The Top 20: How Islamic inventors changed the world
The Independent

From coffee to cheques and the three-course meal, the Muslim world has given us many innovations that we take for granted in daily life. Paul Vallely nominates 20 of the most influential- and identifies the men of genius behind them.

1. The story goes that an Arab named Khalid was tending his goats in the Kaffa region of southern Ethiopia, when he noticed his animals became livelier after eating a certain berry. He boiled the berries to make the first coffee. Certainly the first record of the drink is of beans exported from Ethiopia to Yemen where Sufis drank it to stay awake all night to pray on special occasions. By the late 15th century it had arrived in Mecca and Turkey from where it made its way to Venice in 1645. It was brought to England in 1650 by a Turk named Pasqua Rosee who opened the first coffee house in Lombard Street in the City of London. The Arabic qahwa became the Turkish kahve then the Italian caff頡nd then English coffee.

2. The ancient Greeks thought our eyes emitted rays, like a laser, which enabled us to see. The first person to realise that light enters the eye, rather than leaving it, was the 10th-century Muslim mathematician, astronomer and physicist Ibn al-Haitham. He invented the first pin-hole camera after noticing the way light came through a hole in window shutters. The smaller the hole, the better the picture, he worked out, and set up the first Camera Obscura (from the Arab word qamara for a dark or private room). He is also credited with being the first man to shift physics from a philosophical activity to an experimental one.

3. A form of chess was played in ancient India but the game was developed into the form we know it today in Persia. From there it spread westward to Europe - where it was introduced by the Moors in Spain in the 10th century - and eastward as far as Japan. The word rook comes from the Persian rukh, which means chariot.

4. A thousand years before the Wright brothers a Muslim poet, astronomer, musician and engineer named Abbas ibn Firnas made several attempts to construct a flying machine. In 852 he jumped from the minaret of the Grand Mosque in Cordoba using a loose cloak stiffened with wooden struts. He hoped to glide like a bird. He didn't. But the cloak slowed his fall, creating what is thought to be the first parachute, and leaving him with only minor injuries. In 875, aged 70, having perfected a machine of silk and eagles' feathers he tried again, jumping from a mountain. He flew to a significant height and stayed aloft for ten minutes but crashed on landing - concluding, correctly, that it was because he had not given his device a tail so it would stall on landing. Baghdad international airport and a crater on the Moon are named after him.

5. Washing and bathing are religious requirements for Muslims, which is perhaps why they perfected the recipe for soap which we still use today. The ancient Egyptians had soap of a kind, as did the Romans who used it more as a pomade. But it was the Arabs who combined vegetable oils with sodium hydroxide and aromatics such as thyme oil. One of the Crusaders' most striking characteristics, to Arab nostrils, was that they did not wash. Shampoo was introduced to England by a Muslim who opened Mahomed's Indian Vapour Baths on Brighton seafront in 1759 and was appointed Shampooing Surgeon to Kings George IV and William IV.

6. Distillation, the means of separating liquids through differences in their boiling points, was invented around the year 800 by Islam's foremost scientist, Jabir ibn Hayyan, who transformed alchemy into chemistry, inventing many of the basic processes and apparatus still in use today - liquefaction, crystallisation, distillation, purification, oxidisation, evaporation and filtration. As well as discovering sulphuric and nitric acid, he invented the alembic still, giving the world intense rosewater and other perfumes and alcoholic spirits (although drinking them is haram, or forbidden, in Islam). Ibn Hayyan emphasised systematic experimentation and was the founder of modern chemistry.

7. The crank-shaft is a device which translates rotary into linear motion and is central to much of the machinery in the modern world, not least the internal combustion engine. One of the most important mechanical inventions in the history of humankind, it was created by an ingenious Muslim engineer called al-Jazari to raise water for irrigation. His 1206 Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices shows he also invented or refined the use of valves and pistons, devised some of the first mechanical clocks driven by water and weights, and was the father of robotics. Among his 50 other inventions was the combination lock.

8. Quilting is a method of sewing or tying two layers of cloth with a layer of insulating material in between. It is not clear whether it was invented in the Muslim world or whether it was imported there from India or China. But it certainly came to the West via the Crusaders. They saw it used by Saracen warriors, who wore straw-filled quilted canvas shirts instead of armour. As well as a form of protection, it proved an effective guard against the chafing of the Crusaders' metal armour and was an effective form of insulation - so much so that it became a cottage industry back home in colder climates such as Britain and Holland.

9. The pointed arch so characteristic of Europe's Gothic cathedrals was an invention borrowed from Islamic architecture. It was much stronger than the rounded arch used by the Romans and Normans, thus allowing the building of bigger, higher, more complex and grander buildings. Other borrowings from Muslim genius included ribbed vaulting, rose windows and dome-building techniques. Europe's castles were also adapted to copy the Islamic world's - with arrow slits, battlements, a barbican and parapets. Square towers and keeps gave way to more easily defended round ones. Henry V's castle architect was a Muslim.

10. Many modern surgical instruments are of exactly the same design as those devised in the 10th century by a Muslim surgeon called al-Zahrawi. His scalpels, bone saws, forceps, fine scissors for eye surgery and many of the 200 instruments he devised are recognisable to a modern surgeon. It was he who discovered that catgut used for internal stitches dissolves away naturally (a discovery he made when his monkey ate his lute strings) and that it can be also used to make medicine capsules. In the 13th century, another Muslim medic named Ibn Nafis described the circulation of the blood, 300 years before William Harvey discovered it. Muslims doctors also invented anaesthetics of opium and alcohol mixes and developed hollow needles to suck cataracts from eyes in a technique still used today.

11. The windmill was invented in 634 for a Persian caliph and was used to grind corn and draw up water for irrigation. In the vast deserts of Arabia, when the seasonal streams ran dry, the only source of power was the wind which blew steadily from one direction for months. Mills had six or 12 sails covered in fabric or palm leaves. It was 500 years before the first windmill was seen in Europe.

12. The technique of inoculation was not invented by Jenner and Pasteur but was devised in the Muslim world and brought to Europe from Turkey by the wife of the English ambassador to Istanbul in 1724. Children in Turkey were vaccinated with cowpox to fight the deadly smallpox at least 50 years before the West discovered it.

13. The fountain pen was invented for the Sultan of Egypt in 953 after he demanded a pen which would not stain his hands or clothes. It held ink in a reservoir and, as with modern pens, fed ink to the nib by a combination of gravity and capillary action.

14. The system of numbering in use all round the world is probably Indian in origin but the style of the numerals is Arabic and first appears in print in the work of the Muslim mathematicians al-Khwarizmi and al-Kindi around 825. Algebra was named after al-Khwarizmi's book, Al-Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah, much of whose contents are still in use. The work of Muslim maths scholars was imported into Europe 300 years later by the Italian mathematician Fibonacci. Algorithms and much of the theory of trigonometry came from the Muslim world. And Al-Kindi's discovery of frequency analysis rendered all the codes of the ancient world soluble and created the basis of modern cryptology.

15. Ali ibn Nafi, known by his nickname of Ziryab (Blackbird) came from Iraq to Cordoba in the 9th century and brought with him the concept of the three-course meal - soup, followed by fish or meat, then fruit and nuts. He also introduced crystal glasses (which had been invented after experiments with rock crystal by Abbas ibn Firnas - see No 4).

16. Carpets were regarded as part of Paradise by medieval Muslims, thanks to their advanced weaving techniques, new tinctures from Islamic chemistry and highly developed sense of pattern and arabesque which were the basis of Islam's non-representational art. In contrast, Europe's floors were distinctly earthly, not to say dirty, until Arabian and Persian carpets were introduced. In England, as Erasmus recorded, floors were "covered in rushes, occasionally renewed, but so imperfectly that the bottom layer is left undisturbed, sometimes for 20 years, harbouring expectoration, vomiting, the leakage of dogs and men, ale droppings, scraps of fish, and other abominations not fit to be mentioned". Carpets, unsurprisingly, caught on quickly.

17. The modern cheque comes from the Arabic saqq, a written vow to pay for goods when they were delivered, to avoid money having to be transported across dangerous terrain. In the 9th century, a Muslim businessman could cash a cheque in China drawn on his bank in Baghdad.

18. By the 9th century, many Muslim scholars took it for granted that the Earth was a sphere. The proof, said astronomer Ibn Hazm, "is that the Sun is always vertical to a particular spot on Earth". It was 500 years before that realisation dawned on Galileo. The calculations of Muslim astronomers were so accurate that in the 9th century they reckoned the Earth's circumference to be 40,253.4km - less than 200km out. The scholar al-Idrisi took a globe depicting the world to the court of King Roger of Sicily in 1139.

19. Though the Chinese invented saltpetre gunpowder, and used it in their fireworks, it was the Arabs who worked out that it could be purified using potassium nitrate for military use. Muslim incendiary devices terrified the Crusaders. By the 15th century they had invented both a rocket, which they called a "self-moving and combusting egg", and a torpedo - a self-propelled pear-shaped bomb with a spear at the front which impaled itself in enemy ships and then blew up.

20. Medieval Europe had kitchen and herb gardens, but it was the Arabs who developed the idea of the garden as a place of beauty and meditation. The first royal pleasure gardens in Europe were opened in 11th-century Muslim Spain. Flowers which originated in Muslim gardens include the carnation and the tulip.

"1001 Inventions: Discover the Muslim Heritage in Our World" is a new exhibition which began a nationwide tour this week. It is currently at the Science Museum in Manchester. For more information, go to www.1001inventions.com.

English enriched by Centuries of borrowed Arabic words

By: Mohamed Elmasry

Media Monitors Network

For 1000 years, Arabic was the primary international language of commerce, scholarship and politics, much as English is in today's world. In fact, over the centuries English adopted many words that were either borrowed directly from Arabic, or were absorbed indirectly through other languages, especially Spanish.

Even today, Arabic still accounts for the greatest number of Eastern elements in English. The lists of examples that follow are only a brief sampling of the many more words available; perhaps some will surprise you!

No computer, nuclear plant or microchip design could have been possible without the words and concepts we know as algorithm, algebra, and zero - all of which come from Arabic.
The names of many musical instruments -- like lute and guitar - as well as a number of technical performance terms and styles, are also from Arabic roots.

Many names of familiar animals, plants, spices, herbs and drinks began as Arabic nouns: saffron, henna, camphor, cotton, apricot, lemon, lime, orange, tamarind, lilac, sherry, mango, coffee, artichoke, spinach, jasmine, ginger, tulip, lotus, shrub, giraffe, gazelle, cobra, zebra, cheetah.

If you have ever taken a chemistry course, the word chemistry itself originates with Arabic, as well as nitro, alkali, alcohol, calibre, antimony, arsenic.

In your household and daily life, you might easily run into Arabic words that are so common we never give them a second thought: shampoo, sofa, cable, atlas, magazine, pie, pajama, bungalow, mattress, sack, khaki, candy, caramel, jar, sherbet, sugar, syrup, cinnamon, ribs, silk, cheque, chatty, sandal.

And, as you might expect, Arabic is very present in slightly more exotic or emphatic English words and proper names: tycoon, carat, chess, checkmate, Sahara, almanac, rum, musk, sesame, tariff, cashmere, mummy, coral, sapphire, jubilee, jargon, thug, Satan, fake, jungle, alchemy, zenith, safari, talc, tartar, zircon, chiffon, amber, Bedouin, Ariel.

In military vocabulary, frequently-used terms like hazard, admiral, arsenal and assassin all owe their use to Arabic.

But reference books devoted to tracing the English words borrowed from Arabic are rare. Most were written some time ago and do not include contemporary scholarship or changes in our language. The most recent is more than three decades old -- Arabic Contributions to the English Vocabulary, by James Peters and Habeeb Salloum (1973). Two other useful, but dated, titles are: A History of Foreign Words in English, by Mary S. Serjeantson (1935) and Arabic Words in English, by Walt Taylor (1933).

Words are much like organic living creatures whose character and meanings evolve over time and circumstance. Those Arabic words that made it into English must have had a fascinating history, much of which has been lost over the centuries. It makes one wonder; Who used the original Arabic words and what were they like? How did these words first come to be spoken by non-Arabs? How many variations did they go through before appearing in English dictionaries? Why are some much easier to trace back to their Arabic roots than others? Linguists have answered some of these questions but there is still much more to be known. Here is a project worthy of far greater attention. Any takers?

For more information on Islamic Heritage please visit: www.islamichistorymonth.com

In Europe A War Is Declared on
Islam and the Qur'aan

BY: HARUNYAHYA

Following the Council of Europe¢s recent decision regarding the prohibition on the teaching of the fact of Creation in schools, a second issue to take its place on the agenda was the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling on 9 October that reli­gious classes in Turkish schools were a violation of the right to education. Under this ruling, various changes need to be made to the way religion is taught in Turkish schools and, according to the ECHR, religious classes should even be prevented in some way.

In fact, the changes referred to here have no other aim than to entirely do away with religious education, to turn young people away from belief in Allah (God) and to instill a materialist mindset in them. The deci­sion to ban the teaching of Creationism in schools under the Council of Europe decision taken in early October has the same objective. The fact that the report in question maintains that only the theory of evolution should be permitted on the curriculum clearly reveals the concern that students who learn about the fact of Creation will not grow up to be mate­rialists. This is why Creationism has been portrayed as a threat for Europe and the above decision was taken. The same state of affairs applies to the religious class-es currently provided in Turkey. Uneasy at students learning about Islam and turning away from the idea of materialism, Europe has this time encouraged the ending of religious instruction in schools under a vari­ety of pretexts. Europe¢s endeavors are obvious; it has declared war on belief in Allah and Islam.

There is no doubt that the reason for all this is the rev-elation to the entire world that Darwinism, and its sup-porter materialism, are both deceptions. Darwinist and materialist circles have panicked in the face of Harun Yahya¢s Atlas of Creation, which demonstrates that life forms today are exactly the same as their ancestors that lived in the past. They have realized that they will no longer be able to propagate that deception in the way they have for the last 150 years. The world has now come to see that Darwin¢s theory of evolution is a ter­rible lie. Materialist philosophy, which encourages irre­ligion, is now in its death throes and in the 21st centu­ry mankind will be freed from such deceptions, Allah willing, and return to the true purpose behind its cre­ation. Terrified and astonished by this realization, Darwinist-materialist circles are now attempting to take precautionary measures against this extraordi­nary rise. But what is done is done, and all the world now knows about the Darwinist deception. School stu-dents are now waging their own campaigns against Darwinism and refusing to learn about this fraud.

What Darwinist-materialist circles want is to form an irreligious society, with no traces of belief in Allah. The fact is, however, that this irreligious society will fur­ther encourage moral degeneration, increase the war, slaughter and rebellion that accompany irreligion, and inflict disaster on all mankind. What needs to be done is to encourage people, especially the young, to adopt religious moral values rather than turning them away from religion and encouraging materialist philosophy.

The reason for the panic being experienced by European Darwinist circles is crystal clear: They have realized that Creation is the sole fact, of which the whole world is now aware. They imagine that they will be able to put an end to this progress by banning religious classes and removing Creationism from the curriculum. They are convinced they will emerge vic­torious from this war they have declared against belief in Allah. (Surely Allah is beyond that.) They want to believe that Darwinism will be embraced and accept-ed, even though they are well aware that this will never happen. A false religion or a lie manufactured in opposition to belief in Allah has no way of survival. Almighty Allah reveals as much in His verses:

Rather We hurl the truth against falsehood and it cuts right through it and it vanishes clean away! Woe without end for you for what you portray! (Surat al-Anbiya¢, 18)

He sends down water from the sky and river-beds fill up and flow according to their size, and the floodwater carries with it an increasing layer of scum; a similar kind of scum comes from what you heat up in the fire, when you desire to make jewelry or other things. That is how Allah depicts the true and the false. As for the scum, it is quickly swept away. But as for that which is of use to people, it remains behind in the ground. That is a metaphor which Allah has made. (Surat ar-Ra¢d, 17)

With the definitive collapse of Darwinism, the influ­ence of Darwinists is much weaker than it once was. The rise of Islamic moral values is a promise made by Allah and will, by His leave, become a reality. The por­tents of this can be seen all across the world. His true religion has, by Allah¢s will, overcome. Darwinists are no longer able to mislead people. Europe¢s hostility towards Islam will change nothing. By Allah¢s leave, as with every heretical idea that has ever opposed Islamic moral values, this latest counter-attack, too, will merely result in a further strengthening of the Islamic faith.

Imagine a world today - and over the past sixty years - if the West and Japan had succeeded in fragmenting China, splintering the unity of this great and ancient civilization, and persisted in rubbing China's face in the dirt?Audio

Islam Now, China Then: Any Parallels

By: Shahid AlamIviews

"History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history that we make today."Henry Ford, 1916
On some days, a glance at the leading stories in the Western media strongly suggests that Muslims everywhere, of all stripes, have gone berserk. It appears that Muslims have lost their minds.
In any week, we are confronted with reports of Islamic suicide attacks against Western targets in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Western countries themselves; terrorists foiled before they could act; terrorist attacks gone awry; terrorists indicted; terrorists convicted; terrorists tortured; terrorist suspects kidnapped by CIA or warnings of new terrorist attacks against Western targets.
Unprovoked, without cause - we are repeatedly told - Muslims everywhere, even those living in the West, are lashing out against the civilized West. Many in the Western world - especially in the US - are beginning to believe that the entire Islamic world is on the warpath against Civilization itself.
Expert commentators in Western media want us to believe that the Muslims have lost their minds. They tell us that Muslims are inherently, innately, perverse; that never before has violence been used in this way, against innocent civilians. It is always 'innocent' civilians.
Other peoples too have endured colonization, slavery, expulsions, extermination at the hands of Western powers: but none have responded with violence on this scale against the West. Certainly not with violence against civilians. Never have Aborigines, Africans, indigenous Americans, Hindus, Jews, or the Chinese targeted civilians. They never attacked Westerners indiscriminately. They never targeted 'innocent Western civilians.'
Is this 'insanity' slowly raising its ugly head across the Islamic world really unique? Is this 'insanity' a uniquely Islamic phenomenon? Is this a uniquely contemporary phenomenon? Is this 'insanity' unprovoked?
We cannot of course expect any history from the corporate US media on this Islamic 'insanity'. In order to take the moral high ground, to claim innocence, the rich and powerful - the oppressor classes - prefer not to talk about history, or invent the history that serves their interest.
What is surprising, however, is that few writers even on the left bring much history to their analysis of unfolding events. Not being a historian - of Islam, China or Britain - I can only thank serendipity for the little bit of history that I will invoke to provide some background to the 'malaise' unfolding in the Islamic world. A little history to connect Islam today to China in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Implausibly - perhaps for some - the history I invoke comes from Friedrich Engels - yes, he of the Communist Manifesto, friend of Karl Marx, revolutionary - writing in May 1857 when the British were waging war against China, known to history as the Second Opium War.
More implausibly, this history comes from an article published in a leading US newspaper: The New York Daily Tribune (available in Marx and Engels Internet Archive). Yes, in some remote past, a leading US newspaper routinely published commentaries by the likes of Marx and Engels. Today, the publishers of the New York Times, the Washington Post or LA Times would become apoplectic just thinking about it.
During the First Opium War of 1840-1842, when the British waged war to defend their 'right' to smuggle opium into China - Friedrich Engels, writes - "the people were quiet; they left the Emperor's soldiers to fight the invaders, and submitted after defeat with Eastern fatalism to the power of the enemy." Yes, in those times, even enlightened Westerners spoke habitually of oriental fatalism, fanaticism, sloth, backwardness, and - not to forget their favorite - despotism.
However, something strange had overtaken the Chinese some fifteen years later. During the Second opium War, writes Friedrich Engels, "the mass of people take an active, nay fanatical part in the struggle against the foreigners. They poison the bread of the European community at Hong Kong by wholesale, and with the coolest premeditation...They go with hidden arms on board trading steamers, and, when on the journey, massacre the crew and European passengers and seize the boat. They kill and kidnap every foreigner within their reach."
Had the Chinese decided to trade one oriental disease for another: fatalism for fanaticism? Ah, these Orientals! Why can't they just stick to their fatalism? If only the Orientals could stick to their fatalism, all our conquests would have been such cakewalks!
It was no ordinary fanaticism either. Outside the borders of their country, the Chinese were mounting suicide attacks against Westerners. "The very coolies," writes Friedrich Engels," emigrating to foreign countries rise in mutiny, and as if by concert, on board every emigrant ship, and fight for its possession, and, rather than surrender, go down to the bottom with it, or perish in its flames. Even out of China, the Chinese colonists...conspire and suddenly rise in nightly insurrection..."
Why do the Chinese hate us?
No doubt the Europeans then were asking this question. And, like the democracy-mongers in the United States today, unwilling to examine the root causes, the history of their own atrocities, unwilling to acknowledge how they "throw hot shell on a defenseless city and add rape to murder," the Europeans then too were outraged. European statesmen and newspapermen fulminated endlessly about Chinese barbarity, calling their attacks "cowardly, barbarous, atrocious..." The Europeans too called for more wars, endless wars, till China could be subdued, totally.
Friedrich Engels was not deceived by the moralizing of the British press. Yes, the Chinese are still 'barbarians,' but the source of this "universal outbreak of all Chinese against all foreigners" was "the piratical policy of the British government." Piratical policy? No, never! We are on a civilizing mission; la mission civilizatrice Europeans. It was not a message that the West has been ready to heed: then or now.
Why had the Chinese chosen this "uncivilized" form of warfare? What had gone wrong? Was this rage born of envy; was it integral to the Chinese ethos; was this rage aimed only at destroying the West? Westerners claim that "their kidnappings, surprises, midnight massacres" are cowardly; but, Friedrich Engels answers, the "civilization mongers should not forget that according to their own showing they [the Chinese] could not stand against European means of destruction with their ordinary means of warfare." In other words, this was an asymmetric warfare. If the weaker party in a combat possesses cunning, it will probe and fight the enemy's weaknesses: not its strengths.
Then as now, this asymmetric warfare caused consternation in the West. How can the Europeans win when the enemy neutralizes the West's enormous advantage in technology, when the enemy refuses to offer itself as a fixed target, when it deploys merely its human assets, its daring, cunning, its readiness to sacrifice bodies?
"What is an army to do," asks Engels, "against a people resorting to such means of warfare? Where, how far, is it to penetrate into the enemy's country, how to maintain itself there?" The West again confronts that question in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. The West has 'penetrated into the enemy's country,' but is having considerable trouble maintaining itself there. Increasingly, Western statesmen are asking: Can they maintain this presence without inviting more attacks?
Friedrich Engels asked the British to give up "moralizing on the horrible atrocities of the Chinese." Instead, he advises them to recognize that "this is a war pro aris et focis ["for altars and hearth"], a popular war for the maintenance of Chinese nationality, with all its overbearing prejudice, stupidity, learned ignorance and pedantic barbarism if you like, but yet a popular war." If we can ignore the stench of Western prejudice in this instance, there is a message here that the West might heed. Is it possible that the Muslims too are waging a "popular war," a war for the dignity, sovereignty of Islamic peoples?
In 1857, the Chinese war against Westerners also was confined to Southern China. However, "it would be a very dangerous war for the English if the fanaticism extends to the people of the interior." The British might destroy Canton, attack the coastal areas, but could they carry their attacks into the interior? Even if the British threw their entire might into the war, it "would not suffice to conquer and hold the two provinces of Kwangtung and Kwangsi. What, then, can they do further?"
The United States and Israel now hold Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan. How strong, how firm is their hold? on the one hand, they appear to be in a much stronger position than the British in China. They have the 'rulers' - the 'Mubaraks, Musharrafs and Malikis - in their back pockets. But how long can these 'rulers' stand against their people?
What if the insurgency that now appears like a distant cloud on the horizon no larger than a man's fist is really the precursor of a popular war? What if the "extremists," "militants," "terrorists," are the advance guard of a popular war to restore sovereignty to Islamic peoples? Can the US and Israel win this war against close to a quarter of the world's population? Will this be a war worth fighting: worth winning?
Shouldn't these great powers heed the words of Friedrich Engels? Shouldn't they heed history itself. After nearly a century of hard struggle, the Chinese gained their sovereignty in 1948, driving out every imperialist power from its shores? Today, China is the world's most powerful engine of capitalist development. It threatens no neighbor. Its secret service is not busy destabilizing any country in the world. At least not yet.
Imagine a world today - and over the past sixty years - if the West and Japan had succeeded in fragmenting China, splintering the unity of this great and ancient civilization, and persisted in rubbing China's face in the dirt? How many millions of troops would the West have to deploy to defends its client states in what is now China - the Chinese equivalents of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan and Iraq? If Vietnam bled the United States, imagine the consequences of a quagmire in China?
Would the United States prefer this turbulent but splintered China held down at massive costs in blood and treasure, with military bases, client states, wars, and unending terrorist attacks on American interests everywhere in the world - to the China that it has today, united, prosperous, at peace; a competitor, but also one of its largest trading partners?
At what cost, and for how long, will the United States, Europe and Israel continue to support the splintering, occupation and exploitation of the Islamic heartland they had imposed during World War I? At what cost - to themselves and the peoples of the Islamic world? There are times when it is smarter to retrench than to hold on to past gains.
That time is now: and that time may be running out.
Another turn of the screw - another attack by the United States or Israel - and this window may close irrevocably. If wars, civil conflicts or revolutions sweep across the Islamic world - unlike the Chinese revolution, most likely this turbulence will not be confined to one segment of Asia. In one way or another, this violence will draw the whole world into its vortex. One cannot even begin to imagine all the ramifications, all the human costs of such a conflagration.
The most vital question before the world today is: Can the United States, Israel or both be prevented from starting an apocalypse?

M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University. He is author of Challenging the New Orientalism (IPI Publications: 2007). Visit his website at http://aslama.org He may be reached at alqalam02760@yahoo.com.© M. Shahid Alam

History dispels the lies about Islam

By: Mohamed ElmasryIviews

A well known technique in any propaganda war is the spreading of "disinformation" about your enemy. Disinformation is the new postmodern word for lies. If you repeat the same lies over and over again, listeners' critical thinking skills are numbed; and in the absence of any opposing argument, the lies eventually cannot be differentiated from truth. Islam has had many enemies over the centuries and still has. One of the most persistent lies repeated by its detractors is that Muslims spread their faith by the sword. Yet of all mainstream religions, none is more precisely documented as to its origin, revelation, message and teachings. Since its emergence through the Prophet Muhammad and his transmission of its holy book, the history of Islam has been well recorded. From the Prophet's time until today, the Quran has offered guidance and discipline for everyday life. As Islam spread, the lives and teachings of its messengers have also been documented. As with Judaism and Christianity, the most influential and revered figures are those from the time when the faith was newly revealed; in Islam, these were Muslims who lived in the age of Prophet Muhammad and who embodied the teachings of the Quran as examples to their fellow human beings. Many of their thoughts and deeds were recorded for the benefit of future generations. To return to the questions of whether the Quran encourages Muslims to spread their faith by force, or whether the Prophet himself set a violent example for Muslims to follow, one has only to consult the source. The Quran is crystal clear in stating, "There is no compulsion in religion." (Quran 2:256) The commandment is absolute; there are no exceptions. Coercion, compulsion, force -- whatever one chooses to call it -- is forbidden. No other holy book lays down such a clear directive to its adherents.Believers in the world's largest Muslim country of today, Indonesia, have never in history encountered foreign Muslim soldiers on their soil. The same is true for today's Muslims in Malaysia, China, sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Turkey. All of these countries or regions were introduced to Islam through other Muslims, not by Muslim armies. Even in Egypt where the earliest Muslims were mostly Arab soldiers, Islam was diffused slowly throughout the country over more than 400 years. The Egyptians loved Islam because the values it embraced, such as justice, equality, modernity and freedom.And in Egypt, as well as in Persia, Greater Syria, India, North Africa and Spain, converts freely accepted Islam because it offered comparatively more than other religions of the day. During those early centuries, people who felt oppressed or restricted by the rigidity of Christian and Jewish traditions, or excluded from the caste system of Hinduism, were attracted by the Islam's de-emphasis on hierarchy. They loved the Islamic teachings that God is One and the Lord of All, that humans can talk to God directly, and that there is no Original Sin Ð every human being is wholly accountable for his/her deeds.So while it is true that Islam spread in some places with the speed of a bullet, no literal bullets have been involved. The whole concept of "convert or die" is utterly foreign and reprehensible to authentic Islamic beliefs and conduct. And the Quran itself further reinforces the sanctity of all human lives in saying that to kill another person is as evil as killing the entire human race. Muslims do not blame any religion for the atrocities committed by those claiming to be its adherents. Thus, Muslims do not blame Judaism itself for injustices committed by Jews against Palestinians. Nor do they blame Christianity per se for the crimes committed by Church-sanctioned medieval Crusades; for atrocities committed during the conquest of Spain by Christian armies and the subsequent persecution and expulsion of Muslims; nor for the horrors of the Inquisition, the St. BartholomewÕs Day Massacre, or any number of similar tragedies. All three faiths, rooted in Abrahamic tradition, teach similar values of non-violence, justice and equality. Those who take up the "cause" of any faith through violent means are in effect blasphemers of it. The earliest Muslims in Arabia were persecuted and subjected to torture. They fled for their lives from Mecca to Medina, but their pagan enemies followed, determined to annihilate them. Then and only then, did Muslims take up arms in self-defense. This was no a religious war, however, but rather a forced political conflict in which the rich and powerful of 6th-century AD Arabia perceived their status being challenged. The MuslimsÕ aim was not to convert their pagan countrymen, but to defend themselves; similarly, the anti-Muslim pagans were not interested in suppressing Islam itself, but in subjugating its believers through political power. When the Prophet Muhammad and his followers returned peacefully to Mecca in triumph, he granted pardon to the same people who had persecuted and waged war against him and his fellow Muslims. This humane and generous behavior reflected the teaching of many Quranic verses which stress the importance of courtesy, politeness and civility, even where there has been severe conflict: "And the true servants of the God of Mercy are those who walk upon the earth humbly; and when the ignorant address them, reply ÔPeaceÕ; and they pass the night praying to their Lord, prostrating and standing." (Quran 25:63 - 64)

Dr. Mohamed Elmasry is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Waterloo and national president of the Canadian Islamic Congress.

Free Speech or Double Standards?

By: Enver MasudIviews

Yes to free speech, no to double standards, but we expect more from our leaders than the bare minimum that the law demands.On March 6, 2001 the European Court of Justice ruled that "the European Union can lawfully suppress political criticism of its institutions and of leading figures, sweeping aside English Common Law and 50 years of European precedents on civil liberties."A challenge in 1990 to the publication of Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" on the grounds that it contained "a blasphemous libel concerning Almighty God (Allah) the Supreme Deity common to all the major religions of the world" was rejected because Britain's blasphemy law was restricted to "scurrilous vilification of the Christian religion."A Paris court on February 27, 1998, fined French philosopher Roger Garaudy $40,000 for statements made in his 1996 book "The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics." The European Court of Human Rights declared inadmissible his appeal lodged in the case of Garaudy v. France.Ernst Zundel, Germar Rudolf and David Irving are serving time in jail in Europe for their views about the holocaust. Why doesn't the press support Zundel's, Rudolf's, Irving's, or Garaudy's right to free speech.Would a U.S. president invite Zundel, Rudolf, Irving, or Garaudy to dinner at the White House as then President Clinton did with Salman Rushdie?" I think not.We understand that changes to the Patriot Act sought by President Bush would make illegal at certain gatherings signs that have not been previously approved.Yes, Muslim demonstrations may not be effective, but they are understandable. Muslims are fed up with the double standards, the constant attacks on Islam, and their virtual exclusion from mainstream debate.Civil society requires more than merely observing the law. Language acceptable in a novel, is not acceptable in the communications from society's leaders - be it a newspaper, corporation or state.

Enver Masud is founder of The Wisdom Fund, and the recipient of the 2002 Gold Award from the Human Rights Foundation for his book The War on Islam.

Apostasy Fire

Intellectual Apostasy, the Real Issue

By: Ibrahim N. AbusharifIslamiCity

Another fire to put out. This time an Afghani (formerly a Muslim) speaks of his religious makeover and, for a while, faced the penalty of death because of apostasy rulings found in Islamic sacred law-this according to an Afghani "judge." The story and its permutations have led the network and cable news and print behemoths, received comments from the White House and just about every Rev and collar in America and Europe, and provoked more rabid slurs trained on Islam. In a way, I understand the indignation: if a man wants to change his religion, so let him. This controversy raises some issues that outstrip one person.As for apostasy laws, they do exist. But Islam is not the only religion in this regard, nor are they alien to secular systems. And you ask: So what? What kind of argument is that? Is this McApologetics? Good questions. I mention this because regrettably analogies of this kind are now a requirement, given the puerile handling of Muslim affairs, the pompous bloviations of media "experts," and a public seemingly sedated by its own sense of perfection. But it also adds perspective in the light of the monster-making process of all things "Islamic." When you believe that the patent to "issues," like violence and extremism, belongs to one folk, then the mind is doomed to delve into fear-fictions that permit legislatures to make all kinds of damned "laws" and wars. So, I make the analogy between apostasy in the early Islamic historical context with the American law of treason or sedition that is punishable by death. The apostasy laws in Islamic legal tradition vary greatly and are often said to pertain more to "treason" and "sedition" than a spiritual choice. Back in the day, when Islam was young and enemies abound, those who didn't want to see their idols dethroned in the city of Abraham (Mecca) and those who felt intimidated that God would send a prophet from Ishmael's pedigree (especially in the post-Jesus world) tried to do anything to damage or destroy the small community of believers. They made alliances, attempted to assassinate the Prophet Muhammad (numerous times), waged battle, slandered galore, and other tricks to do the deed. There were hypocrites among "the believers"; they would be Muslim by day and plotting maniacs by night, allying themselves with those who, on their own accord, chose enmity as their reception to Islam and its folk. They would change their "faith" for political expedience and promises in order to do some impolite things to a budding religious community. Their aim was not subtle.In the aftermath of the passing of the Prophet, some Arab tribes (especially in the eastern half of the Arabian Peninsula) decided to edit out a core tenet of the faith and withhold their charitable requirement, and thus impale the very economic basis of a contiguous people and nation. The battle against them was called the "War of Apostasy." Much has been made of this. It's comparable to a movement to refuse to pay taxes to the Feds while still claiming the right to live in America. Imagine that on a large basis, such that the very economic legs of the nation would not only wobble, but collapse and put an end to the American entity. Do we remember the Civil War and its economic rationale?It's important to note that apostasy rulings have rarely been used in the heyday of Islamic civilization, a ranging world conglomerate stretching from the western frontiers of China, the Indian subcontinent, to North and Sub-Saharan Africa, eastern Europe, and the western shores of Spain. There's absolutely nothing in the Žlan or sacred paradigms of Islam that makes a religious choice an anathema to Muslims. Not one reference in the Quran that refers to people leaving the realm of faith suggests the penalty of death. The scripture does, however, state that in the Hereafter these scoffers will not find an easy remedy. The statements of the Prophet with regard to apostasy have been profoundly examined by scholars, most of whom have placed a high premium on context when adjudicating.I mean, listen: read history by real historians. And if you have the money, fly out to North Africa and the Middle East and look at some of the oldest Christian and Jewish communities on the face of the earth. The relatively few episodes of animosity were a matter of human frailty (pandemic always) and not rooted in the deep soil of the Islamic way of thinking. The recent tensions of the last century in the Muslim world were inspired more by the "political" strains of the Palestinian issue or secular juntas of the Arab east, patterned after European fascist or socialist political systems (the Baath Party of Iraq is an example) than by Islam and its laws. Then compare that with Spanish extermination and expulsion of Muslims and Jews, sanctioned and approved of by Rome. There's more to cite, like the Catholic "response" to the early followers of Martin Luther; the conquerors in the New World, who were given the right to "subdue" the natives in the "name of Christ," which was permissible because the natives were unclean "infidels"; the slaughter of Mormons (heretics according to mainstream Protestant churches) in early American history; and others. But that was history, and these minority communities in the Muslim east were originally of the Christian and Jewish milieu, although it's well known that there were converts among them (very few) from Muslim ranks. (Personally, I know of Christian Arabs who were once Muslim, who made the choice for their own reasons. And they live well in the Arab world.)Now back to Afghanistan, a nation smitten in recent history by invasions, revolutions, extremists, and entrenched tribal logic. Anyone who has any awareness of the country will know that, like the so-called "honor killings" of India and Pakistan, this episode of apostasy "ruling" is informed not by Islamic sacred law or paradigms, but by a people poorly confronting their own ignorance and psychological traumas. Just like the destruction of the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan, which existed for centuries unmolested by the Muslim authorities that ruled the region (which once contained many centers of high learning, if one can imagine that), this Afghani fellow, a Muslim turned Christian, may be another victim of the contemporary Muslim "funk" and may add to the misunderstanding of Islam and lend further credence to questionable theories of civilizations and their inevitable clashes. (The devil wonders how many in the vocal bleachers were hoping to see this man become a martyr who would then inspire many a troubadour to sing elegies by which the missionaries can do their work.)Now to preach: I'm not sure how these things happen, but they are damned when they do. There's hardly anything more dangerous than the mixture of religion with simplemindedness, or any people-moving philosophies mixed with the loss of intellectualism and critical thinking. Somehow the spiritual equation has been inversed. Too many folk interpret rigidity and strictness as signs of religious commitment and piety. Spiritual security, however, always leads to flexibility, lenience, and mercy, the qualities that ushered so many into Islam in the first place. A show of religiosity by way of gesture, a stage play of piety, is obnoxious and, on a larger scale, a disaster. One wonders where's the Muslim world clerisy on this underlying issue. Or is there one to speak of, an authentic intelligentsia cleansed of the automatic verbiage of expired "movements"?Note: There are many academic treatises on the topic of apostasy rulings in Islamic law, and clearly there are ranging opinions among scholars of the classical age and modern. The intransigence of the Afghani "judge" of this controversy is out of step with the very legal tradition he believes he's upholding-a tradition that has survived because of important degrees of plasticity.

Ibrahim N. Abusharif is the editor-in-chief of the Starlatch Press, a Chicago-based publishing house. You can visit his blog at http://fromclay.blogspot.com

A Forgotten Covenant

By: IslamiCityIslamiCity

"This is a message from Muhammad ibn Abdullah, as a covenant to those who adopt Christianity, near and far, we are with them. Verily I, the servants, the helpers, and my followers defend them, because Christians are my citizens; and by Allah! I hold out against anything that displeases them.
No compulsion is to be on them. Neither are their judges to be removed from their jobs nor their monks from their monasteries.
No one is to destroy a house of their religion, to damage it, or to carry anything from it to the Muslims' houses. Should anyone take any of these, he would spoil God's covenant and disobey His Prophet. Verily, they are my allies and have my secure charter against all that they hate.
No one is to force them to travel or to oblige them to fight. The Muslims are to fight for them. If a female Christian is married to a Muslim, it is not to take place without her approval. She is not to be prevented from visiting her church to pray.
Their churches are to be respected. They are neither to be prevented from repairing them nor the sacredness of their covenants. No one of the nation (Muslims) is to disobey the covenant till the Last Day (end of the world)."*
Such were the memorable words of Prophet Muhammad in the year 628 CE, when he granted this historic document, also known as the Charter of Privileges, to the monks of St. Catherine Monastery in Mt. Sinai. It consisted of several clauses covering all aspects of human rights including such topics as the protection of Christians living under Islamic rule, freedom of worship and movement, freedom to appoint their own judges and to own and maintain their property, exemption from military service, and the right to protection in war.
In the spirit of this and numerous other authoritative Islamic texts, one wonders why contemporary policy makers in the West insist on supporting the secular, corrupt, and authoritarian regimes of the predominantly Muslim nations. What is the wisdom of allocating billions of dollars to overthrow, through well-crafted public and covert operations, the popularly and legitimately elected Muslim governments? Have the West's 'experts' on the Middle East, the Orientalists and the national security advisers hijacked Western political institutions as the latter hijacked the legitimate government of, for example, Iran's democratic Mosadeq regime, or the Algerian peaceful election that guaranteed Muslim control, and many more cases? Should the predominantly Christian West fear and fight genuine Islamic regimes or should it change its outlook by trusting those who uphold God's Words and Muhammad's commands above secular and cultural values?

*The English translated text of the Charter of Privileges was extracted from the Book 'Muslim History: 570 - 1950 C.E.' by Dr. A. Zahoor and Dr. Z. Haq, ZMD Corporation. P.O. Box 8231 - Gaithersburg, MD 20898-8231 - Copyright Akram Zahoor 2000. P. 167.

Islamic Economics: The Total Revolution

Islamic Economics: The Total Revolution

By: Robert D. CraneAmericanMuslim.org* - Aug 23, 2007

I. The Economics of Tawhid
In a revolutionary age, half-assed revolutions accomplish nothing and merely bring on more injustice by failing to solve the real problems. For decades, Muslim economists have focused on the micro-problems of usury, but failed to address the larger problem of the wealth gap. The charging of interest on loans is indeed a contributing factor, but a minor one. So-called Islamic banks have been established and expanded their assets into the many billions of dollars by conning individual Muslims into "investing" their money in them as a requirement of their din. In fact, these banks, and especially the Islamic banking arms of the big multi-nationals, are fraudulent as means to promote economic justice because they have deliberately and assiduously joined the global banking system, with all of its institutional defects, in order to fit in. In Islam, everything is interconnected in accordance with the overarching paradigm of tawhid. This coherence of unity in diversity, which reflects the Oneness of the Creator, is manifested in the form of what the great jurisprudents of Islam have called the universal principles of justice. These are known as the maqasid al shari'ah. The most controversial of these in both modern Muslim ideology and secular Western thought is haqq al mal. The core meaning and principle of this universal principle of economic justice is respect for the sacredness of private property in the means of production and for the universal right of every person to capital ownership. This is disputed because in secular thought nothing is sacred. All the parts of creation are disposable because there is no concept of tawhid to give meaning.
II. The Two Principles of Economic Justice
The principles of economic justice are discussed in Chapter Seven, entitled "Human Rights in Islam from the Economic Perspective," in the early draft of Volume One on the Islamic Perspective published for feedback in June, 2007, in http://www.theamericanmuslim.org as part of a nine-part series under the title, The Natural Law of Compassionate Justice: Source of Convergence Between Science and Religion. The Islamic concept of economic justice is based on two principles. The first is the ultimate sovereignty of Allah over all of creation. This means that private property ownership of the means of production is sacred, but only because it implies the responsibility of stewardship by the individual owner. Whoever earns from the use of capital, including land and infrastructure, has a right to enjoy the profits, but he must earn them honestly and spend them to support the needs not only of his own family but of the marginalized in society who no fault of their own either are poor wage-slaves or incapacitated.
This social element in private ownership is based on the fundamental Islamic virtue known as infaq, which is the inclination to give rather than take in life. This is universal in every person but must be cultivated culturally because otherwise the selfish nature of every person, known as nafs al ammara or "the commanding and demanding self," will claim absolute sovereignty over what belongs to Allah. This is why one of the "five pillars" or actions to maintain one's submission to God is charity.
Charity consists both of sadaqa, which is voluntary giving to others based only on their need, and zakat, which is mandatory and is based on the capital intensivity of the means of production with rates decreasing in proportion to the increase in human input either through labor or capital. Earnings from labor are taxed at 2% of one's wealth (not on income), but earnings from cultivated land are taxed at ten percent, because the land but not the water is produced by God. Profits from uncultivated land as well as from mining ores, which come primarily from the bounties of God, are taxed at 20%. This provides incentives to invent and apply technology and pursue science in order to improve it.
The second basic principle of Islamic economics is that economic power and political power are dependent on each other. Economic justice is not merely one aspect of political justice but provides its foundation. Neither is possible without the other. This is part of the Islamic concept of tawhid, which teaches the interdependence of everything in the universe. The pulverization of knowledge into unrelated parts is the principle cause of chaos. The principle cure is the reestablishment of cosmos.
The most important derivative of this second principle for Islamic economic thought and the most important aspect of haqq al mal or respect for private property ownership in the means of production is recognition that such ownership is a universal human right. It may not be usurped by government as in socialism, whereby the "ownership" by the proletariat is pure fiction. Furthermore, Islamic principles of universal ownership are incompatible with the welfare economics of capitalist economies, which have constructed barriers to universal access to ownership and justified this politically by redistributing profits from the rich to the poor. The result is the concentration of ownership and a constantly growing wealth gap both within and among countries.
Economic justice in traditionalist Islamic thought may be compared to the design of modern input-output theory, whereby every person has a right to participate through either labor or capital in the production of wealth, and an equal right to the distribution of this wealth based on one's own input. The sole role of government is to maintain the principle of limitation through what I developed some twenty years ago as the principle of harmonic justice, which is to assure that contributive and distributive justice remain in balance. Both economic socialism and either monopoly or oligarchical capitalism violate all three principles.
The father of modern Islamic economics is Shaykh al Islam Muhammad al Tahir ibn Ashur. He taught at Zaituna University in Tunis, which traditionally ranked right after Al Azhar in Cairo as the leading Muslim university in the world, and rose to become the Grand Mufti of Tunisia. His major contribution to Islamic thought was to revive the normative study of Islamic jurisprudence in the first half of the twentieth century, which had been moribund in the Sunni world for six hundred years ever since the death of the last great Islamic jurisprudent, Al Shatibi. Ibn Ashur was inspired by the publication in printed form of Al Shatibi's manuscript, Al Muwafaqat, when Ibn Ashur was a boy and by his association as a student at the age of 24 in 1903 with Shaykh Muhhamad Abdu.
Ibn Ashur died at the age of 94 in 1973, but he led the way toward a renaissance of higher purposes in Islamic thought by developing an open- ended framework of respect for new responsibilities that became the foundation for an Islamic science of human rights. He published his magnum opus, Maqasid al Shari'ah al Islamiya, in 1946, when Marxism had captured the minds of almost the entire body of the world-wide Muslim intelligentsia, both liberals and conservatives. His position was that Marxism is un-Islamic in theory and would be catastrophic in practice.
His most radical proposal was that wealth in a capital intensive economy is created primarily by capital rather than by labor. He thereby stood Karl Marx on his head, who had asserted, contrary to all the evidence, that labor is the only factor in wealth creation and that capital is merely a "congealed form" of it. This so-called labor theory of value justified the expropriation of all private ownership of capital by the state on behalf of the workers, who otherwise would be doomed forever to the status of wage-slaves. This Marxist theory is still dominant in much of the Muslim world, but only because it is still almost universally accepted in the best American universities.
Grand Mufti Ibn Ashur developed the principle of equality of opportunity and associated it with access to and preservation of private wealth. He considered that respect for private property in the means of production and its preservation and safe-guarding (hifz) form the core principle of haqq al mal. He posed as a basic principle of subsidiarity that, "the preservation of private wealth leads eventually to the preservation of the community's wealth, because the preservation of the whole is achieved by preserving its constituent parts" (p. 121). This principle applies to self-determination in both economics and politics.
Ibn Ashur was almost a century ahead of his time by inventing not merely binary economics but trinary or three-factor economics, which is critical to such tools of expanded capital ownership as community investment corporations. He wrote, "There are two ways for the community and its members to create wealth: owning (tamalluk) and earning (takassub). Owning is the basis of wealth formation by humans" (p. 280). Tamalluk means owning property (p. 282), in other words ownership of all non-human means of production, which one may define as "capital." Takassub is equivalent to labor or human work in employing capital. Ibn Ashur writes, "Earning (takassub) depends on three primary factors (usul): 1) land (ard), 2) labor (amal), and capital (ra's al mal)" (p. 282).
Land includes natural resources, such as oil, which is created by "God" rather than by either labor or capital.
Labor as a means of production includes ingenuity in management within a corporation to determine the efficiency of the corporation in bringing together the three factors of production, land, labor, and capital.
Capital may be construed to include the results of human effort after completion, such as a highway system as part of the economic infrastructure, technological processes, robots, and patents. Ibn Ashur defines capital as follows: "Obviously, means of work, such as engines, steam-driven machines, electrical equipment, and even animals used for packing and plowing, would constitute part of capital" (p. 284).
These three factors of production can all be privately owned. As a general principle in Islamic economics, according to Ibn Ashur's outline of economic justice, everything that can be so owned should be. The corollary is that the process of broadening ownership of future wealth must not deprive existing owners of their accumulated ownership rights from the past, because any confiscation of such rights would violate the sacred value of ownership as such. The only exception would be eminent domain, whereby, for example, the community through its government can appropriate land for urban renewal after paying market value to the existing owners, so that the present and future residents can form a land-based community investment corporation. Funds for such acquisition, as well as for the establishment of new industries on the land through a community investment corporation, can and should come from the cost-free creation of money by the central bank for productive enterprises individually owned by every member of the community.
A fourth branch of the economy, in addition to the factors of production, is the invisible infrastructure of government, including the legal system and the laws that govern banking, taxes, and corporations. This publicly "owned" infrastructure of society functions either to further concentrate private ownership or to de-monopolize ownership of the rapidly growing wealth of society as part of a public policy to narrow or close the wealth gap. Since government is a necessary evil as the only legitimate monopoly of power in society, it should minimize its own power by maximizing the power of civil society and of every person. This can be accomplished best by promoting economic democracy as the surest means to pursue the vision of political democracy.
Following the universally accepted principle of Islamic economics, Ibn Ashur did not consider money itself or even credit and shares of stock as a means of production or "capital." Money, credit, and stock link people to the instruments of production, known as capital, by enabling them to direct the employment of these instruments. These symbols of value are media of exchange, which quantify economic value and permit the implementation of promises as a social value.
Ibn Ashur was not equipped to devise specific institutional means to create money and credit based on future profits rather than on past savings, which can and should be the principal Islamic contribution to the 21st century economics of compassionate justice. His framework, however, leads inevitably to the concept that it is a universal human right for every person to participate in owning productive wealth. This leads to the concept that it is a universal responsibility of individuals in moral community through government to facilitate this through the perfection of financial institutions so that they will broaden rather than concentrate capital ownership and reduce rather than increase the wealth gap, which otherwise would be inevitable in a modern capital intensive society. Western economic theoreticians have developed parts of Islamic economics but few have had the vision to see these parts as constituents of a single holistic framework, much less as part of a higher paradigm of transdisciplinary thought.
Once one accepts the system of ownership economics based on the above trinary factors of production, as envisaged by Shaykh al Islam Ibn Ashur in his revolutionary introduction to Islamic normative justice, the ways to implement it are universally applicable. They are limited only by human imagination and ingenuity and by the courage needed to perfect the existing system of money and credit so that it will effectively democratize economic opportunity and thereby facilitate real representative government.
III. The Issue of Illegitimate Ownership
Those with the socialist perspective based on the labor theory of value, argue that property acquired by oppression is not legitimate, much less sacred. Therefore justice requires that it be redistributed by government fiat on behalf of those who own no property. The owners, whom Karl Marx designated by the opproprious term "capitalists," have no right to their property, because property in itself has no value. Only people do.
There is a simple answer to this contention, though it may involve some epistemological and ontological sophistication. One should distinguish property as such from the people who own it. The right to property ownership is part of natural law. It is recognized by every religion as a universal right for every human being essential to one's human dignity. Humans can and have designed institutions that either impede this right or promote it. Extremists in the support of either monopoly capitalism or monopoly socialism have created institutions that deny this right. They are the problem, not property itself or those who own it.
Such extremists are an important cause of global terrorism, particularly those who are ideologically motivated to cure terrorism by resorting to terroristic counter-terrorism without addressing the causes in our defective institutions that limit access to property ownership in the means of production.
The problem may be partly the chicken and egg dilemma. How can one replace defective institutions when human beings themselves are defective? Why not merely replace the human beings who exploit the existing institutions? They have no right, one says, to their ill-gotten gains. Mount a revolution to remove the bastards. But, we know what happens in revolutions to switch photos on the wall.
Who is really at fault, the wealthy one-percent who benefit from the existing system or those who created it? If the institutions are at fault, then why redistribute the property from the rich. This would be blaming property itself not those who have raised barriers against broader access to it. Why not a revolution to replace or rather perfect the offending institutions? But, now we are back to the original chicken and egg dilemma. If the guys who invented the institutions control the wealth, and the wealthy control politics, how does one change institutions?
One answer is to change people. The Communists tried to change human nature. Christian, Jewish, and Islamic evangelicals (those who "bring the good news), want to change persons one by one. Many Muslims, as well as Christians and Jews, are firm supporters of Rabbi Michael Lerner and his Network of Spiritual Progressives, even though perhaps this name may be an oxymoron. His "new bottom line" is designed "to replace a culture of selfishness and materialism with one imbued with love, kindness, generosity, open-heartedness, nonviolence, and radical amazement at the grandeur of the universe." This is the core message of every world religion, always has been, and, God willing, always will be.
But in the meantime, since this personal transformation might take centuries, we are left with the economic institutions, primarily of money and credit, which determine the creation of future wealth and its ownership. For more than a quarter century, the de facto ecumenical think-tank in Washington, The Center for Economic and Social Justice, has derived its fundamental approach from Louis Kelso's concept of pure credit based on the collateral of future wealth production. The establishment economists insist that this can not exist at the macro level and therefore can not or even should not exist at any other level, particularly if the creation of pure credit, originating perhaps from the Central Bank, would involve changing existing policies and institutions.
Skeptics about whether and how one can change the very system of creating money and the underlying (and overlying) economic institutions argue that it may take many centuries to effect any change. A couple of centuries ago, the French populists had what they thought was an immediate solution. They launched the French Revolution. This led to the monstrosities of Communism and Nazism and both Secular and Apocalyptic Zionism, but is still praised by sympathetic or simply ignorant people (as shown by the fact that the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp commemorating it a few years ago).
IV. Social Justice
The American Revolutionary Party, which I co-founded only a year ago when the two establishment parties seemed to have self-destructed into a mutual bankruptcy, has a safer solution and therefore over the long run a better one derived from the paradigm of social justice. This is based on the Reverend William Feree's publications on social justice, beginning with his dissertation in 1942, Catholic University Press of America, The Act of Social Justice. This seminal thesis was developed into his book, Introduction to Social Justice, Paulist Press, 1948, and further refined in a seminar from April 11 to 13, 1956, which distinguished social justice from social charity. Social charity is not justice but only a stopgap until the movement of social justice can change the institutions that deny economic justice. The Reverend Feree recalls the classical Christian teachings on personal virtue, which nowadays are practically dead even among Catholics. These are known in Islam as the akhlaq. They are best described in the new book by the Rev. Benedict J. Groeschel, C.F.R. (the Gray Fathers, based on the color of their habit), The Virtue Driven Life, Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, Huntington, Indiana, 2006. But, Father Feree goes further to identify social virtues as equally important. These are the virtues of individuals working in community to address the issues of compassionate justice that cannot be addressed by anyone working alone. He also addresses the dilemma of persons caught in the present system who not only can not change it but feel compelled to be part of it. The strategy of social justice is to build a core group or core groups of persons as facilitators of a social movement to change the environment, both political and otherwise, so that institutional change can become possible without violent revolution. The first requirement of such a movement is that its progenitors share a common vision, common understandings about the problem of concentrated wealth, and a common strategy to overcome the wealth gap. This appears to be possible only if grounded in a consensus among the enlightened in every religion. Although it might seem overbearing to act as a purist in requiring such a consensus, there is no other way to build an effective movement. Now we are back to the issue of who is at fault for the present rapidly growing wealth gap both within and among countries. Is it the existence of property, or the fault of those who have become rich because of the existing system, or of those whose response is passive envy or even active hostility without any solutions, or of those who may see the institutional problem but cannot imagine any way effectively to address it? No, the fault lies in the partial revolutionaries, those who either see or address only parts of the problem without any transcendent vision of compassionate justice. What we need is total revolution based on what should be acknowledged as the really first factor of production, the primary one, God.

Intellectual Terrorism

Intellectual Terrorism

By: Dr. Aslam Abdullah
IslamiCity* -

The detestable cartoon portrayals of Muhammad , Prophet of Islam (peace be upon him) by Danish and later by Norwegian, French, German and many other European newspapers is nothing less than emotional torture and intellectual terrorism.

In the name of freedom of speech, the most sophisticated professional class of European print media organizations are revealing their centuries old hatred and intolerance towards Islam and Muslims.

In universities, European and American journalists are often taught that freedom of speech ends where the sensitivities of people begin. Seemingly, they have failed to implement this most ethical and moral lesson. A newspaper, whether Danish or Portuguese, that indulges in opinionated reporting by making fun of a major religious figure revered by a global community is an exercise in emotional torture.

Showing solidarity with those who promote such kind of propaganda does not promote "free speech" but in fact promotes intolerance and violence that hurts innocent people all over the word. However, this is not a new phenomenon. Many European and American scholars, academics and intellectuals as well as public officials have remained engaged from seventh century onwards in anti-Islam, anti-Muslim and anti-Prophet Muhammad campaigns.

They have refused to show civility in dealing with issues pertaining to the second largest religion in the world. After all, it was Martin Luther, the great Christian reformer to whom almost every Christian Protestant group owes its origin produced the worst writings against Islam and Prophet Muhammad.

Those who are unable to overcome their hatred and ignorance of Islam will not stop from promoting their agenda. To expect otherwise from such intolerant people would be futile. However, what was surprising was the silence of Christian and Jewish community and religious leaders on this issue? Through their interfaith dialogue with Muslims they must have realized the sanctity and sacredness Muslims attach to their religious values.

We are brothers and sisters in humanity and all of us should share a common goal of eradicating intolerance of any kind by speaking out against it. Whether it is a Jew or a Gypsy, we should not tolerate such hateful rhetoric. Yet, only a handful of community and religious leaders spoke out.
" .. indeed you shall hear many hurtful things from those to whom revelation was granted before your time, as well as from those who have come to ascribe divinity to other beings beside God .." al-Qur'an 3:186
What was even more disturbing was the response of Muslims. Boycotting Danish products, closing down the offices of European diplomatic offices and the beating of Dane's working in the Gulf were measures that did not suit a community whose Prophet is described in the divine scriptures as a Mercy to Humankind.

Immediately, after the battle of Badr, Omar bin al Khattab, one of the most celebrated companions of Prophet sought the permission of the state to punish Suhail bin Amr, a prisoner of war who had engaged in anti-Prophet Muhammad propaganda in Makkah. Suhail was known for his abusive language and insulting attitude towards the Prophet. Prophet Muhammad , as the ruler of the newly formed Islamic State strictly prohibited his companions from punishing or torturing any prisoner of war on account of their past hostilities. He admonished Omar bin al-Khattab for seeking retribution. After all, the Prophet had endured all the possible humiliation at the hands of the elites of Makkah and their supporters without asking any of his supporters to silence his opponents.

Islam recognizes the dissent to its teachings and appeals to its adherents to deal with it in a civil manner. Islam promotes the idea that a polite response and a decent rebuttal are powerful enough in changing the worst enemy into a friend. Islam does not seek revenge of those who indulge in anti-Islam, anti-God or anti-Prophet abuses. Furthermore, Islam prohibits the use of pressure and intimidation for changing the hearts of people.

Islam teaches us that coercion is incapable of bringing a change in the attitude of people. Intimidation might make others change their immediate reaction to Islam but ultimately it is futile because every individual has to make a conscious decision about his or her relations with God and His creation.

The provocation of Danish and other European newspapers was foolish and full of hatred. There is no need for such provocation in a world that is fast becoming cosmopolitan in all its dimensions. The freedom of speech cannot be used as an excuse to hurt or insult others. Moreover, there exists double standards in this matter among most European and American journalists working for big media corporations. Most of these advocates of freedom of speech do not dare write against the foul practices of multinational corporations that often provide bread and butter to most working journalists. Most of them do not dare to expose the dirty trade practices, excessive exploitation and other violation of human rights of people working in such corporations. Most of them would not even touch the so called issues of national security even if the position of the power elite is against national interests. A case in point is the War in Iraq.

The majority of the European and American journalists working for big corporation controlled media have not questioned the rationale behind going to war in Iraq.

In fact, their anti-Islamic writings betray their loyalty to the power elites who are keen in promoting a hateful agenda against Muslims. Muslims ought to be cognizant of these facts. Our response to such Insults and humiliation should be based on the divine teachings and the lifestyle of our Prophet. We must not give in to our emotions.

We could have done much better if our response was controlled by the Divine teachings. We could have asked the Danish and other newspapers to allow us to introduce our Prophet to their audience the way we see him. We should have engaged the Dane's and others in a meaningful dialogue and discussion on the true nature of our faith and the true personality of our Prophet.

We should rise above our emotions to use this moment to educate others about Islam in an objective manner. It is the responsibility of our religious and intellectual leaders to direct our masses in developing a meaningful response to incidents of hate and racial bigotry.

No doubt, each of us feels hurt when we see an offensive depiction of our faith or our Prophet. However, rather than reacting in an emotional manner, we should use the opportunity to demonstrate true Islamic values of patience and persuasion. We showed our weakness in controlling our emotions when Salman Rushdie insulted our Prophet. We have repeated the same mistake. By now we should have learned about the teachings of our prophet in dealing with such cases. Perhaps we need to go back to study the life of our Prophet in more detail to develop a better understanding of his character and teachings as well as his mission in the world. After all, we accept him as a Mercy to Humankind that includes Dane's, Norwegian, French, Germans, Jews, Christians and every human being that exists or will exist in our universe.

Dr. Aslam Abdullah is editor-in-Chief of the Muslim Observer and the director of the Islamic Society of Nevada as well as the director of the Muslim Electorates Council of America.