exist by the West has spread to issues of religion.

It seem like even Islam need the stamp of the orientalists and their misguided views before it can be 'certfied' as correct for 'human' consumption. To these people even religion has to go through an 'evolution'.

Liebnizt, Huxley, Rene Guenon, Fritjof Schuon, Krisnamurty Coomaraswamy and lately even Hoessien Nasr , despite their different philosophical upbringing and belief, they all shared something in common : That the world great religions shared a common denominator. Out of this philosophy came the misguided notion amongst the 'very bright' and later even the 'not so bright' that at the topmost 'distilled' end. all religions are the same.
This , to me, is political correctness at its most maddening height.

Mohd Aizam Mas'od wrote a very convincing rebuttal against this ongoing religious confusion, which even consume many Muslim thinkers nowadays. Liberal Islam, progressive Islam, are ones of the by -products of this new derivative.
I can understand Rene Guenon [ Shaykh Ab'dal Wahid Yahya ], Martin Lings [ Shaykh Abu Bakar Siraj ] and Fritjof Schuon[aka Shaykh Nurudin ] from where they came from. All brought up initially as either agnostic or on a staple diet of trinity, later in their lives, realise and could not accept these various abberation from the original' Din and were given Islam as the ultimate gifts from Allah. They came in with a cultural and an alien philosophical baggage.Not their fault and in fact these guys contributions have enriched Islam. But what I still cannot comprehend is why people like Prof Hoessien Nasr and Dr Nurcholish Majid et al, all born Muslims and brought up in an Islamic milliue, could still need 'perinneal philosophy' to explain Islam. Islam does not need apologists.

It was there at the beginning of the primordial man, Prophet Adam alaihissalam.
In fact it was there even before Adam.

Read what Mohd Aizam Mas'od has to say:
http://www.islam.gov.my/sites/default/files/a_perennial_philosophy.pdf

Related Article in the blog :
Faces in Islam : Still on Happiness, click here
.........

Lauren Booth...my way to Islam

2011-08-04T07:36:00.003+08:00

click here

Related articles in the blog :
Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson, click here
Shaykh Hussien Yee, click here
'Cat Steven's " Light ", click here

On Death and Dying : Your Time Is Up......

2011-08-03T22:53:00.007+08:00

Shaykh Ismail Musa Menk on Death.
click here

Some magical and most powerful "mantra" to repeat, remember and commit to memory, and as an 'antidote' to soften the blow :

Hasbunallah wa ni'mal wakeel
(Al Imran , 3 : 173)
Dua Prophet Ibrahim alaihisalam
Those to whom the people said: Surely men have gathered
against you, therefore fear them, but this increased their faith,
and they said:
[Allah is sufficient for us, and He is Al Wakeel { best disposer of affairs }]

Hasbiyallahu, la ilaha illa, huwa alaihi tawakkaltu, wa huwa Rabb al- arshal -azhiim
{ Al Taubah , 9 : 129 }
[ Allah is sufficient for me, I have placed my trust in Him, He is the Lord of the Magestic Throne. ]

وَقَالَ ٱرۡڪَبُواْ فِيہَا بِسۡمِ ٱللَّهِ مَجۡر۪ٮٰهَا وَمُرۡسَٮٰهَآ‌ۚ إِنَّ رَبِّى لَغَفُورٌ۬ رَّحِيمٌ۬ (٤١)
Bismillah himajreha wa mursaha inna Rabbi la Ghafur ru Rahim.
{Hud , 11 : 41 }
[ In the name of Allah be its course and its mooring. Lo! my Lord is Forgiving,
Merciful.]..Prophet Nuh alaihisalam on the eve of 'The Big Flood'.

Related articles on 'death' in the blog:
Death and Eternal Life After Death, click here
Some Random Thots on Death, click here
Some More Random Thots on Death, click here

Jewels from The Quran : Episode 2...Shaykh Ismail Musa Menk

2011-08-03T22:07:00.001+08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgj-RNyLEKg&feature=relmfu

Jewel from the Quran...is in reciting it with comprehension

2011-08-01T07:50:00.024+08:00

In 2011, it is no longer possible to hide behind ignorance and indifference our inability to comprehend and understand the Quran.
IT connectivity and it's ubiquity make such excuses redundant. Whether you are an Eskimo in Greenland or a fan of Christopher Hitchins and Richard Dawkin in England , Europe or Kuala Lumpur, you now have no valid excuse to remain ignorant. Whether you are white, black , brown or yellow; Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or agnostic, The Quran is addressed to you, as it was addressed to Prophet Muhammad some 1432 years ago:
click here

Likewise if you think you are too clever and a firm 'fan' and enthusiast in some abberant philosophy be it perinneal philosophy, liberal Islam or some 'woolly woolly' ideology, be warned : you are on very flimsy ground !

This Ramadan you can make a start towards your very own 'education' : Recite or listen to The Quran with some modicum of understanding. Follow up later with your own adventure in reading tafseer work of whichever shade you like. If your inclination is simple minded, straight forward [' betul macam bendul '] and literal, 'salafi', go the Ibnu Katsir way. If you want a European and progressive outlook of Islam, read perhaps Muhammad Assad [ for Dr Farouk Musa's take on Muhammad Assad's 'Message of The Quran', click here ].If your inclination is to feel energised and 'angry',read the more radical stuff from Maududi or 'angry' with a tinge poetic beauty, read Sayyid Qutb.If you have a lot of time and want a Nusantara perspective, Hamka's Tafsir Al Azhar would be perfect.

One has to start somewhere, sometime, somehow. Disregard your current background . You may be a nuclear scientist, may have a Masters degree from Harvard or a Phd from Cambridge but if you remain impervious to The Message of The Quran, you are what Allah termed as deaf , dumb and blind ! HE is very definitive about it: You are just DEAF, DUMB, and BLIND, my friend !.

Alhamdullillah, Islam is not constrictive. There is a spectrum of views even during Rasullallah's time and the sahabat. It is the myopic views of present day Muslims that are putting us all in the 'last lane' of everything. As if Islam put a heavy constraint on thinking. The early Muslims were mostly thinkers. The European Renaisance was just a carbon copy of what went on earlier in Cordoba, Baghdad and Servile.

Stop warming your ar.. on your chair my friend. Recite, Recite and Recite. Life is very short. By the time you realise it, you are almost there !

al Fatihah to al Baqarah 141, click here
al Baqarah 142 to al Baqarah 252, click here
al Baqarah 253 to Ali Imran 92, click here
Ali Imran 93 to An Nisa 23, click here
An Nisa 24 to An Nisa 147, click here
An Nisa 148 to al Maidah 81, click here
al Maidah 82 to al An'am 110, click here
al An'am 111 to al A'raf 87, click here
al A'raf 88 to al Anfal 40, click here
al Anfal 41 to al Taubah 92, click here
al Taubah 93 to Hud 5, click here
Hud 6 to Yusuf 52, click here
Yusuf 53 to Ibrahim 52, click here
al Hijr 1 to al Nahl 128, click here
al Isra' 1 to al Kalf 74, click here
al Kalf 75 to Ta Ha 135, click here
al Anbiya 1 to al Haj 78, click here
al Mukminun 1 to al Furqan 20, click here
al Furqan 21 to al Naml 55, click here
al Naml 56 to al Ankabut 45, click here
al Ankabut 46 to al Ahzab 30, click here
al Ahzab 31 to Yaseen 27, click here
Yaseen 28 to Az Zumar 31, click here
az Zumar 32 to Fusilat 46, click here
Fusilat 47 to al Jathiya 47, click here
al Ahqaf 1 to Adh Dhariya 30, click here

............then with HIDAYAH and FAITH, two God-given gifts, without which we would just be big-time time experts like John Esposito or Bernard Lewis: dumb, deaf and blind .....despite all their knowledge !

In the realm of Quran on the net, I like best still Quranexplorer, founded by a group of committed Muslims, of all places, Florida, USA.
With the Quranexplorer, it is possible to 'khatam' the Quran 3 times in a year without much sweat !
May Allah bless this fine work of daawah by these group of young bright people from Florida.
click here

Faces in Islam : Rihla with Hamza Yusuf Hanson........

2011-07-30T00:11:00.006+08:00

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson did a TV programme for Middle East show casing some aspect of 'faces' of Islam across the globe :

In Malaysia he came right smack into the vociferous but often ignorant voices within 'Sisters in Islam'[ oftentimes, if one closes one's eyes and listen carefully, sounds like 'Sisters sans Islam', from the animal noise they make !....a biased personal opinion of mine and a few others, no doubt, I must concede. ]
click here
click here
click here

Hamza in France,
click here
click here
and in Spain,
click here

Faces in Islam : Still on Happiness.........

2011-07-26T22:11:00.012+08:00

Well , you may say Prof Hoesien Nasr and Prof Sayyid Muhammad Naguib, being pure theological academicians, may be speaking above our heads. And especially with Prof Nasr who is earning his keep in Georgetown University just may be 'woolly woolly' on the issue of religion in view of his elevated status there.
[ I am still personally confused on his stand on Periennial Philosophy for instance, despite his scholarly stature,it is to my ignorant and probably shallow understanding, that he may be unconciously and partially playing to a kufr gallery, pardon my ignorance Prof Nasr ! " I am just being naugthy. Uppermost in my mind is Prof, why cannot we call a spade a spade and put aside for once,political correctness ? Please pardon my ignorance Prof. I may just be an enlightened 'sparrow' rebutting an eagle.....to me an aberration of the original aqidah is an aberration, whatever you may choose to 'cloth' it or call it be it Red Indian philosophy, ancient Inca rites or even the Holy Trinity. It is just about calling a spade a spade. ]

Let as 'turun padang ' and listen to a bread and butter scholar, who has nothing to gain, and listen to his take on the nature of happiness in Islam, and then ponder further on our own..........

Shaykh Ninowy on 'Happiness', click here

Some magical and most powerful "mantra" to repeat, remember and commit to memory:

Hasbunallah wa ni'mal wakeel
(Al Imran , 3 : 173)
Dua Prophet Ibrahim alaihisalam
Those to whom the people said: Surely men have gathered
against you, therefore fear them, but this increased their faith,
and they said:
[Allah is sufficient for us, and He is Al Wakeel { best disposer of affairs }]

Hasbiyallahu, la ilaha illa, huwa alaihi tawakkaltu, wa huwa Rabb al- arshal -azhiim
{ Al Taubah , 9 : 129 }
[ Allah is sufficient for me, I have placed my trust in Him, He is the Lord of the Magestic Throne. ]

Faces in Islam : Prof Seyyed Hossien Nasr on The Pursuit of Happiness, An Islamic Perspective

2011-07-22T04:12:00.037+08:00

'Pope' is dead!

'Pope' aka Prof Wan Burhanuddin, one time dean of USM School of Architecture, sufi disciple, streetwise philosopher of sort, school day rebel, self-stlyed Lingzi exponent,died yesterday after a long, very private and painful struggle with cancer.

Pope, my classmate from form four science 2, at the Malay College from 1968, lead a very colorful multifaceted life veering to the extreme left in his schooldays experimenting with all that need to be experimented in the whirling and dizzying days of the 60's and the 70's to the extreme right in the 90's and the 10's in his later day life, with Quran and tafseer oozing out like water filled to the brim ! I am already missing him.........his oft tangent comments, his sharp and witty rebuttals and above all his criticism without barbs and poison.

May his soul be amongst those accepted by The Beloved. May God be content with him.

In essence, Life, is just truly a collection of breath. If we already have used up X numbers of breath, mathematically, the number Y of what is left of it, grow less and less in actual numerical significance. This does not require the IQ of Albert Einstein or rocket science to know but we, collectively, do continue to live on in almost total heedlessness. We are just like those cows and goats in the abattoir, munching on hay and chaff 'happily' regardless of the fact that our turn is just a few very precise moment away, all already predetermined, to the precise millisecond,by the cogwheel already in motion.....

Last night,myself, my new-found relative Nadzru Azahari,CEO of Ranhill Worley and long-time classmate during my Sultan Ismail College days in the early 60's and an 'Arabist' par excellence,[ I just discovered he is also a Rao from the Mandor Diman lineage of Kelantan, 'click here' for Rao of Malaysia ], Prof Wan and Prof Zainey were supposed to 'dissect' Rene Guenon, Fritjof Schuoen, Prof Nasr and Perennial/Traditional Philosophy at our 'mandi' dinner at an Arab restaurant just outside Masjid Al Falah, Taipan USJ. Our two knowledgeable professors 'politely' called back earlier to say they were not able to attend. I suspect the subject matter must be deemed too heavy. It is my bad habit to throw 'heavy stuff at these academic friends of mine!

Me and Nadzru, we ended up discussing 'Happiness' instead.

The nature of happiness is oftentimes discussed within Islamic milliue. The pursuit of happiness, however, is very much a Western and secular concept. True Muslims do not pursue 'happiness' per se as a 'station'. The wise ones from amongst us celebrate the remembrance of God in zkir, prayer and doa an in every move of our lives and in the process acheive the higher states of Contentment and Rida. 'Happiness' that comes with being in these states is just regarded as incidental 'collateral' damage !.

From the perspective of Prof Syed Muhammad Naguib al Attas, our very own home-grown philosopher, Happiness in Islam has to do very much with having the proper 'ADAB' but this would be addressed in future discussion.........

For the present, let us listen to what Prof Seyyed Hossien Nasr has to say :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p8kSiNLnEQ&feature=related

The journey to God is the journey of our Qalb to free themselves from the 'naf'.
Superior freedom is not the freedom of the 'naf', but freedom from the 'naf'.
Happiness is not happiness distant from the Source of happiness but rather nearness to The Source of happiness.
Knowledge is not knowledge of created things but knowledge of the Creator.

Shaykh Mukhtar al Maghraoui,
Al Medina Institute, USA
Double PHD in Physics and Electronics Engineering.

PS :
The 'mandi' in USJ is not that great. I have yet to find an ideal 'mandi' here in KL. An ideal 'mandi' rice should not be too dry and neither should it be too wet but the 'piece de resistance' is really in the meat: the mutton should still be slightly dripping in its own juice, but again not too wet, just nicely wet. I had that some years ago in Jeddah at a friend of friend's house, Salleh al Patani. A home cooked 'mandi'.
I have been searching for that kind of'mandi' all these years. Ideal things in your mind are always illusive ! One of the pleasures of life is the search, they say.....

For a short sojourn on Prof Naguib al Attas, click here
For part 2, click here

Nuggets ofWisdom

2011-07-19T08:29:00.001+08:00

Ordinary people is made by his time, spiritual people made his time.

Keys To The Garden : Timothy John Winter on Rida.

2011-07-18T06:57:00.003+08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN0_WD-fpEQ

Feature Interview: Tim Winter (aka Abdul Hakim Murad)
18/04/2004

University Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, England, and Director of Studies in Theology at Wolfson College. His research work focuses on Muslim-Christian relations, Islamic ethics and the study of the Orthodox Muslim response to extremism.

John Cleary: In this hour, we turn to Islam, as a guide to life. Our guest is a Cambridge Divinity scholar who also happens to be a Muslim.

My guest now is somebody whose life is lived in two worlds. Now he may choose to dispute that, but for most people Timothy J. Winter is a university lecturer, a graduate of Cambridge and somebody who has followed the English middle-class path to academia and success.

To many others, Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad is a religious scholar of eminence. Eminence in the Islamic community. Both of these people reside in the one body, Tim Winter, welcome to the program.

Tim Winter: Thank you very much, it’s a pleasure to be here.

John Cleary: Do you ever feel you live in two worlds?

Tim Winter: Yes, and I enjoy it enormously. I think everybody has a complex identity nowadays, we’re all hyphenated one way or another, and I’m Anglo-Muslim, and I find that rather an interesting sort of identity to have.

John Cleary: Many Anglo-Muslims have a Muslim heritage, that is, their parents or grandparents come from an Islamic tradition; that’s not the case with you.

Tim Winter: Well British Islam is a complicated, broad sort of church, and we have perhaps towards its core, a nucleus of converts, and that goes right back to actually the 18th century; there have always been Anglo-Muslims, or Anglo-Mohammedans, as the Victorians called us, and we had census figures released just a few months ago from the 2001 census, that indicate that there’s now 63,000 converts to Islam or descendents of converts in the United Kingdom. So, we’re a small group of eccentrics, but not small to vanishing point.

John Cleary: How did you first discover this community which you’re now so much a part of?

Tim Winter: Well I went into the religion through a rather dry and bookish route I suppose, through comparing various philosophies and theologies, and I suspect that I never met a proper practising Muslim before I actually decided to take the plunge. So it was very much principles first and then the realities of the community after.

John Cleary: Well let’s talk about those principles for a moment, because you grew up in a society, a culture that’s steeped in Christian values. Now whether or not they’re practiced is a different question, but the value system was still there and evident before you. Christianity recommends itself to millions, Islam recommends itself to millions. What were the critical elements in the choice? First the rejection of Christianity, and then the acceptance of Islam, or did it happen the other way around?

Tim Winter: Well my own background is Norfolk non-conformist, we were Congregationalist ministers in various small chapels, and temperance folk as well. My grandfather was from the last generation that took the pledge, and he never touched the demon drink until the day he died. And one ingredient in that sort of dissent was a certain hesitation about the doctrine of the Trinity. Perhaps a certain Anglo Saxon pragmatism could never quite get its mind around the intricacies of at least the classical definitions of three in one.

John Cleary: There’s a very strong history of that in British dissent too, it led to the Unitarians and other groups over the years, so it’s got a strong hold on the British imagination, that dissenting tradition, particularly on such doctrines.

Tim Winter: Yes, I’m from Cambridge, and Newton is perhaps Cambridge’s most famous product, and Newton was at least a closet Unitarian, and many other people in the 17th and 18th century privately harboured serious reservations about whether Christ and the Bible had actually taught anything resembling the later doctrine of the Trinity, and whether it actually made sense to solid, no-nonsense, English pragmatists. So I come very much out of that tradition, although I ended up in a direction rather different from the one that they would have favoured.

John Cleary: Then take us through that path.

Tim Winter: Well it was I suppose the usual earnest late-night coffee-drinking teenage angst talking about the meaning of life, and trying to figure out where I was, what I was heading for. And this was the ‘70s, the tail end of the sort of hippy trail to India. People were still experimenting with sort of oriental, exotic alternatives to solid, middle-class, tedious, worthy, Christendom. But I ended up not in the subcontinent or the Far East, as most of my generation did, but actually in the Middle East, because I felt that to switch to something so radically different as a traditional Indian religion, or Zen Buddhism, would have represented too much of a tearing, too much of a ripping out of my soul, of some of the stories that were there from my childhood, and were really part of who I was. I didn’t really want to be anything strange or exotic, I wasn’t looking for an alternative identity, but rather for a way of continuing in some way with what I already knew, and the person of Jesus was very much central to that, sort of unbesmirchable, great hero of the West’s religious history. But at the same time, squaring my conscience with the core doctrines, and it came to a point where I really could no longer recite the Creed in church and accept the doctrines of incarnation, atonement, and Trinity.

John Cleary: They seemed unreasonable?

Tim Winter: They seemed unreasonable, and also they didn’t seem to correspond very much with what historians were, certainly in the ‘70s, discerning as the original teachings and lifestyle of the historical Jesus. There’s a big crisis now in New Testament scholarship, over whether the Christ of faith is actually the same person as the Jesus of history, the great resurrected Christ that you see in the cupolas of misty Byzantine domes, staring down from on high; is that actually the same person as that amazing wandering rabbi of 1st century Palestine with his extraordinary message of reconciliation?

John Cleary: Many of those same challenges are now being presented to Christians through the Mel Gibson film ‘The Passion’, which incarnates Christ very much as a human being.

Tim Winter: Yes, I have my own problems with the Mel Gibson sort of over-technicolour version of the suffering of Christ.

John Cleary: Yes, somebody’s described it as ‘sanctified splatter’ to me.

Tim Winter: Yes. He represents a particular kind of very conservative Catholicism that exaggerates the passion beyond the mediaeval position. If you look at mediaeval portrayals, particularly the Eastern tradition of the passion, it’s rather toned down, it’s dignified, there isn’t this sense of twisted, tortured agony, that represents I think an exaggerated, what could technically be termed a Jansenist view of original sin, and the misery of the human condition, that I think most people nowadays find rather distasteful: the idea that we’re so deeply sunk in sin and guilt and evil, that God himself has to suffer infinitely to pull us out of this mess that we’ve got ourselves in. It doesn’t speak to me, really, I find even most atheists can live reasonably decent lives. The idea that we’re sunk in a mire of despond and original sin, I think is rather a miserable under-estimation of the way that God’s actually created us. But it’s a great film.

John Cleary: which moved you away from Christianity. What then recommends Islam to you?

Tim Winter: My capacity for faith in abstract doctrines is rather limited. I’m very much a child of my time in that, and I could never really take the leap of faith required to subscribe to the indispensable Christian doctrines of Trinity, vicarious atonement.

John Cleary: And incarnation?

Tim Winter: And the incarnation, yes. And also I don’t see that it’s necessary. The Jesus that appeals to me is the Jesus of, say, the parables, particularly The Prodigal Son, who is ultimately a Jewish teacher, that the great message of the Hebrew Bible is that human being can be reconciled to God through God’s infinite power to forgive, that the prodigal returns to the father, and there’s no sign of a vicarious atonement, or the father suffering on the son’s behalf. He just forgives him and embraces him. I think that’s the highest form of monotheism for me, and I find that enshrined in Islam actually rather more accurately than at least in the developed forms of Christianity that I was brought up with.

John Cleary: You’re on Sunday Night on ABC Radio. Our guest is Timothy J. Winter, university lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge in England. He is also known as Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad, a Muslim scholar of eminence throughout the Islamic world.

Tim, there’s a cultural element to all this as well. Introduce us to a little music.

Tim Winter: Well, Islam is not just a great enterprise of faith and works, but it’s produced some of the world’s great civilisations. You think visually of the great world that stretches from the Taj Mahal to the Alhambra, some of the world’s great architecture. It also has wonderful sounds as well, and the key to Islamic tonality and melody is actually the formal recitation of the Holy Qu’ran. I used to walk down a little street when I was living in Cairo in the early morning when the shopkeepers were putting out their wares, and I counted 38 shopkeepers who actually were listening to the 24-hour a day, wall-to-wall Qu’ran radio station, which sort of invested the mundanity of their lives with the fragrance of the absolute. That’s certainly my favourite sound, it was one of the things that magnetised me and brought me towards Islam, and it is the greatest of the Islamic art, the naked, unadorned, projection of the human voice into some great dome of a sacred space; that still moves me more than any other sound.
MUSIC/CHANTING

Tim Winter: But of course we have other traditions as well. We have great traditions of singing the praises of God and of the blessed prophet, in an almost infinite variety of modes. The African Islamic sound is very different from the Bosnian Islamic sound, the Turkish Islamic sound, the Uzbeks, the Malays, Islam is not just one civilisation, but a huge range of civilisations, which all have their own particular way of being Muslim, as it were metaphorically facing the same direction of prayer in Mecca, but from often quite different directions. It’s a diverse world.

John Cleary: Well let’s hear one of your favourites, from Turkish music.

MUSIC/CHANTING

John Cleary: You’re on Sunday Night on ABC Radio around Australia; John Cleary with you. My guest is Timothy Winter, lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University. He is also a committed Muslim; as Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad, he has produced a number of works on Islam and the faith, from the perspective of a believer. Tim, let us for a moment talk about some of the issues which confront us today. Writers have spoken of the clash of civilisations; you have the Huntington thesis and other things. To what extent do events such as those unfolding in Iraq influence the Muslim world as a body, that is the world of faith, to say Look, there is really a subtle clash of civilisations going on here beneath the surface. And I guess I ask it for two groups of people: one, the ordinary Muslims as they go to the mosque each week, but also the Islamic scholars and the range of people who seriously think about Islam.

Tim Winter: Well there’s certainly a clash regrettably, between the zealots on both sides, the Christian Fundamentalists in the Pentagon rattling their swords against the evil, Saracenic East, and reciprocated by Muslim zealots and Fundamentalists who are convinced that the Pentagon represents all America and the West can possibly be, and is just a negative force of domination and contempt. But I think the only positive aspect of the current standoff is that I travel a lot in the Muslim world, and in the West, and my sense is that the mainstream of the two religions actually don’t regard each other with enmity that I suppose they did in the past. Just last week I was in Washington with the Archbishop of Canterbury and a group of Muslim scholars and a group of Christian scholars, and we were actually amazed and reassured by the extent to which we’d agree, not just humanly in a sort of courteous level of interaction and shared faith, although obviously there are sharp doctrinal differences between the two religions, but also on political matters. The previous time our group met was in Qatar this time last year at the height of the war in Iraq. It was a very tense time, and the hotel where we were staying, 80 of the rooms were occupied just by the CNN team, and we were very much operating against that backdrop of a failure of communication between two parts of the world. But all of the Christian clergy and all of the Moslem clerics present were really united in their opposition to the war on Iraq. The Archbishop of Canterbury had spoken against it previously, the Vatican whose spokesman was there, had spoken against it, so the main stream clergy on both sides, actually I think view the world in rather convergent, similar ways. It’s the radicals and the zealots on both sides that unfortunately are the focus of attention for the mass media, who are really responsible for this very tragic and I think rather threatening polarisation.

John Cleary: One of the elements of the polarisation that’s pushed even in semi-serious Christian circles is a theological issue, and that is the critique that ultimately Islam in the way it is taught, in the majority of places, has at its heart, a notion of theocracy, which is fundamentally incompatible, and I use ‘fundamentally’ quite deliberately there, incompatible with any notion of secular pluralism.

Tim Winter: Well clearly, religion in any traditional sense is going to adopt a position of prophetic criticism of the structures of liberal consumer society. There are many aspects of the modern world and globalisation, the degradation of the environment, the control exercised over the planet by the corporations, media moguls etc., that I think people in all religions really want to criticise very sharply, and Islam is certainly not different in that respect. The issue of religion and politics, you have to remember that before say the 18th century, all religious assumed that the two were two ways of expressing the same thing, that the head of the church was the head of the State, and in Christendom, as in the Islamic world, the two were very much elided. But the Muslim tradition is actually to keep the institutions of religion very separate from the institutions of State. The men of the sword are not the men of the pen, to use the traditional language. In the Ottoman Empire the traditional Moghul Empire and elsewhere, while the Sultan, the Caliph claimed some kind of general aura of religious legitimacy, he didn’t legislate, and he had no control over religion. And religion had no formal control over him. What’s happening in modern fundamentalism, is that the tradition Sultan or Caliph figure is being abolished, because the Royal Family has become too decadent, as in the case of pre-revolutionary Iran, for instance, and the ‘clergy’ think that it’s their responsibility now really for the first time in Islamic history, to step into the vacuum and try and put things right. So what we’re seeing now, the sort of theocratic model, the Islamic republican model in many parts of the Islamic world, is something that’s radically new and doesn’t really represent our traditions.

John Cleary: Some people have also compared it to the Cromwellian period in British history, that is once one overturns one mode of government, one necessarily goes through a sort of theological Puritanism in order to sort things out, but Cromwell didn’t last all that long in England and his legacy is regarded as very mixed.

Tim Winter: Yes, I think that’s an interesting precedent. The Anglo Saxon world has, as it were, worked through the experiment of religiously zealous government, and found that it didn’t particularly deliver even religiously. One of the consequences of Cromwell’s period was the unleashing of a long tradition of English scepticism about religion, that it had behaved so badly when in power because of its well-meaning desire to drag everybody into heaven by the scruff of their necks, that many people reacted in the normal human way, by wanting to run away from religion. If you force it down people’s throats, then the danger is many of them will want to vomit it up again. And we’re seeing that in many parts of the Islamic world. If you look at the Iranian experience, after 25 years of Islamic rule, their Ministry of Religious Guidance recently published figures that show that only 3% of Iranians now attend Friday prayers. Before the revolution, it was almost 50%. So what kind of Islamic reformation and revival has that actually delivered? Religion is now identified with a kind of prison, the pan-optican idea of the man at the centre of the State looking at everybody, Calvin’s city of glass, nobody being able to misbehave in a way that annoys the clerics or the mullahs without calling down on them, not just the sanction of heaven, but the repressive capacities of the modern corporate State. So I think that there’s a dawning awareness in the Islamic world that the totalitarian model of Islamic government doesn’t actually deliver, even on its own terms, and it may well be that many Muslim countries have to work through that experience by themselves, that the West should actually let the Algerians, the Egyptians, the Yemenis, the Pakistanis and other people, experiment with the model that many of the people clearly want, and after 20 years perhaps they’ll come down to earth and they’ll see that perhaps there’s a more convivial, more sort of compromising, more real politik style of integrating religion with politics that’s more open to the outside world and ultimately more humane. But it may take a long time.

John Cleary: A recent success, surprising to many, particularly in Australia, given the testy relationship the government of this country has with Malaysia: the recent elections in Malaysia have seen a triumph of the middle-classes, which many people say is the cornerstone to success of any democracy, and belief will soon be subsumed by the good life of the middle classes.

Tim Winter: That’s possibly the case, yes. It may well be that in our consumerist world a totalitarian political order that can’t deliver economically will eventually be superseded. But to do that you have to have a middle-class, as you suggest, with substantial spending power, and given the demographic profile of many Muslim countries, or many Third World countries at the moment, the societies are bottom-heavy, that is to say that the peasantry, the urban proletariat, have very large families, and the middle-class, where it exists in recognisable form, is actually a very small sliver, stratum of the population, and not really enough to deliver the kind of Malaysian model that certainly under Badawi many people in this part of the world were regarding as really rather a positive way forward.

John Cleary: Let’s have a little more music now, Tim, and then I’d like to come back and talk about your life in the Islamic community.

MUSIC

John Cleary: ‘Sut el Islam’, the music of Islam, a contemplative tune from an album of authentic Arabia, the Islamic world, that’s a Sonaton authentic series recording, on Sunday Night.

How does your life as a Muslim unfold itself, Tim, during the week, how are you seen in the community? You’re seen as a scholar in your own right. How does this play out? Is the role of the scholar purely intellectual, or does it have faith and devotional aspects to it as well?

Tim Winter: Well I teach in a divinity school, and most of my colleagues, after giving their lectures, discreetly slip on the dog-collar and go off and thunder from the pulpit in Cambridge parish churches. In a sense, I’m in the same mould, and I find that actually rather stimulating, because I do want to teach and write and expound my scholarship in a way that serves ultimately the glory of God. I take it that that’s the best way of being objective.

John Cleary: And touches the people in the pews as well.

Tim Winter: Well I’m not allowed religiously to touch my students, I have to explain Islam or world religions or the philosophy of religion, a course that I also teach, in ways that are accessible to the wider secular academic world, because that’s the rules by which one has to play, and I think it’s quite bracing and helpful that you can’t take anything on trust, everything has to be proven from the word go. But then of course, I slip off Friday lunchtimes after my last seminar, and wind on my turban and mount the pulpit in the Cambridge mosque and thunder from the pulpit there, to a very diverse congregation, really couldn’t be further removed from the kind of rather languid, apathetic, middle-class English students that I teach in the morning.

John Cleary: There’s a sense in which though each influences the other. I mean the way one responds to an audience in the mosque, to a congregation, actually begins to crystallise the way one’s thoughts academically, I mean life influences art, in the broadest sense.

Tim Winter: Yes, I think particularly in a modern or to use the trendy term, post-modern academic environment, to think that one has to separate the two worlds absolutely, the world of faith and piety and quoting from the Scriptures, and on the hand the world of being philosophical and scientifically objective on the other. That’s not really necessary any longer; nobody expects it. We have different definitions of objectivity now. But in a divinity school where I work, where I find my mainly Christian but also Jewish colleagues actually very convivial and interested into entering into conversations with other faith traditions, I find that there’s a kind of half-way house between the academic objectivity and thundering from the pulpit, that we get together regularly to look at related issues in each other’s scriptures, so because we have great linguists amongst my colleagues, the Hebrew Bible about Abraham, St Paul in Greek, about Abraham, and then the Qu’ran about Abraham, and at quite a high level we’re able to share insights and compare and contrast. And it’s interesting to see how a kind of fellowship, that’s actually a sort of religious fellowship, can develop in an academic milieu that actually crosses the religious boundaries. So while one remains, as it were, vertically part of one’s own denomination, there’s a kind of horizontal way in which one can be in fellowship with people from very different religious traditions, because we share the same kind of academic method of looking at your heritage. So I find it a rather interesting overlap zone in which to work.

John Cleary: On the streets in Europe, religion is becoming an issue. We’ve had France recently take a recourse to their ancient republican heritage and say Look, all religious symbols are out, we just can’t afford to play the game this way. Now one can understand from the position of an intellectual heritage why France would take that line; a similar line is not being taken in Britain and in other countries, as yet. But nevertheless there is a real problem which the French are genuinely trying to come to terms with, and it’s a problem for pluralism. That is, how does one genuinely honour pluralism? Is by saying “All shall tow the same line”, or is it by saying “All shall keep their faith to themselves”? I mean this is a genuine dilemma, is it not?

Tim Winter: Yes, the French are now trying to grapple with the consequences of imposing church-State separation that was formulated at a time when religion only meant the Roman Catholic church, and was really based on a specifically anti-Catholic and anti-clerical rhetoric in the late 19th century, with the fact of a very religiously plural modern Parisian reality. So they banned the headscarf in schools, saying, We’re not specifically targeting Muslims, perish the thought, but then they find that the small Sikh community says We really have to keep our turbans on, so Lionel Jospin goes into conclave with his experts for a couple of weeks, and then they say Well you can have invisible turbans, and the Sikhs say What do you mean exactly? And they go silent for a couple of weeks and then they say, Hairnets, and we’ll give you the model of the Sikh hairnet in the schools, and that becomes absurd. And then the Assyrian community in Paris that nobody had ever heard of before, pops its head above the parapet and says But our religion requires us to have big crucifixes, this has never been a problem in schools before. And so the French secular, rather narrow tight-lipped ideology, finds itself butting its head against a French demographic reality that’s become extraordinarily diverse and rich. The Germans have taken rather a different course two weeks ago: two of the German laender provinces announced that it was specifically Islam that would not be tolerated, that the headscarf would be banned, but other religious symbols would be allowed. And I think the Danes are going to go the same way. That’s a little bit easier to administer, but of course in the context of Germany, people think about the Nuremberg laws singling out the Jews, making them dress in a way that was offensive to them, and it has a rather worrying pedigree there, and with the constant growth of neo-Nazi parties in many European countries, many in the Muslim communities are becoming quite disturbed.

John Cleary: Those countries which are taking these actions are doing it in the name of trying to preserve civil society, yet the remedies you’re suggesting and others, can have perverse side effects. But nevertheless, something needs to be done?

Tim Winter: I don’t see that it needs to be done. Why shouldn’t religious communities dress any way they please in public spaces?

John Cleary: Because they’re used as political symbols, as political rallying points.

Tim Winter: That is generally not the case. I don’t think that most young girls –

John Cleary: But that’s the accusation.

Tim Winter: But I don’t think it’s the case. Most Muslim girls who choose to cover their heads in schools do so because it’s their understanding that this is pleasing to God. They don’t assume that it has any consequences for how they’re going to vote, or their political affiliations. In the Muslim world, a woman covers her head without any indication that she supports any particular political party or orientation, it’s an act of piety, rather as a traditional Catholic woman or Jewish woman will often cover her head as an act of modesty, and because it seems to be recommended in scriptures, without any idea that it’s a political statement.

John Cleary: Yes, one of the amusing historical observations of this is, if this issue were stepped back 100 years, you could not find it because Catholic and Jewish women were wearing headscarves in the same way that Muslim women are today.

Tim Winter: That’s right. I think it was a universal assumption that females should be modest and a good way of expressing their modesty and demureness was for them not to project their physical charms too conspicuously in the public domain.

John Cleary: St Paul speaks about it in the New Testament

Tim Winter: Yes, it’s a good Christian and even in my own ancestral tradition, non-conformist tradition, that women dress modestly in public. It’s universal, it’s not just Islamic.

John Cleary: There are many schools in Islam, Tim. We talk about Suni and Shi’ite as the largest, there are also individual schools within those traditions, such as the Wahabis who dominate Saudi Arabia, Sufism is a long tradition that spreads itself across all of the main categories; it’s a means of doing business, if you like. When you look at contemporary Islamic theology and politics as it’s practiced, Wahabism seems to attract particular attention, and the Wahabies in Saudi Arabia attract a particular attention because of the strong Suni tradition of the imposition of law. Wahabism has a strong juridical element to it, which seems to be imposing itself very much on the way Wahabi Muslims express themselves in life, it’s leading to terrorism.

Tim Winter: Well I think that’s going a bridge too far. I’ve lived in Saudi Arabia, I know some of the Wahabi scholars, and there are really too broad tendencies within what’s conventionally called Wahabism at the moment. One you might define as the Royal Saudi Wahabies, that is to say the regime loyalists in Saudi Arabia, who certainly speak out very courageously against terrorism; and the Mufti of Saudi Arabia spoke out against suicide bombing and 9/11, but then an uneasy relationship with them, you have the radicals, who you might call the Wahabies of Mass Destruction, who’ve incorporated more recent ideas of the ideologising of religion, and particularly incorporating ideas of originally Western radical inspiration, to do with political violence and using terrorism and targeting civilians to secure a political end. And they exist in very uneasy tension at the moment in Saudi Arabia, each claiming legitimate inheritance or the original Wahabi mantle, that the movement was launched 200 years ago in Central Saudi Arabia; and the argument is, does this mean an essentially accommodationist relationship to the West and particularly America, which is the official Royal position in Riyadh, or does it mean some kind of Cromwellian international insurrection in order to impose God’s law on earth? And so intense is this tension now in Saudi Arabia that they’ve been fighting in the streets, and there have been very serious incidents in a number of Wahabi heartland towns in North Central Saudi Arabia. Several dozen people have been killed, thousands have been incarcerated with the blessing, or at least the uneasy consent of regime scholars. So it’s certainly not fair to say that somebody who identifies himself with the teachings of Wahabism is automatically a problem in Australia or in Saudi Arabia or anywhere else. But nonetheless, it’s also the case that the great majority of people who do believe in the legitimacy of terrorism to secure purportedly Islamic ends, do tend to subscribe to the rather literalist, dry, intense Wahibi theology. So there is a problem there, but you certainly shouldn’t generalise.

John Cleary: We’re looking at a Europe which is changing very rapidly. We’re looking at a Europe which is, there’s almost a re-Islamisisation of Europe. One could go back to the days of 1453, when the Spanish ruled the line, and said This far and no further, and similarly in the East up through Bosnia where we’re seeing the outcomes of many of those historic squabbles penetrating. But in another way the battle cannot be won by either side in that Turkey becomes part of the EU, and an Islamic country becomes part of the European identity. This is not something that rules and lines in the sand can change. There has to be at some point a cultural accommodation here. To what extent are intellectuals such as yourself and others, concerned that this long-term agenda is the real agenda? We actually need to come to a very sophisticated, mature, cultural accommodation here, and we need to have our sights clearly set on that, as a European idea.

Tim Winter: Well this has become one of the big lightning rods for the argument about European identity at the moment. Europe now is host, if you include Russia at any rate, to around 32-million Muslims, we’re by far the most substantial minority on the Continent, and given that Europe is largely surrounded by mainly Muslim areas, it’s likely that immigration will continue, families will continue, conversion will continue, and we’re part of Europe’s future. But I don’t like the language of there being a battle, because I travel a lot amongst the sort of mosque communities in the north of England and in parts of the Continent, in Spain, France and elsewhere, and overwhelmingly, the message that I pick up from the ordinary man in the mosque, is that they’re perfectly happy, they feel at ease with their Christian neighbours, they’re happy for Europe to retain a Christian identity, and they’d prefer that to some kind of vague secular alternative, and they do feel very much part of the European reality, although they like in certain aspects of their lives, to be separate and distinct, and there’s plenty of precedents for that, the Catholic communities, the Jewish communities, and many others. Unfortunately the media tends to focus on the sort of loudmouth radical fringe that is absolutely against any possibility of convivial life with Christian and other neighbours, but they’re really not representative. In England we have over 1,000 mosques that are officially registered and I would say maybe five or six are sort of block-headed, narrow-minded, fundamentalist establishments. Unfortunately they’re the ones that the television cameras always tend to focus on. But overwhelmingly I would say that the process of, well, Islamisation is too grand a word, but the cautious reception by Europe of substantial numbers of Muslims has been a considerable success, and in England now we have many successful Muslims in the media, we have Police Commissioners in London, we have Muslims in the armed forces, even in the SAS. A Muslim friend of mine is involved in guarding nuclear weapons in a submarine base, and we have Muslims in the House of Common s and the House of Lords. There is a mosque in the Palace of Westminster in London, there’s a mosque in the BBC. Overwhelmingly I think it’s a success story, and it’s regrettable that we assume that because Islam is said to be so different that there has to be some kind of problem. Inherently I think there isn’t a problem. The days of the Spanish Inquisition are over, Christianity clearly has become a hugely pluralistic and hospital force in the world, and Islam has a long tradition of dealing reasonably with religious difference. And I would describe it overwhelmingly as a success story. But those zealots who do exist are a problem, they are rocking the boat, they are giving us all a bad name, they are a source of guilt and contrition and confusion for us, and I think it’s probably fair to say that the Muslim leadership has not been as outspoken as it should be in condemning those people and trying to rein them in.

John Cleary: And we’re seeing examples of that of course in Britain in the last couple of weeks, Muslim leaders have spoken out against terrorism.

Tim, we’re rapidly running out of time, but let’s talk a bit about your life in the faith. What for you is the clear light of Islam, the thing that shines for you, that recommends it to you as a path that your life should honour?

Tim Winter: A simple definition of one God, ultimate reality is ultimately single, unconfused, uncomplicated, undifferentiated. That seems to me the clearest explanation for the otherwise intolerable mystery of human existence, and the diversity and richness and beauty of the world. And then a wonderful range of forms of meditation and worship by which one approaches and adores that one ultimate reality. One of the richnesses of Islam for me is that the core liturgy, the core practices of worship and of fasting and of charity, are the same everywhere, and have never changed. No well-meaning, liberal, woolly-minded reformers have said Let’s do mosque worship in a slightly different way. Let’s bring in the guitars and the trendy Imam with the winkle-picker boots and the jeans, trying to sing along with the Prophet, and update it. I go into a mosque and I know exactly what I’m going to get, a beautiful, unchanged, perfect ritual from a great age of faith, and I find that to be a unique privilege, one of the great things of being a Muslim for me, is that our core practices don’t change, and I think probably never will change. And then also the third thing is belongingness to the Abrahamic tradition. I don’t experience it as an Englishman, as something foreign. Superficially, I suppose it’s different, but at heart it’s part of the Judaeo-Christian scriptural, Middle Eastern family of faiths. I still love Jesus and Abraham, Moses, Jacob, Isaac, Ishmael, they’re all revered in the Qu’ran, they’re the great figures of my early childhood, and I still revere them to this day. So I don’t feel it’s an alienation.

John Cleary: How do you experience God? Is God then purely an intellectual abstract?

Tim Winter: One of the great mysteries of God is that the nature of God is pure compassion, and the God of compassion which is to be known by human beings, and has created the world as a diverse range of signposts, beautiful signposts pointing back to him. So wherever I look, whether it’s the beauties of the Australian outback, or the English countryside, or the deserts of the Middle East, I see the beauty of God, and that arouses in my heart a desire to return to God, to love that God, that despite his ultimate –

John Cleary: Otherness in a way.

Tim Winter: ….. Otherness, his ineffability, he can’t be described in himself, because he’s radically unlike ourselves, he’s infinite, perfect, all the things that we’re not. Nonetheless, in his compassion, he has consented to have a personal aspect, a personal face, so that we can worship, so that we can love, so that we can grow close to him and Islam has an extraordinarily rich tradition of sainthood and personal devotional poetry and prayer that certainly speaks very directly to my heart.

John Cleary: In some ways, one has to ask, it’s about the, say let’s go back to where we started, to that Trinitarian notion. In Trinitarian religions such as Christianity, the idea of the aspect of God that dwells within, the heart experience, the Holy Spirit, how is that reflected in Islam, the in-dwelling of God?

Tim Winter: Well in-dwelling, we might say very cautiously, is the nature of everything in the world, because it’s all absolutely dependent on God with every instance.

John Cleary: An eminence.

Tim Winter: There is an eminence, yes. The Qu’ran speaks of the God that’s utterly unlike ourselves, but also says God is closer to us than the jugular vein. He is with you wherever you may turn, wherever you turn, the Qu’ran says, there is the face of God. And whatever we see in terms of beauty in the world, in people’s faces, in humans, mutual compassion and love, there we discern that basic thirst that human beings have for the source of nourishment and richness and fullness that is in God. So it’s a kind of nostalgia. Religion is about awakening a nostalgia that we have for the place where we were before we were born, and the place that we hope we’ll return to after our death.

John Cleary: Tim Winter, it’s been great to have you on Sunday Night. Thanks so much for joining us.

Tim Winter: It’s been a pleasure.

Related Articles on the blog:
Redzha, click here
Redzha Revisited, click here

Something Bright For Us To Ponder...........

2011-07-17T16:29:00.008+08:00

Cambridge University Prof TJ Winter aka Abdal Hakim Murad, some 10 years ago in a Chicago International Mawlidil Nabi Conference reminded us Muslims not to feel despondent. Despite what has been said and bandied around the world over and over again, the future is still bright for us Muslims.
10 years on, his message is still very relevant. We do not need to apologize or feel despondent as so many within us feel we should............

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09SJeh5qGL0&NR=1

" Ya ghaliba illallah "
God alone is victorious

Knowledge of The Unseen : Ramadan

2011-07-16T18:06:00.010+08:00

Three different approach on Ramadan:

One, steeped in the sufic training of hidden and profound meanings of The Word, from the dry arid desert of Mauritania to Algeria and Morocco, Muslim revert,Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson.

The other,the rarefied academia of Oxford with a pedigree that is as 'cold as ice' as it can get, Prof Tariq Ramadan, grandson of Shaykh Hasan al Bana, martyr and founder of Ikhwanul Muslimin.

And yet the other, equally rarefied academia, as exemplified by Prof Abdal Hakim Murad aka TJ Winter, a student of Imam Al Ghazali.

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, click here
Prof Tariq Ramadan, click here
Prof Abdal Hakim Murad,aka TJ Winter, click here

I love to listen to all these learned scholars.....sweet music to my ears.
Islam is the greatest gift on earth. It is only us, given as a birthright, who failed to appreciate this greatest gift fully.

Knowledge of The Unseen : Spiritual Path to God.

2011-07-13T21:59:00.007+08:00

I like to listen and relisten to Shaykh Mukhtar al Maghraoui. This double PHD chap from Algeria/Morocco: his voice and intonation, so much soothing; his depth of knowledge of the 'seen' and the 'unseen', phenomenal; his presentation, sublime.

He is my vision of the 'Contemporary Ulama'. Someone who is equally at home, and not overwhelmed, by 'The God particle' and The Cern particle, The String theory of the formation of the universe, as well as Mikraj and life before life, and life after life.

Just listen to him and you will come to know:

The journey to God is the journey of our Qalb to free themselves from the 'naf'.
Superior freedom is not the freedom of the 'naf', but freedom from the 'naf'.
Happiness is not happiness distant from the Source of happiness but rather nearness to The Source of happiness.
Knowledge is not knowledge of created things but knowledge of the Creator.

Shaykh Mukhtar al Maghraoui,
Al Medina Institute, USA
Double PHD in Physics and Electronics Engineering.

Part 1, click here
Part 2, click here
Part 3, click here
Part 4, click here
Part 5, click here
Part 6, click here
Final part, click here

Related article in the blog by Maghraoui
on " al qada' wal qadar "
click here

BERSIH 2.0............

2011-07-11T20:38:00.043+08:00

9th July, 2011
BERSIH,
Kuala Lumpur

BERSIH as seen through ALJAZERA, click here

and even The Queen of England was having a good fun at NTR. Resplendent in her ' Bersih Yellow', a class act of language without words !
click here

I have my very own small private 'altercation' with 'POWER' two days after BERSIH. Nothing spectacular.
Let us start with a YB Mat Sabu's ceramah done sometime ago probably a week or two in Teganung before BERSIH's 9th July, to put us in the right tone and mood.
click here,

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

Friends,

I have a confession to make here.
I was not with BERSIH on 9th July.
The internal 'boiling' building up was too much.....weeks of brainless intimidations by our men in blue with massive jams on almost all major roads leading to KL, tempers and horn blaring, polemics and name calling in the National Press etc etc. Make one wonder what band of people are advising NTR nowadays...they do not seem to be too clever ! Certainly they are losing those votes from 'fence sitters' like me and millions others.

I was in Gua Musang tending and speaking to my Gaharus on 9th July...sorry folks.
Like millions others I could not stand anymore of these nonsense. If I continue to be in KL on the 9th I would either end up 'killing someone' or most probably end up like that young boy on the utube...on the street of KL..beaten up till his leg broke. He must be famous now but at 59 I do not need to be famous. We are old newspapers.

And the best thing UTUSAN MELAYU can come up was:
" Bising2, Tapi hanya Enam Ribu "....this is the standard of our journalism. When all the road To KL were baricaded with police ready with Bren Guns and potable loos for the last 3 days !

Come 'General Election', LET US ALL VOTE all THESE BAS....DS OUT !
I wonder what goes on in the 'mind' of media numero uno like Dato' JJ or Dato' Syed of NSTP. Do they have a mind of their own ?! One might be forgiven to wonder, at some point in time ? Is there an ounce of intellectual honesty or self audit every night they go to bed ?

Nik Howk

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

From Dato JJ :
[ from Mediapreema Apakahnamadiadah ! ]

F..k you Sir.

Didn't I tell u to exclude me from your list? Go fly your f..king kite some place else! (No pun intended here).

My BP actually came down few notches I swear these last few weeks or so, when u promised me to take out this pacal from your email list.

Some of you clever folks can't even understand simple English.. Sigh.

Read my lips: What fools these mortals are! Sent by Maxis from my BlackBerry® smartphone

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

TQ Datuk
This confirm the standard of our journalism.
No wonder, on the scale of press freedom ,we are now at the same level of Myanmar and Zimbabwe.
I would not bother to ccmail my grouses to you guys if both of you are just selling chapatis or tea tarik at the corner mamak stalls. Your commission, directions, additions and editions, are heard and read by millions....in your business, and mine included, intellectual honesty is a paramount and integral virtue. We are not politicians who can bluff, and need to bluff, their way to Putrajaya !

Nik Howk

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

And it confirms the standard of discourse among the pseudo-intellectuals in the country hiding behind their fat pension packages to perfect the art of cynicism and casting aspersions on others ...Good luck to u Sir. [Sent by Maxis from BlackBerry® smartphone]

Dato JJ

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

Dato JJ,

I am not yet pensioned off. Just like you I am working my guts out with my bare hands and occasionaly with both feet for an honest mussel here and a mussel there.

Of course if we have a govt change come next 'Erection', you can be sure you can start enjoying your 'fat' pension rightaway. I do not think Anuar, Mat Sabu and co would need your kind of expertise.

Good luck to you Datuk and your kinds.
I am sorry you guys cannot see your profession as sacred. It is sad. very sad.

Nik Howk

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

Datuk,

I propose Nik Hawk take charge of the media. Let's see how he does it. Hehehe. Budak kolet! Apa ni??

Dato' NSTP

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

Dato NSTP,

In the 1st place I would certainly not accept your job....does not matter it is five figures with all the perks thrown in. Peanuts compared to the price, sacrifice and questions I would have to answer latter.Susah nak jawab to the 'CEO of the Universe' latter ,on the disparities and the summation of raised bp 's and collective heartache and anger I cause by my commission,omission and my miss'edition'.

Frankly Dato', I would rather 'jual goreng pisang tepi jalan than take your job' . I view my akhirat more important than a big fat pay check. I am not that clever by 2011standard you may say. For that matter Dato',even a cabinet or a PM's post is not worth the sacrifice and the awesome responsibility. I pity you guys actually. As our Teganung friends would say, " Setabuk pong aku tak kenang kerja mung !"

Your's is a sacred job affecting millions. You may say most time you guys have to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea...our Prophet Ibrahim chose the deep blue sea and got himself 'burned'.

As you can see Dato kita 'dudok dibumi ini bukan pasal cari makan saja, pasal akhirat pun nak dijaga'. If we just take care of the stomach, what we finally get at the end of the 'tunnel' is what comes out of it.
And I do not have to tell you what it is !

Nik Howk

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

Doc,

Let's not go into the dunia-akhirat issue. Who are we to pass judgments on each other? "Dia ni masuk neraka, dia ni pergi syurga."
I think we are mere mortals, Mungkin orang yg cepat mengutuk org lain based on emotion to kena jawab lebih nanti. Kita semua nanti. Tengok hati masing2. Tq
[Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless]

Dato NSTP

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

Dato'

I am not accusing anybody of going to hell. Far from it. If you read carefully..I am not naive. Certain jobs like yours though affect millions that one need to give serious thought on its execution. PM, Cabinet ministers, Sultans and King, 'lagi lah besar responsibility mereka. That goes with the job. Pak Mat Nyadap from Kuala Ketil or Padang Pa' Amat may just be asked about his lembu but if you are PM the questioning would be a thousand time more substantive. Allahualm but that is why I do not want to be Pm even if you give a million RM salary a month!

Your kind of job is a difficult one. A very big one indeed.
In fact in my estimation bigger than the socalled judiciary.
You press peope if you guys do your job properly could reduce executive unaccountability and excesses decades ago , etc etc and etc . You know this and I of all people cannot give a lecture on this. Press freedom is the panacea and catalyst for democracy and good governance. That is universal. You guys are very very big and important!!! You guys represent 'preventative medicine' in nation building.

As for the judiciary, they are there only after the damage is already done.
How many more decades do we have to wait until you guys grow up and mature?

No emotion involve with me, just cold facts.
Just like you, I have no love for Mat Sabu, Lim Guan Eng,Haji Hadi, Anuar or Karpal Singh.But following the antics of KJ, Nazri,Ibrahim Ali and even NTR, I am not sure they can comprehend the 'gravity' of their proffesion. [click here]

50 years on we are still grappling with the basics and having to deal with these clowns determining the National Agenda.

Of course we still have THE PRESS and THE JUDICIARY, one may say.
But our Judiciary now has been pummelled beyond comprehension.
We heard stories of big businesses and important individuals 'buying' their judges etc etc and etc.
So we are left with just the Press.
And there we are, we have to depend on you guys !

But even The Press have failed us miserably......nothing emotive about that.
Our institutions are next to non existent.

Don't tell me you are happy with the standard of governance right now!!
We are on par with Vietnam and Cambodia. Slightly better, sorry. Much better than Myanmar of course.

I have no querrel with you guys .
I am querelling with the fact that in 2011 we still have boys filling in for jobs meant for men.

Has bunallah wa ni' mal Wakeel.

Nik Howk

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

Doc,

We are accountable by what we do, say, think, etc. And that includes insulting your fellow beings. I never did that to you.
[Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device via Vodafone-Celcom Mobile.]

Dato NSTP

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

My God Dato'
You are beginning to sound like a poodle
Substantive numero uno of NSTP
One who is supposed to catapult us into good governance and more accountability. You can do better than that.
Yours is a sacred duty to Allah, King and country.
We expect high things from you guys....or are we expecting too much?
We cannot leave all these to the politicians.

Men are by nature corrupt. Whether they are in Pakatan , PAS, or UMNO.
We need you guys to be the eyes and soul of the people.
The alternative to free and fair press is street demo! And we certainly do not need this !
May God help us !

Remember our Malay College motto :
FIAT SAPEINTIA VIRTUS [ Manliness Come Thru Wisdom ]
Wise up man.

Nik Howk

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

OK, My daughter from Malacca GH just emailed me just now to stop "harrasing the PRESS people, PA !". I told her I was just doing my bit for BERSIH 2.0
A fair and free press is sacrosanct to democracy and governance but,........ to please her, I will stop my ranting here with an editorial from Jakarta Post and Shaykh Hussien Yee's advisory, a perspective from a Muslim :

Editorial: Malaysia: Rich but not free
The Jakarta Post | Mon, 07/11/2011 10:20 AMA | A | A |The leaders of Malaysia are laboring under an old paradigm that says you can have development or democracy, but not both. We have news for them: You can be rich and free at the same time. Malaysians deserve both and they deserve it now — not sometime in the future.

The lengths the government went to in trying to prevent and then break up the Bersih 2.0 rally in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday shows that the nation’s leaders were still not prepared to let go — even when an increasing number of Malaysians of all races have been pressing for more freedom and justice.

The rally, defying a government ban, went down as the largest in Malaysian history. It was significant that representatives from all three major races participated.

The government vainly tried to play the race card, suggesting it was a concerted move to undermine the dominant Malay race. Earlier it suggested that the rally was a communist plot.

There was nothing subversive about the rally. It was held to demand electoral reforms ahead of the next election in 2012.

The demonstrators, who numbers were independently estimated to top 10,000, were simply trying to exercise their rights of free speech and assembly.

They may have defied the law, but they were still marching peacefully. A few clashes erupted when the police tried to break them up. When they did disperse, they did so peacefully.

The police clearly overreacted. They did not need to invoke the Internal Security Act to arrest some of the protest’s leaders before Saturday. They certainly did not need to detain more than 1,600 on the day of the demonstration.

Aspirations for freedom and democracy are universal. Governments everywhere will, sooner or later, have to make accommodations. You cannot suppress the people and deprive them of their freedom forever. You must give them their due — or else they will get it by force. The Arab Spring is a case in point.

Given its current economic strength, Malaysia is in an enviable position to allow greater freedom and democracy. It can afford to take some risks without necessarily undermining development. A few powerful people may stand to lose their economic privileges, but they should have been phased out by now.

The Bersih 2.0 rally is the clearest sign that Malaysians want freedom and justice, as well as wealth.

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

Some final wisdom from Shaykh Hussien Yee, click here

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

An alternative viewpoint from within the family,
click here

Knowledge of The Unseen : Yasir Qadhi on Jannatul Firdaus

2011-07-08T04:01:00.012+08:00

I like to listen to people like Yasir Qadhi of Houston,Texas, USA; Al Margroui who originated from Sufi land of Morocco/ Algeria; and occasionally Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson, a convert from Christianity reverting to Islam in his late teen in the USA and had learn about Islam from amongst all places, Mauritania, Africa. Not to leave out Shaykh Ninowy now domiciled in USA, originally from Syria and a couple other scholars like Dr Bilal Phillips who had found Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia amongst the sons and daughters of people from the diplomatic enclave ,'secular'[ an unsurprising fact of course ]. He grew up for some years in his early youth in KL. Taught English later in Saudi Arabia and had sustained 'permanent head damage' there and now in the forefront of daawah since then!

The common denominator amongst them is they all have deep knowledge plus plus on the faith AND a mastery of English, which whether we like it or not now in this 21st century , is the language of DAAWAH. You want the spirit of the faith, you need to master Arabic to get to feel the real essense of Islam, but to bring back lost 'flocks to the fold', it is back to English

There is an obvious distinct difference in the theological approach between those schooled in the Nedj peninsula namely from the Medinan/ Makkah axis and that from elsewhere. Oftentimes if you are bent on sticking to the minutiae , you may say the differences are major and irreconciliable!
But if you are really generous with yourselves and can differentiate between the trees and the forest, the differences are really small and 'branches' in nature.

In essense,all boils down to a Knowledge of The Unseen, and how far deep one would like to go into this path.In a world of meanings related to The Unseen, one can choose to take a 'literalist' approach or a 'figurative' approach. Both are right or both could be wrong, but if our 'nawaitu' are right, we are not far away from The Straight Path. LIFE IS A jOURNEY, and if we always are guided by the Quran, we are OK.

We will start with Shaykh Yasir Qadhi on this interesting journey

Jannatul Firdaus by Yasir Qadhi, click here

For related articles on the blog :
Ru, Joe, Sha and Nina,click here
Mixing the Profane and the Sublime, click here

BERSIHBERSIHBERSIHBERSIHBERSIHBERSIHBERSIH

2011-07-06T21:33:00.008+08:00
Peludah Warna

Kuasa gusar kini menggelegak murka;
warna kuning diisytihar racun terbisa.
Diragutnya baju-T segeram tenaga
dan diumum itulah busana bahaya.

Tapi, kita jahit semula perca kain,
menjadikannya panji terindah dan tulen.
Warna kuning yang teramat tenang dan syahdu
kita kembalikan damai ke dalam qalbu.

Kini cahaya mentari mungkin diramas
dan sinar kuningnya juga mungkin dicantas.
Memanglah mereka kini peludah warna
sedang menghimpun lendir kahak sebanyaknya.

Kerana nikmat amat lama berkuasa,
kuasa pun seolah menjadi hartanya.

1. 7. 11. A. SAMAD SAID

Related Articles in the blog:
Are we Malaysians ready for good governance ?,click here
ASB from 52 billion RM to 2 billion, click here
From Libya to Tok Bali, click here
1 billion RM Naval Frigate,click here

Jannatul Firdaus and Hell.........

2011-07-04T00:45:00.027+08:00
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3SZwQwsJVM&feature=related

Ru, Sha, Joe, Yazman and Nina,

You guys may ask Papa, of the Quran's 6600 plus ayats from 114 surah, how many describe Jannah and hell.

The answer is : many and uncountable.....mostly all are allegorical or figurative[ in Arabic known as Mutashabihat ], meaning: they are beyond our comprehension and understanding. What the good shaykhs were alluding to were meant to be comprehensible to the imagination of the 7th century Arabs: Seventy two houris, gold and silver goblets, gardens with streams flowing, over hanging grapes with assortment of fruits within reach etc and etc....Nina and Shasha, do not be disheartened. Paradise is both for you as it is for Ru, Joe and Yazman. All need to work very hard for it. It is beyond our mortal comprehension. And so is Hell, mind you.We live in a four dimensional world bounded by Time, Space,Place and Person. Our description and perception of hell and heaven are limited by our senses and a narrow and myopic world view, determined by the limitations imposed on us by our very limited 'senses'. Our brains are limited by that billions of neurons and circuits. No great shake ! Only clowns, the likes of Christopher Hithens,Carl Sagan, Darwin and of late the Oxford biologist,Richard Dawkin, who thought we are 'unlimited' in our thinking. They are deluded, lost souls.

Jannatul Firdaus and Hell are there!

To us, ignorant souls, it seem a lifetime away...a very distant lifetime away from you guys perspective. Not too distant from Papa's five score and nine. In Godly terms though, Eternity, Hell and Heaven have already occured. Time and space are just God's creation. He operates beyond these realm...the Sixth dimension if you may. The Fifth dimension is the world of the 'malaikats and the jinns'.

But back to our world, life is just a collection of finite days, a summation of X- number of breaths ! To the sufis and those gifted with wisdom,Death or the end of this finite life, is just a breath away. One wise man of old noted that 'Life is just three breath. One that has just gone . The other that is not yet completed and the next which is truly not yet yours !' The next station is Life after death !.To them wise people, that is the 'real life'.

Does this all mean we just have to drop everything and only position ourselves on our sajadah and just pray!? Certainly not.

Islam is about EXCELLENCE.
Excellence in thought, words and deeds.

It means we need to find a vocation in our lives that can contribute to the total summation of human goodness....be you a plumber, a road sweeper, a train driver, a jetliner's pilot, a doctor, a farmer, an investment banker, a merchant, a king or a prime minister. Some vocations, like Papa's, are easier to do 'nawaitu' at, on a daily basis, towards goodness. Some, say a banker or pilot, would require more imagination. Some would be next to impossible, for example bartenders, futures trader, Mafia godfather and all that sort. Choose your vocations carefully so that ' contributing to goodness' can become your daily activities. A teacher , like your mom is an excellent example. A comic writer even in Papa's estimation, with the right nawaitu, is great ! Politics is Ok, in fact a fardzu if you have the talents but do not follow some overt examples like what you are seeing now...Papa would not have to name names, you guys already know.

It just mean when we leave our homes in the morning, we do it with sincerity and accountability, with the right 'nawaitu', with a dua, to contribute to human goodness....giving adequate sustainence to wife and family is goodness, providing education and a future to your offsprings is goodness, smiling and giving salam to a stranger is goodness, paying your income tax in time is goodness let alone paying your zakat fitrah and property etc and etc,....feeding the poor and the indigent is goodness....even picking a torn or broken glass on a lonely street without anyone noticing you is goodness! Yes, picking a broken glass on a desolate road with no one watching you especially would be an extreme act of 'goodness'. That is piety....You may not see HIM but He sees you.

But 'goodness' alone is not enough. The CEO and OWNER of this universe has set some minimum standards, SOP as you call it, and that in the main apart from other 'rukun',is your daily SOLAT.

It goes without saying that you guys should observe your solat. The obligatory five times a day solat to start with. Later in life, the sunat ones as well. Of course once you guys derive pleasure in this kind of private communion with HIM, you will even find waking up in the wee hours of the morning to do Tahajjud a sublime hobby. This probably will come much later in your lives, if papa were to be right, unless of course papa are blessed with genius offsprings of which papa think at present papa is not, and papa have no complaint on that issue !
Papa's SOP and ISO is much easier and precise. If you guys can join Papa for Subuh on time, you guys are already 'genius' material! The rest will subsequently fit in according to your scales of things.

On your onward journey to reach HIM of course Dua and Zikir are very useful tools. If you guys can comprehend the power of Dua and Zikir, you will find great pleasure in these two activities. Papa always believe in Time being the great healer, even in physical illnesses, and more so in the spiritual ones. With Time you guys will find out by yourselves Dua and Zikir are really great tools for healing our physical and inner pain.

And you guys may finally ask : What could empower one towards HIM ?
Solat, fasting, giving alms and sedekah, continous zikir and dua, and working for the 'goodness' of man all are easily said than done !
It has to be KNOWLEDGE. Ilm, Ilm Ilm and Ilm.
When you know HIM,nothing is impossible. We have to get to know HIM through
ILM, ILM, IlM and ILM.

Comprehend your Quran...Read the Quran with comprehension daily.Even one ayat a day will do. Start reading simple tafseer early if you can. Constancy ,rather than volume is the BIG secret.

Enhance your daily work and career thru more knowledge in your respective fields. If you are a road sweeper, a pilot or an investment banker, take a PHD in your respective field. If you are in mangement do an MBA or a DBA.........Papa always subscribe to the view that even a Quantum physicist who is entirely honest and humble with himself will be able to strengthened his relation with Allah much further thru more depth in his knowledge of his vocation.
Knowledge in the 'seen' [ BA, MA, DBA, PHD, MBBS, Accounting, Arts, Literature etc etc ] and the 'unseen' [ Fekah, Usuluddin, Tafseer, tasauf, etc etc ] must go hand in hand. There is a Malay proverb that goes like this " berkilau air di sungai, sudah tahu dia jantan betina ikan itu ! "..

We need KNOWLEDGE to find pleasure in celebrating HIM.
Allahualam.

Papa

Related Articles in the blog:
Lina Joy Revisited, click here
We have to Reexamine our Shahadah, click here
Letter to Ru, Sha, Joe and Nina, click here
An Aidil Azhar letter to an Agnostic friend, click here
Shaykh Ninowy's 'Our Purpose in Life', click here

Magna Carta; English Common Law; Life , Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness

2011-07-02T08:21:00.009+08:00
What has Magna Carta, The English Common Law and the famous Thomas Jefferson's American Declaration of Independence to do with the Syariah ?
A lot.....if one care to look into history objectively.

Listen to Yasir Qadhi and Yasir Birjas :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p8-3nvsewA&feature=related

Once we can comprehend the true meaning of our life, time,period, age,geographical locations and our positions in this life become irrelevant.........whether one is from Timbuktu,London, New York or Makkah; road sweeper, king or billionaire; during Spain's Andalucia, now or in the future...Allah is just One. We pray and celebrate His names because we need Him. He does not need us. We are 'replaceable'.

Faces in Islam : Ramadan on Ramadan....

2011-06-27T02:07:00.010+08:00
Prof Tariq Ramadan, don at Oxford University, grand son of Shaykh Hasan al Bana,one of the rising face of ' European Muslim ',talks on Ramadan.
click here

وَإِذَا سَأَلَكَ عِبَادِى عَنِّى فَإِنِّى قَرِيبٌ‌ۖ أُجِيبُ دَعۡوَةَ ٱلدَّاعِ إِذَا دَعَانِ‌ۖ فَلۡيَسۡتَجِيبُواْ لِى وَلۡيُؤۡمِنُواْ بِى لَعَلَّهُمۡ يَرۡشُدُونَ (١٨٦) أُحِلَّ

And when My servants question thee concerning Me, then surely I am nigh. I answer the prayer of the suppliant when he crieth unto Me. So let them hear My call and let them trust in Me, in order that they may be led aright.
Al Baqarah , 2 : 186

For more on Tariq Ramadan,
click hereEuropean Muslim
click here
Charlie Rose interview with Tariq Ramadan, click here
click here

In the world of al ghaiba......

2011-06-25T08:06:00.015+08:00
In the world of al ghaiba....
Al Rahman, Al Rahim, Al Ghaniyyu
Ad Daim [ The Constant ], Al Khabir [ 'Qaf'bir, The Eternal ],
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow are just sides of the same 'coin'...........
'It' has all passed !
Eternity has happened...only we are just fast asleep !
'Man Rabbuka'....then we wake up to the Al Haqqa

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwmbnVRRS8k&feature=related

Man Rabbuka , click here
The Shahadah, click here
The Big Bang, click here
Do you have a heart ?, click here
aargh aargh,?[ doctored tape ], click here

Faces in Islam : AMERICA.........

2011-06-20T21:53:00.004+08:00
click here
click here

Muslim Women in America,
click here
click here