10 August 2009
In Islamic Law there is a method required to get at the truth of events that is both higher and deeper than any other legal system in the world. This method is itself based on two foundational facts of the Deen. Firstly – Divine Revelation has laid down the broad parameters of what is forbidden and permitted, and all that is not forbidden is permitted – the rest enlightened or darkened by the civic ‘Amal, the mores of time and place. Secondly – the Sunna of the Messenger, peace and blessings upon him, as the measuring template of the highest human behaviour, followed in resonance by the ‘Amal of the people of Madinah, itself the place of the Deen.
Legal method itself in turn devolves on the Imam Daaral-Hijra, down to the record of his applied legal practice in Madinah as set down by Imam Malik’s own lawyers in al-Mudawwana. To eliminate the medievalisation of a case-based system at regular historical intervals, great legalists have condensed the legal inheritance to its primal elements cutting away the now ‘old-fashioned’ and taking in the ‘modern’. These ‘Kanoon’ or ‘Kawanin’ (ibn Rushd, Khalil, ‘Iyad) prevent the nonsense of the shi‘a attacks claiming that ‘the door of ijithad is shut.’
Within our system the legal examination of a questioned matter does not begin with the specifics of the event. Indeed it is in the nature of the Islamic view that since the judgeable event itself has clear and specific contours which permit us to decide on it we cannot fail to see that it is surrounded by an aura or a zone of experience stretching from the individuals concerned out to the society, its location and its conflicts and passing through that outer haze and closer specificity like an invisible yet cutting steel thread comes the hidden destiny as it moves to trigger event itself.
I have been asked to give an opinion on the grave matter distressing the Muslims in Britain and in East Turkistan, land of the Uighurs. British Muslims have been, without any evidence given, accused of ‘rejoicing’ when British soldiers are killed in Afghanistan. Ironically, the only people outraged at the deaths of young soldiers in that war are Muslims who watch the daily deaths passing by a public that turns away its head. The respected leader of the Uighur fight for survival tells us that the Chinese took 10,000 of her people – to disappear in one night. The same week the U.S. Secretary of State flies in to Peking to inform the Communist government that their genocide is perfectly acceptable and will not interfere with capitalist transactions.
Why – I have been asked – have people – men and women and youths, indeed, mothers fathers, brothers and sisters – become utterly indifferent to their own dead?
That this should be the case, of course, indicates that the sustaining ethos of christian civilisation laid down by Montaigne and Erasmus has come to an end. Humanism is finished and it is this loss that has left us with the nihilism of suicide as a weapon and anarchy as the condition of the masses. Global rescinding of all ‘human rights’ legislation involving limited arrest, public trial and known accusers, has taken place in the last decade. Country after country has toed the line with the value system of atheist and sub-human (communist) China.
Firstly, therefore, let us arrive at an understanding of the recognised factors that constitute in their coming-together the effect of the human on the species biologically identifiable as homo sapiens – the knowing creatures. The classical view – Cogito ergo sum – the ‘I think therefore I am’ of Descartes has been deepened by reversal, ‘I am therefore I think’, a move indicating that the classical, that is christian humanist doctrine has collapsed. The reversal leaps inevitably to the conclusion that underlying the faculty of reason is a feeling-experiencing entity. The intellectual enquiry into this matter is not happening in an academic void, only it is not permitted to impinge on the political practice and the economic structuralism today imposing itself on the species. The work of Antonio Damasio, “Decartes’ Error” fits into a dynamic arena of discourse, started by William James and continued by Heidegger, Gadamer and today by Agamben.
Damasio, neurobiologist puts it:
“…the body as represented in the brain, may constitute the indispensable frame of reference for the neural processes that we experience as the mind; that our very organism rather than some absolute external reality is used as the ground reference for the constructions we make of the world around us and for the construction of the ever-present sense of subjectivity that is part and parcel of our experiences; that our most refined thoughts and best actions, our greatest joys and deepest sorrows, use the body as a yardstick.” He further clarifies: “Mental phenomena can be fully understood only in the context of an organism’s interacting in an environment.”
Let us take one aspect of the Damasian, post brain-based model, and view it in one specific.
It is clear that the species operates in its own environment and lives within a web of social, environmental and personal networks and these criss-crossed lines of contact and communication in their connectedness make up that place-body setting for the thinking process to emerge.
Part of our identity as species over centuries has been that as well as living in communities we have reached a modus vivendi to our mutual benefit that accepts living with and alongside what we have called ‘domesticated’ animals, primarily cats and dogs, then horses. These living creatures are a vivid and important part of the human ‘us’.
The relationship to cats indicates the sophistication and complexity of this tie. Practically, they are hunters of infective rats and mice. Emotionally, they transmit warmth and affection. Aesthetically, their outstanding beauty affects us – stroking their fine capilliaried fur lowers our blood pressure, and the Egyptians perceived in them instruments of communing with the unseen. It has been discovered that they emit a sound pitched beyond our conscious hearing when they desire us to feed them. So we feed them not knowing we are responding to a signal. It is this and other webbing of life that passes between us and our dogs and horses also.
Now the modern atheist-materialist Chinese, presently taking over the capitalist world system have to be seen as outside this networked consciousness of the species, thus devoid of an articulated feeling life. The Chinese eat cats, eat dogs – but worse than that are cut-off, existentially cut-off, from the kingdom of the animals. Today in China shows are put on for the public to let them watch the big cats, as live prey is released for them to capture and eat. The unnerving thing is not that they want to watch this but that when they see the prey being killed and devoured they roar with laughter and take pictures. They are existentially cut-off from belonging to the cycle of world life. An Uighur scholar said to me: ‘They are a people who have never cooked an egg.’ At first I failed to grasp his meaning – it was, they live without raising chickens, that is, they live a subsistence life prior to the stage of developed homo sapiens.
If this condition is allowed to flourish the end result is that the Chinese state officials can condemn men and women to death IN ORDER TO sell their vital organs to the world market. They can make 10,000 Uighurs disappear – and it does not matter. As Dr. Damasio says, “Reduction in emotion may constitute an equally important source of irrational behaviour.”
What is that issue, that point, that zone where the cracks happen, where the split can be discerned, that allows us to identify the current sickness of mankind? It lies at the heart of christian society – its theology. At the moment that the fundamental event of religion was based on a lie, language was betrayed, and thus the rational discourse ended because of it. At the moment the false claim was made that the prophet Jesus (‘Issa) had died to save mankind, offering his body as sacrifice, and that it was a divine transaction – the lie was declared truth. The supposed declaration at the so-called Last Supper ‘This is my body, broken for you…’ was presented as divine transaction. The bread and the wine were transubstantiated into “God’s” body and blood. It is madness but under it lies the global crime of usury/capitalism. The peasants of catholic Spain have an expression for telling the truth – calling bread bread and wine wine. In other words peasant realism tells them, despite the bishops, that the sacrament celebrated by them is a swindle.
Before we continue to examine the political ramification of this core deception we must observe the truth of this supper of our lord Jesus, prophet and man. For the move beyond the current crisis of capitalism is dependent on, not only the abolition of the deception, but also the establishing of the truth as the basis of the human project.
The new Divine dispensation ending the jewish epoch of guidance comes with the first definition of the renewed Deen.
Allah declares in al-Maida (5:72):
Those who say that the Messiah, son of Maryam, is Allah are kafirun.
Then the matter continues (5:73):
Those who say that Allah is the third of three are kafirun.
There is no god but One God.
Then Qur’an declares (5:75):
The Messiah, the son of Maryam, was only a Messenger,
before whom other Messengers came and went.
His mother was a woman of truth.
Both of them ate food.
The Revelation then tells us openly (5:112-115):
And when the Disciples said, ‘‘Isa son of Maryam!
Can your Lord send down a table to us out of heaven?’
He said, ‘Have taqwa of Allah if you are muminun!’
They said, ‘We want to eat from it
and for our hearts to be at peace
and to know that you have told us the truth
and to be among those who witness it.’
‘Isa son of Maryam said, ‘Allah, our Lord,
send down a table to us out of heaven
to be a feast for us,
for the first and last of us,
and as a Sign from You.
Provide for us!
You are the Best of Providers!’
Allah said, ‘I will send it down to you
but if anyone among you is kafir after that,
I will punish him with a punishment the like of which
I will not inflict on anyone else in all the worlds!’
Therefore, after the miracle of the Feast of the Table, whoever claims that by the magic of the initiate priests, the believer is actually partaking – that is eating and drinking the two thousand year old flesh and blood of our lord ‘Issa (Jesus) is sustaining a lie, a fantasy which in itself is a form of madness. As Hajj Umar Vadillo explained, “Once you have accepted that biscuits and wine are flesh and blood and partaking cleanses your wrong actions, it is then easy to believe that paper and coded numbers are a valid substitute for gold and silver, and may be deemed wealth.”
It was this ‘sacramental’ transfer – bread into flesh – that licensed the transfer from things into numbers. This allowed the irrational to take over the rational. Paying back gold with more gold was demonstrably a path to slavery. Transfer the ‘value’ to a token document and then simply to coded numbers (Madoff’s billions) laid the foundation of the christian capitalist system. Marx renamed usury, surplus value. It was an increase in amount not things.
So it was that language was divorced from transaction and amount, therefore from event itself. Ezra Pound in his ‘Cantos’ marks the modern age with the Russian Emperor Alexander’s instruction to Talleyrand at the Congress of Vienna in 1815: “To change the meaning of words themselves from one conference to another.”
Here was the licence issued for the gulag and the concentration camp. They, horrific as they were, did not represent the full crime of the last century. That crime was the political foundation of the modern state. The split between word and deed.
Re-define man – then destroy him. The jews were of an inferior race – destroy them. Germany. The bourgeois were of an inferior class – destroy them. Russia. Cambodia.
The communists were the enemy of democracy – destroy them. Korea. Vietnam. (“Better dead than Red!”)
The Taliban are terrorists – destroy them. Afghanistan. Pakistan. Anywhere.
The U.S. Chief of NATO in Afghanistan said they were there to bring peace and democracy to the country. At the same time he orders the bombing of villages and attacks by unmanned drones. Thousands have been killed in both Afghanistan and in Pakistan – to ‘free’ the people. In China the national socialist (Nazi) state has taken into custody (that is, disappeared) ten thousand Uighurs. They are accused of ‘separatism’. It is a mortal crime. To separate – is to die. So if they try to separate – kill them.
This is the world today – and this is your global psychosis to set alongside your global warming.
Yet this is still not the viral basis of the sickness – it is the numb and the helpless acceptance of the masses. Sleepwalkers in a horror movie.
Pirandello, with Ibsen the summit of modern dramatic literature, wrote a play in 1920 entitled, ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author.’
The play presented a theatre company busy producing a banal popular drama. Onto the empty stage come a family huddled together, carrying their suitcases. An author has created their searing tragedy but left it unresolved. They have come to the theatre to end their drama. As they enact their terrible story – it contrasts with the triviality of the actors’ play – it moves to tragedy. Faced with the violence and suicide enacted by the inner drama the actors call a halt to it. One of the actors calls it all a fantasy – another says no, this is reality. The stage manager calls them back to work, complaining, this has wasted a whole morning.
Pirandello considered all his plays to be one opus and called it ‘Maskere Nude,’ Naked Masks. As such it may be considered the summit of psychiatric thinking. It towers over the writings of Freud. ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’ can then be read not just as an examination of the level at which human suffering becomes unbearable, but can be read as the crisis point in politics where mankind imposes its ignored suffering on the capitalist masses.
We can read the ‘six characters’ not as the dead Afghans but as the ultimate victims – the young NATO soldiers – dead for a capitalist seizure of an innocent land and people. These fine men, more even than the Afghans themselves, are the dupes and victims of a completely fabricated war.
NATO is the internationalist mercenary (and above all national legal systems) force of the U.S.A. as hosts to dollar-based banking. For this it is strategically vital that a military land base adjoins the Chinese frontier in preparation for the inevitable war of China versus America and its debtor satellites.
In 1933 Klaus Mann wrote that the crime of his century was not the Nazi regime but that educated Germans did not act to prevent the coming catastrophe.
Today the situation is the same – the tragedy is that the parents of the NATO soldiers do not want their sons to live, do not want grandchildren. It is the delayed suicide of humanity. There, and in Nazi China, too. Indifference of the masses results in the massacre of the innocent.
Meanwhile our Stage Managers can call us back to the obedience of slaughter – our play must go on. Obama, Sarkozy, Brown and Merkel (what a bunch!) – our Stage Managers re-assure us: Paper money and decoded numbers are real – there was no banking crisis. NATO soldiers are defending our way of life. Uighurs are terrorists – and separatists. There is no link between global warming and corporation capitalism. Africa is fine – two nice jewish celebrities, Madonna and Angelina have just each adopted a poor African baby. Charity takes time.
A final note to our diagnosis. In Hanemann’s system of homeopathic medicine he defined infective epidemic as being in itself a negative pervasive field which manifested in the specific emergence of the viral material.
The 30 Years War was the ‘miasma’ from which emerged the bubonic Black Death.
The 14/18 war was the miasma which produced the Spanish Influenza.
The American wars in Korea and Vietnam gave us the miasma which produced AIDS.
And now the slaughter of Asia, from the Uighurs to the Afghans has produced its viral killing ground, appropriately named Swine Flu and renamed in the spirit of the age “H1N1”.
Nothing – so far – is called by its real name – for how long?
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