DEMOCRATIC TYRANNY AND THE ISLAMIC PARADIGM: Preface to the French Edition by Hajja Aisha Bewley

[Democratic Tyranny and the Islamic Paradigm, along with many of Hajja Aisha's works are available at diwanpress.com]

    Having been requested to compose a short preface to this French translation of the text, I realised that it gave me an opportunity to address the current state of politics and the rather dire situation in which democracy now finds itself. We are living in a time of upheaval, a time of inflection, after which things could go in a number of directions, some extremely unpalatable. Democracy does now strikingly appear to be in retreat, a fact recognised even by those at the top of politics. The current American Vice-President, J.D. Vance, stated categorically in an interview that the current order will meet its ‘inevitable collapse’. Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and political activist, has said that he does not believe that liberty and democracy are compatible. The list of critics of democracy today goes on and on. A large number of people have finally realised that democracy as practised leads to a tyranny controlled by an oligarchy. Its critics are growing. Its stalwart defendants tend to be part of what Curtis Yarvin has termed ‘the Cathedral’ – the interconnected bureaucratic network of academics, media elites and government bureaucrats who set the bounds of acceptable opinion and police it. The bureaucratic element of this situation is sometimes referred to as ‘the Deep State’, the Swamp, or the Blob. The natural response to this is expressed in the desire to dismantle this edifice or to ‘drain the swamp’. Then the question arises: what political structure should then replace ‘democracy’?

 

THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY by Hajja Aisha Bewley

This is the transcript of a talk given in Leeds in 17th May 2016

Every day the topic of issues of identity are mentioned as being the root of many problems in society. And it is absolutely true and it is not a new problem. Every generation looks at changes in society and says the same thing. But in modern times, these problems are accelerated and intensified due to the pace of change and the constant feedback through media, and particularly social media. The focus is intensified. Political identity, cultural identity, and now even gender identity, which is most likely a symptom of the intensification of the general crisis in identity. 

Khutba for Eid al-Fitr 2024

Part 1

 

الله أكبر الله أكبر الله أكبر         لا إله إلا الله        الله أكبر الله أكبر    ولله الحمد

الله اكبر كبيرا،  والحمد لله كثيرا، وسبحان الله بكرةً وأصيلا

إِنَّ الْحَمْدَ لِلَّهِ ,نَحْمَدُهُ وَنَسْتَعِينُهُ ونستغفره ونومنه ونتوكل عليه ,ونعوذ بالله من شرور أنفسنا ,ومن سيئات أعمالنا ,مَنْ يَهْدِهِ اللَّهُ فَلَا مُضِلَّ لَهُ ,وَمَنْ يُضْلِلْ فَلَا هَادِيَ لَهُ ,وَأَشْهَدُ أَنْ لَا إِلَهَ إِلَّا اللَّهُ وَحْدَهُ لَا شَرِيكَ لَهُ , وَأَشْهَدُ وَأَنَّ سيدنا وحبيبنا ومولانا مُحَمَّدًا عَبْدُهُ وَرَسُولُه ﷺ

ٱلۡحَمۡدُ لِلَّهِ ٱلَّذِی هَدَىٰنَا لِهَـٰذَا وَمَا كُنَّا لِنَهۡتَدِیَ لَوۡلَاۤ أَنۡ هَدَىٰنَا ٱللَّهُۖ لَقَدۡ جَاۤءَتۡ رُسُلُ رَبِّنَا بِٱلۡحَقِّۖ

عما بعد

فقال الله تعلى في كتابه العزيز

بعد أعوذ بالله من الشيطان الرجيم

 

یَـٰۤأَیُّهَا ٱلَّذِینَ ءَامَنُوا۟ ٱتَّقُوا۟ ٱللَّهَ حَقَّ تُقَاتِهِۦ وَلَا تَمُوتُنَّ إِلَّا وَأَنتُم مُّسۡلِمُونَ

Allah says in His Generous Book:

You who believe, have taqwa of Allah with the taqwa due to Him and do not die except as Muslims.

 

This Eid has fallen at a time in which the worldwide Muslim community is in a state of shock, grief and anger due to the ongoing events in Palestine, not to mention other various injustices being committed against our fellow Muslims across the world. Thus, although we are entirely grateful to Allah for permitting us to live through, and take benefit from, yet another Ramadan, the joy we feel – which is usually a prominent feature of Eid al-Fitr – has been to some extent curtailed by sadness and outrage. 

 

RULE BY VIRUS by Hajj Fazlun Khalid

Hajj Fazlun Khalid,
Founder of Islamic Foundation for
Ecology and Environmental Sciences
(IFEES)

(To Join his Signs On The Earth Environmental Masterclass, every Tuesday during Ramadan 2020 (28th April, 5th, 12th, 19th May) at 6 pm, click HERE)


Against a backdrop of multiple conspiracy theories, the Coronavirus spreads inexorably. The matter is however reasonably straightforward if we take a moment to reflect. As the Qur'an asserts -

Corruption has appeared in both land and sea because of what people's own hands have brought about so that they may taste something of what they have done so that hopefully they will turn back. 

(Qur'an 30:41)

There cannot be much dissent as we proclaim that we are living in the midst of the "greatest civilisation ever contrived by man". However, the price of "progress" has been achieved at the cost of a ravaged planet whose fragility and sensitivity becomes ever more apparent. Our imagined mastery of the Earth is proving to be illusory. The House of Cards we have built for ourselves is wobbling and it takes a microbe to level down the rich to the experiences of the poor.

New website: iandallas.org

http://iandallas.org/

MAGNA CARTA AND THE END OF THE POLITICAL CLASS by Shaykh Abdalqadir al-Sufi

Posted June 23, 2014 on www.shaykhabdalqadir.com

The worst result has occurred in the issue of the trial of the men accused of terrorism. The trial was ordered to be held in camera, that meant in private unwitnessed by citizens or media. The evidence and the summation withheld from the people. The excuse was ‘national security’ – as yet undefined even in the law justifying the principle. The laws destroying the great and up until then honoured foundation of British society was enacted under a Prime Minister now revealed as a mentally unstable psychopath. Worse than his madness was his slavish obedience to the financial masters of Britain since 1945, the U.S.A. The laws that dismantled the great defining document of civic freedom, the Magna Carta were direct copies of the set of laws by which America dismantled the legal framework of the Founding Fathers.

At appeal the affair was decided by Lord Gross who declared that the sensitive matter (the evidence on which they stood accused) should be held in camera but that the rest of the trial (an inhibited defence) could proceed in public.

Who is Lord Gross? This is a man who attended South Africa’s most prestigious Jewish school, Herzlia, and then presumably turned his back on the injustices of apartheid to find a high place in English law. Now, having disdained the inhumanity of the South African regime, he sits in authority on an English bench and first pays lip-service to Magna Carta then smashes it in his judgement.

The accused will still stand judged on an unheard evidence. This doubly weakens civic society, for one group can now argue that the accused were victims of agents provocateurs and it was this that had to be concealed from the citizens.

If this fundamental and primal law of civic society is as it now is both traduced and then rejected – what, we must ask is of worth? What merits security? Or is it that national security is a euphemism for a national prison of its inhabitants.

As if to cover the open crime of Lord Gross, traitor to English justice and to his own people who were slaughtered in their million by the simple original mechanism of arrest without trial, the Prime Minister declares the traduced law a basis of our intrinsic values.

In Israel Cameron grovelled for acceptance, declaring that his family had jewish blood. An Israeli general walked out, declaring:

‘That cuts no ice! He thinks we think like Hitler thought we thought.’

Cameron’s loud affirmation of our ‘basic values’ in the middle of a campaign of denigration aimed at Muslim British citizens held up Magna Carta just as the shameful Law Lord was destroying it. Well, here, it is a Muslim leader and a Scot defending it and now to teach the poor man about values.

Let us call things by their proper names.

We take our definition from ‘The Shorter Oxford Dictionary, Vol. 2’.

Value: Middle English and Old French.

That amount of some commodity, medium of exchange, etc., which is 

considered to be an equivalent for something else.

The material or monetary worth of a thing: the amount at which it may be 

estimated in terms of some medium of exchange or other standards of a 

like nature.

Therefore to establish justice in our commonwealth, the proposal of this loyal Scottish Muslim citizen is that the political-class which invented should now abolish VALUE-ADDED-TAX since to tax value surely is to de-value.

Talk by Shaykh Abdalhaqq Bewley Sunday 19th Jan 2014

Reconnecting with Nature by By Klaudia Khan

The concept of responsible management and taking care of the natural environment is firmly embedded in the teachings of Islam, so Muslims shouldn’t be reminded that living eco-friendly lifestyle is part of their religion. Or do they?

Fazlun Khalid, a man synonymous with the eco-Islam movement and one of the most influential contemporary Muslims, claims that people nowadays, including Muslims, are getting more and more disconnected from nature.

It’s not only Islam that teaches respect for the natural environment, but it’s an idea rooted in every religious system in the world. Yet as the philosophy of the Post-Enlightenment Era divided the sacrum from the Profanum, industrialization and urbanization allowed people to live lives that are physically disconnected from nature, the sacrosanct link between the Creator and the creation has gone into abyss.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE

SCIENCE DOES NOT THINK by Shaykh Umar Ibrahim Vadillo

Introduction to Statistics for Muslims
International Islamic University of Islamabad

Lecture:
“Science does not think”
By Shaykh Umar Ibrahim Vadillo
Taken from: http://umarvadillo.wordpress.com/

Summary 

Bismillah irrahman irraheem

In 1926 when Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) the German philosopher, published his book “Being and Time” he revolutionized thinking with a new radical approach to individual freedom that irreversibly tore down the foundations of philosophy. Eventually he will call this “the end of philosophy”, the end of a 2,500 years old “fashion of thinking” which is the exclusive product of the West and was founded upon the writings of Plato. He consequently declared that “science does not think”. Such statement still puzzles people today. Heidegger’s analysis pointed out that science is incapable of thinking what is more important to thinking: the Truth. We will take a walk alongside the path of Heideggers’ thinking into the nature of scientific enquiry and why it cannot think the Truth. Then we will take a leap –as he suggested- reaching to the other side of philosophy, beyond philosophy, in order to arrive to a concluding statement that has a direct relevance to us: “marifatullah is thinking”.

TALK Reconnecting with Nature - A Faith Perspective - TUESDAY 12th NOVEMBER 5pm

Find out more information about the talk 

and register here: http://tinyurl.com/connect2nature 

or call 0113 343 1596 for further information

SYRIA – THE WORLD’S FEVER CHART by Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir al-Sufi

Posted on September 1, 2013 on www.shaykhabdalqadir.com

Helpless, though we certainly are as individuals before the sordid slaughter of the Shi’a family dictator’s fight for survival in Syria – it does not mean that we can not learn from it about the current state of world power. It gives us a reading on the condition of Russia, of China, of Britain and of the American republic’s collapse.

Russia. The world can now observe that after its disastrous attempt to engineer a technological society run by a pragmatic elite of politicians, bureaucrats and technicians, its whole governed by a rigid psychotic, it has blundered into a tiny oligarchic rule this time controlled by a below-stairs ex-KGB man. Putin is a man at the bottom of the pile, catapulted to a leadership that for a historical moment made him seem capable of the task. But, uneducated both culturally and politically, he has survived on cynical pragmatism doomed to be swept aside by the first Tartar star to rise in the east. The brutalism of his approach to Syria is clear to the Russian people. He fails to grasp that Stalin survived by his endless cold passion for the games of politics. He was an ascetic from a seminary. Putin is a man without background, his foreground now crammed with wealth. He is a push-over. It will come sooner than later.

‘EGYPT. TO WHOM THE BELL TOLLS…’ by Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir al-Sufi

Originally posted on August 16, 2013 on his website: www.shaykhabdalqadir.com

Of course we are appalled at the massacre of a country’s citizens by its own military. We must step back from the frenzied scene of ‘breaking news’ and its dismal commentators. These events are profound in effect and by their nature will reconstruct political discourse as a result.

In these final days of the American experiment it was perhaps inevitable that its last two holders of the high office of Secretary of State should prove inadequate, a woman who had failed in the bedroom, followed by a man who had failed on the battlefield.

Shaykh Abdalhaqq Bewley on Radio Asian Fever

Live in Leeds on Radio Asian Fever with RJ Shahab Ud'deen - Ramadan 2013

ZAKAT and AWQAF
TASAWWUF

www.radioasianfever.co.uk

Muslim Education and the Art of Matchmaking by Hajj Uthman Ibrahim Morrison

Muslim Education and the Art of Matchmaking
by Hajj Uthman Ibrahim Morrison
via The Muslim Faculty for Advanced Studies

The End of the Beginning by Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir al-Sufi

Taken from his new website www.shaykhabdalqadir.com

Luciano Canfora, the great Italian political philosopher and classicist, has given us an important definition:

“What one calls a dictator is never one who rules alone, (Alleinherrscher), he is at the centre of a system of power and of consensus. To eliminate him does not necessarily imply a breaking of this system, and on the contrary sometimes that indicates its re-enforcement. The fact that some tyrants organise false provocative attempts against them should make us reflect.”

Reflecting on the Egyptian disaster it must first be recognised that the term Revolution was not instigated by the incoherent and howling mass in the public square. The term came directly from foreign media. Now, Napoleon stated that there never had been a Revolution without a change of ownership. This allows us to establish the first clarification of the situation. The mass have been convinced by the media that something has happened which never happened. There has been no transfer and expropriation of wealth in Egypt, hence, no Revolution.

The second clarification allows us to apply Canfora’s view to the Egyptian crisis. The elimination of Mubarak in no way changed the power nexus he upheld.

The third clarification allows us to follow Canfora in noting that the provocative attempt to further destabilise the State is in fact authored by the power system.

Thus Egypt remains as an anachronistic capitalist State, a date-republic in the mode of South America’s banana-republics. However, in South America, its intellectuals and its mass have already recognised that the enemy is not a local ‘national’ dictator.

The Brazilians are the first people to identify the enemy as being neither government, army nor police. They have perceived, and are the first to perceive, what neither Greece nor Spain has perceived, let alone Egypt, that the enslaving power is not what they have been (media) informed. It is beyond the defunct State – in the global system of banking, media, distribution and armaments. In naming the abominable Blatter, Fifa, and football itself, the Brazilians have opened the New Age. They have opened up a new dialogue of freedom and power, answering the challenge of Harold Laski who wrote in 1921:

“A new formula is needed for a state of which the roots have spread beyond the voting audience.”

He re-iterated this matter:

“We live in a new world and a new theory of state is necessary to its adequate operation.”

On the road to a post-capitalist and real-money society the recently unearthed carcass of a dinosaur lies blocking our way, the Muslim Brotherhood. The two opposing masses in the public squares are, equally, the obedient slaves of the ochlocracy (tyrannicide) ensconced in its banking palaces. We must move forward!

www.shaykhabdalqadir.com/books-of-the-shaykh

Brazil Red - The Global Civil War by Shaykh Abdalqadir al-Sufi

Originally Posted on June 23, 2013 on www.shaykhabdalqadir.com

‘In these times of ours…’ So began Dickens’ final masterpiece ‘Our Mutual Friend’, the last in his life-series of novels, the final rejection of capitalism in its penultimate phase.

‘In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms’ – thus wrote Thomas Mann, Germany’s greatest writer. In mid-life the Nazi dictatorship forced him into American exile. In late-life American democracy forced him into Swiss exile.

‘The only defeat of fascism in our time has been military’, wrote French philosopher, Sartre in mid-twentieth century.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century political democracy had emerged as a world system. Based on a universal franchise elected governments claimed to govern by ‘the will of the people.’

A Response to the Woolwich Incident by Shaykh Abdalhaqq Bewley

This video is taken from the British Muslim Network

Islam -- Its New Beginning by Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi

Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi gives the position of the emergent force of world Islam, and the necessary steps to social renewal.

Postscript to the video by Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi

[Taken from his website: www.shaykhabdalqadir.com]

The only way in which political discourse let alone dialogue can re-start after over a century of silence is by permitting a frank critique not only of structures – corporations and distribution systems – but also of money as numbers controlled abstractly in algorithms, as well as the need to dismantle complex legal frames designed to prevent the evolutionary moves to end oligarchic power.

Since the logic of the mathematical financial apparatus implies, and can be observed to be approaching, a final oligarchic leadership of a mere few hundred holding the world’s wealth and its people enslaved to them, in turn offering that oligarchy the irresistible urge to monarchic absolutism, the radical steps to rescue mankind insist on being taken. War in the mass and terror in the desperate individual have already been factored into the system thus demanding of those desirous of change a total rejection of these means.

Necessary  for this transformation are, one – worship of the Divine Creator, for the enemy of men is atheist, afraid and a victim of belief in chance: two – the ruthless application of reason identifying the persons behind the structures and the enslaving prohibitions they employ.

www.shaykhabdalqadir.com/books-of-the-shaykh

ASSAD IN END GAME by Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir al-Sufi

26/03/2013 

Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir al-Sufi
www.shaykhabdalqadir.com

As the Assad regime goes into terminal rictus one is still reluctant to make a move, however, a matter of grave importance demands our attention.

Syria has become a lake of blood, but only the childrenʼs blood is innocent for deep down below lie the unmeasured depths of the historic swamp. Assad, squalid though his family are, is not the cause of their suffering, he is a result.

The result of the Syrian peopleʼs decades long plunge into a secular western dialectic in which power, political power had been detached from financial power, that is to say political socialism and nationalism, two worlds which when joined together gave Germany Nazi-ism. 

Nasser was the founding father of the destruction of the Arab world, one which left Arabia as Americaʼs gas station. The baathism, or secular socialism that swept Syria and Iraq, itself the vatican-blessed creation of a militant christian, proved irresistible to Arabs longing for modernity and the myth of independence. Soon in both countries the nationalism dominated and the socialism dissolved into modernity. 

SHI'A DENIAL OF THE NEW by Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi - 14/12/2012

[A dars delivered by Shaykh Abdalhaqq Bewley which serves as a commentary for this article can be found by CLICKING HERE]

I must preface this statement by acknowledging two Shi‘a scholars who, by effectively barring my way to their doctrine, both revealed to me its flaw and their own abandonment of it. I must also mention Sayid Mahdi al-Hakim who asked me, “Are you saying that the only difference between us is political?” meaning, therefore, not theological. I replied in the affirmative. He was assassinated in Khartoum by Saddam’s secret police, so I am unable to tell him that what I answered as an instinctive Muslim, time has shown to me to be true. The issue I discovered, however, was not the politics of ‘Ali’s position, or Fatima’s orchard, or the martyrdom of the grandsons, but something much deeper, more troubling and profound, touching the very definition of the human situation.

The result of my present understanding allows me both categorically to reject Shi‘a doctrine, not as sectarian or even misguided but as the very denial and contradiction of the Islamic events, and at the same time also to oppose any violence private or public against the Shi‘a for this would validate their own macabre and brilliant denial of reality. As an Iraqi with a Shi‘a mother and a Muslim father warned me: “Do not bring rational argument to a Shi‘a – it is a psychology with a hidden source.”

Now. To begin our examination of the Shi‘a phenomenon it is necessary to go back, way back to before the great illumination of Islam’s arrival on earth. A doctor, seeking diagnosis, requires to know the prior family history, so with the human species as patient our elucidation begins at an earlier stage of the creatures and the earlier emergence of the fatal symptoms.