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_________________ "I do not exhort you to work but to battle; I do not exhort you to peace but to victory. May your work be a battle; may your peace be a victory." -TSZ
_________________ "I do not exhort you to work but to battle; I do not exhort you to peace but to victory. May your work be a battle; may your peace be a victory." -TSZ
apaosha Daeva
Gender : Posts : 1851 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 37 Location : Ireland
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_________________ "I do not exhort you to work but to battle; I do not exhort you to peace but to victory. May your work be a battle; may your peace be a victory." -TSZ
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
I have translated parts from a interview which i found the most educational and inspiring, with Dutch Mujahideen fighting and being granted Shahada in Syria answering questions of 'de Volkskrant' (the peoples paper).
Honour, nobleness and knowledge exceeds race, ethnicities, ethics, religions and borders.
While the West and Israel were busy with fighting the Mujahideen and wanted to keep them as far as possible from Israel, they have now appeared in her backyard. They make plans against the Muslims, Allah makes plans.
The FSA calls for more strengthening in the form of weapons and money (from the West) and believes in materialistic terms, like any secular mind. But an experienced Mujahid knows that a dedicated warrior on the battlefield is worth more than money or weapons. What use are weapons if you have no one who wants to and will fight? What use are weapons without soldiers?
We respect the opinion of anyone who claims that it is best for the Muslims not to leave to Syria, under one condition: that this is his own independent opinion which he bases on an honest, just and balanced perspective. So has the respected scholar Muhammad Musa Al-Shareef advised Muslims in Tunisia not to go to Syria and instead should reform their own land in this crucial period for Tunisia. As Tunisia now finds itself in a phase of internal reforms. But he adds that he does not resent the Muslims who despite his opinion leave for Syria, and even praise them. This is a fair, just, balanced and above all independent opinion of him, which we respect. But we have no respect for the conforming lip service that certain Muslim representatives offer. Whether hunting for grants, accolades and worldly goods. Or simply due to having a weak character, and hence yield to pressure and makes compromises at the expense of his conviction. A weak character should therefore avoid the scene of representation.
The West has worked itself into a deep economic crisis due to the wars they are fighting in muslim countries. And the people should realise that these wars are being fought in their name, the democratic governments are in theory a representation of the people.
Thus the people must therefore stand up against this parasitic capitalist entity with democracy as its tentacles. Just like Muslims who are trying to shake off the tyrants in their countries and even pay with their lives, as we thus see in Syria. One should follow this example of heroism.
The people in the West must wake up and realize that their governments are gambling away their safety --- Thus it is time that the people in the West take responsibility and do not let their safety be gambled away as chips.
On the contrary, you will never hear about a Mujahid who suffers from mental disorders. Because a Mujahid fights for a righteous cause. On the other hand, we often hear about soldiers from Western troops who suffer from various mental disorders. The number of suicides among U.S. soldiers is even higher than the number of American soldiers who are slain in battle. I think this says enough. It is due to the fact that they are fighting an unjust war, oppressing and persecuting innocent people, and this digests the conscience and intellectual well-being of a human. But if you are fighting for a noble and righteous cause you wil not suffer from it.
We are not at all in favour for violence, fighting and killing. Muslims are meek people, but we also realize that we live in a world where it sometimes unfortunately is necessary to use violence, and there is no escaping from it. Allah has also made it clear in the Quran that fighting is prescribed for us despite that we dislike it. But it could be that you dislike something which is good for you, and vice-versa to love something which is bad for you. Therefore we fight, despite man, and above all the peace-loving Muslim, hates violence. Simply because we understand that it is necesarry. A child also hates brushing his teeth every day, but it is healthy and necesarry. So there are more things in life that man dislikes, but it does not mean that they are bad for him.
We are furthermore not afraid of death, on the contrary, we have come here to die for a noble cause. You will die anyway, so it would be wonderful if you die for a noble cause. A Martyr is actually a bad translation of the Islamic concept of a Shaheed. Because 'a Shaheed' literally means 'a Witness'. Why is a Martyr called a Witness in Islam? Because you testify with deeds, with your own soul and life, that the purpose for which you fight so noble and exalted is that it is worth even your beloved life. Life is the most precious and beloved what man possesses, and you testified that it even exceeds this value. And not with words, but thus with the actual sacrifice of this beloved precious life.
We know from the narrations that all sins are erased with the first drop of blood you spill on the battlefield as Martyr. And this kind of physical pain should man relativize, the pain of a wounded heart does a lot more pain than injured limbs. Anyone with a broken heart can testify.
We will all die, anyway, but if i can choose the way i die, than i rather die for a noble and lofty aim in Syria, then too die in the Netherlands without any significant purpose.
We have the lesser weapons, and are always in the minority. Further, we have no powerful artillery like they have. And despite all these material defects and disadvantages they fear us on the battlefield, rather than the other way around! This is because we are fighting for a noble and just cause, and because God Almighty is our Ally. And the victory will surely come, anyway, sooner or later, with us or without us.
It has even been narrated that the practicing of good deeds to be praised by others, is a small form of polytheism (which does not make you an unbeliever).
Al Ghazali stems from before the stagnation of Islamic science, which reached I completion around 1400 under Ottoman rulership. I suspect that he may have been the worst teacher in human history. It was due to his enormous poetic influence on intellectual pathos that it came to be a disgrace to think about important matters via logical arguments. After Al Ghazali was done, only revelation was trusted as a source of truth.
Of course it didn't take long after that for political rulers to take complete possession of religious authority. One Ottoman ruler allegedly went so far as to forbid all sciences save the one oriented on curing sexually transmitted diseases. I saw this last bit in a BBC documentary, I wonder if it can be verified.
Islam as the beautiful childhood fantasy: a world of mercy, an omnipotent father, the will to grow into someone great with a great many people who love you in the next world. To a child, being grown-up is the next world, and it imagines all sorts of bliss for it.
The Christian ideal allows for the same thing, but it holds a second, and a third option. The nature of the trinity is such that man is able to get lost in their meanings separately, and so 'work on himself' - keep switching perspectives on himself, transform. Christianity is a transformative religion, whereas Islam is a fixating one. This corresponds with the nature of the pagan religions existing before Christ in Europe and the Middle East - in the ME, the great phallic gods, the domination-monoliths. The European tribes had more focus on Gods that amically fight amongst themselves.
A relatively friendly strife between Gods - by human terms natural, that means often very vicious, but not absolutely hostile like God and Satan - a strife in the knowledge of having to deal with each other. Revenge within bounds, creative solutions, jokes, humiliations and re-exaltations, a lot of adultery.
On a more violent level, only the God Most High has to castrate his own father. This can either simply mean to take over control, but there is an alternative interpretation, not mine, which I posted somewhere else - Kronos is the self-contained God who wishes to not be contained and thrusts outwards bestowing himself onto time - this bestowing is Zeus, and to be able to exist, the power-sphere of Saturn must be broken.
Zeus was helped by his mother Rhea, which is then the aspect of the self-enclosed ancestry that represents the will to exist in Olympian, Earthly terms.
Islam as Poetry
The whole appeal of the holy Book is its poetry. My friend who is a muslim of great ethical and intellectual quality used to read the Book in the Mosque to the grown ups when he was a small child, and watch many among them cry. The great Sufi poetry is among the most convincing attributions of specific qualities to divine nature and the very law of the man we discussed, the command to avoid realism, represents in a higher sense the command to seek poetic relations.
The life of the Islamic family is poetic. I remember the small patios in the housing blocks in the outskirts of Damascus, the galleries and balconies with children's chatter echoing around the seat of the mother, or grandmother, entertained by the men, she smiles at a little girl with a large orange balloon, through which this girl is staring, wide eyed, at the stranger. There is definite beauty, but it must not be expressed in images or logic.
The Word is omnipresent in Islam, and the name with the double L is a poetic accellerant of the most powerful order. Don't try it at home unless you're prepared to share your house with the God from thereon out.
The culmination of poetry tends to be on the tragic side of things. It is possible that the beauties in the unimaginable households of princes who use the religion to subject and to justify their subjecting are, as value to self-valuing, enough to justify all the suffering and ignorance their rule relies on... in the eyes of a Nietzschean perspective at least. Not in modern terms.
We moderners... We can not even aspire to such unrestrained wealth. We have lost that sense of Kingship, which is poetic, and of a time before science and reason.
Islam is at its most dangerous a means to reduce the world to a collection of forces. It circulates these forces, dependent identities, around this black stone - all of them happy in half-knowing, becoming rather than being, submitted human energy, orgasmic belonging -- and the fire of a god in men without discipline of intellect. Men of fortune sit on thrones there and enjoy the fruits, which are sweet. Literally, and quite extremely so.
In the worst case, man is unleashed to his lusts rather than that he avoids them - his justification of life is that he is a sinner, and tragically so. That is why so many martyrs receives their ordeal with such immense will to shine, and why the Hezbollah pressmen were keen to show me all the billboards on which the children were advertised that threw themselves with bombvest on an Israeli prison, and managed, in the end, to drive the Israelis out. Tragedy and heroism, this is the active force of Islamic ethics.
If, in the mouths of the martyrs, the phrase "Allah Akbar" were replaced with "Equal Rights", the war would be over right quick - but they seek war. This is nothing but the will to the end, the will to the proof that not many, but one exists - that all instances of the many are incoherent and relate only to truth by this great name, this one logos wherein the mayhem and nonsense of the world resounds in a perfect outcry of truth: "NO!"
Islam is a Holy No. And it can be argued that a Holy No is required to substantiate a Holy Yes.
Poetry as the Abcreation of Reason
The relation of Islamic resolve to poetic narrative means that the attacks on the muslim nations, populations and memes will continue to strengthen the resolve, as such attacks prove the poetry's worth, confirm a crucial degree of truth-value. It's not considered that the worth might be negative precisely because of the predictable truth value, but the population of faith is a thousand years removed from such insights, or a thousand years in terms of our own history. It is likely that time will progress faster given the present means of communication.
It is possible that insights will dawn, but I predict a best case of no less than a hundred years before an intellectual core can be substantial enough to sway popular opinion. In the meantime it is only given to 'us' to create the conditions for such an promethean elite. We as the west will begin to communicate our values in terms that actually threaten the religion.
Divine Reason
Al Ghazali denied causality in the Aristotelean sense, on which Islamic scholars had relied and which they had developed exhaustively, literally unto exhaustion of their meaning.
Then a powerful poet-scholar renounced all four of Aristotle's causal logics on the basis of their inconclusiveness, and his message stuck out of pure revolutionariness. God is the spirit of revolution, revaluation.
Quote :
The material cause is the basic stuff out of which the thing is made. The material cause of a house, for example, would include the wood, metal, glass, and other building materials used in its construction. All of these things belong in an explanation of the house because it could not exist unless they were present in its composition.
The formal cause {Gk. ειδος [eidos]} is the pattern or essence in conformity with which these materials are assembled. Thus, the formal cause of our exemplary house would be the sort of thing that is represented on a blueprint of its design. This, too, is part of the explanation of the house, since its materials would be only a pile of rubble (or a different house) if they were not put together in this way.
The efficient cause is the agent or force immediately responsible for bringing this matter and that form together in the production of the thing. Thus, the efficient cause of the house would include the carpenters, masons, plumbers, and other workers who used these materials to build the house in accordance with the blueprint for its construction. Clearly the house would not be what it is without their contribution.
Lastly, the final cause {Gk. τελος [télos]} is the end or purpose for which a thing exists, so the final cause of our house would be to provide shelter for human beings. This is part of the explanation of the house's existence because it would never have been built unless someone needed it as a place to live. ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.])
And he was right. The causality conception existing in his time was imperfect, 'unworthy' - of reality. Newton disclosed a relation of these causes to each other was far more elegantly than what is made apparent by this particular categorization, and he did so in the quest for divine gold, and he called the object of his law as "the love of God".
In Aristotle, causality was conceived in terms of efficiency. In Newton, causality was revealed in simplicity. Of course he stood in a tradition of men to whom such truths were revealed - the outcry eureka is older than Newton, older even than Archimedes. But all laws that had been discovered by the pre and post Copernicans came together in Newtons formula of momentum and attraction. And this led to the completion of the model in Einstein's theory of gravity and light, the conception of which was revelation, in the sense of a perfectly capable mind knowing how to position itself to itself so as to know what is necessary. It is a miracle how E conceived of the principle of the speed of light - and yet also he stood in two traditions - of Archimedes and of Moses. He saw his science as discerning the thoughts of God. ("All the rest is irrelevant")
Revelation and science are intimately intertwined.
Concluding, it has become much clearer now how a foolishness as that of Al Ghazali could have come to be. He simply wished to return to a more simple nature of things - he was tired of the never ending expansion of categories and tracts of significance. Back to the source! Unfortunately, there was not yet a source to speak of. Ghazali was so arrogant to claim the abcreation of logic without having something to put in its place. A great hubris that did not remain unpunished - billions suffer for his pride.
All very poetic indeed - and this makes me wonder if there is a way out at all without another prophet.
perpetualburn
Gender : Posts : 955 Join date : 2013-01-04 Location : MA
Muslims maybe gain a sense of self from the need for continuous offensive violence. There's a collective external war being waged that anyone as a Muslim can at least loosely feel part of, whether he's fighting with it or trying to find a higher intellectual path out of... Westerners are hedonistic and defensive in their approach to war and don't normally connect their sense of self with war... everything is just interpersonal... Muslim demographics will just slowly be absorbed into Western countries like any other foreign element... no Caliphate, the hyper-aggressive war meme is no match for western defensive measures... The continual war torn Middle East just another dumping ground and resource for higher ups to serve up sacrifices...
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
Stalagmites
Gender : Posts : 70 Join date : 2014-09-01 Age : 29 Location : River
Scratch that. Islamic military conquests are and were characteristically brutal; for the Islamic fighter, death during Jihad is a means of reaching the ideal, Jannah. Imagine being up against such a psychotic and desperate infantry!
Last edited by Stalagmites on Thu May 07, 2015 6:59 pm; edited 4 times in total
Muslims are slaves, and the only thing that stops them from regressing back into the animal world is the barbaric religion of Islam.
Have you any idea of how much philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, economy, etc, was brought to us by the muslim world? They were dressing themselves in silk before europeans even knew better than to get off their horses to take a shit.
At first, I was inclined to view it as a joke. An Islamic scholar, a feminist and a Jewish intellectual are asked about the book. -It is caricaturing Islam, said the first. -It is insulting to women by treating them as easily submissive converts, said the other. -No, no, said the last one, he is obviously playing into the hands of Marine Le Pen and the Right. When asked about it, Houellebecq shrugged looking terribly hangover and said, it is a novel, novels don't change anything, it's not as if I've written an essay.
Ha-Ha.
But then I watched it again and I think it explains why he considers the whole Enlightenment project to be dead and buried in the Paris Review interview: he clearly thinks atheism is untenable and religiosity is rising once more in the west.
I think he is wrong on both counts, mainly because he is misdefining the Enlightenment. It was never really about killing god, since at the start of the Age of Reason Descartes re-introduced god via one door and at the end of it Kant did the same via another. And then there is all that other stuff about access to education and prison reforms and nation-states etc., etc.
The Paris Review interviewer also views the Enlightenment inaccurately, like most contemporary media-beloved intellectuals, as some sort of remember-the-Alamo rallying cry for progressives to display their bona fides. Hence, all the disconnected prattle about cultural racism and antisemitism.
It would not surprise me if at the next stage of his writing career Houellebecq transforms himself into a semi-pessimist of the Kierkegaardian type and rediscovers an incommunicable yet absolute faith lighting up the darkness of his resignation.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
Houellebecq's novels are overrated, or atleast I couldn't understand what the hype was when he was compared as a 'contemporary Nietzschean' [Laconian on this forum said likewise]; a couple of his novels just came across just shabby and corny.
Houellebecq is a shock-artist and a poseur and a wannabe Dostoevsky.
That said, this doesn't do anything regarding his and the general views on Islam; see for instance, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] , which reads like a realtime novel...
Book giving light to virtually unknown, yet biggest event of recent times. Explains most of everything needed to know about the Sunni dominion and the behaviour of several parties in certain aspects. Everybody's dirty little secret.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
The 23 minutes during video shows perfectly the hypocrisy of those against his burning. You will hear an outcry all over the media world-wide, yet, those bombs falling upon them, they burn as well, tear apart bodies, delves people under bricks.
The pilot reminds me a little bit about the image of weak people sitting behind a desk, ''playing war'' shooting people with a drone without any direct consequences for their own safety. And suddenly, he is out of the air within enemy territory face to face.
At the ending, it reminds me as well about how it is like a ''game'', how it says ''So good tidings to whoever supports his religion and achieves a kill that will liberate him from hellfire.''
_________________ 1. "Youth, oh, youth! | of whom then, youth, art thou born? Say whose son thou art, Who in Fafnir's blood | thy bright blade reddened, And struck thy sword to my heart."
2. "The Noble Hart | my name, and I go A motherless man abroad; Father I had not, | as others have, And lonely ever I live."
Islamic military conquests are and were characteristically brutal; for the Islamic fighter, death during Jihad is a means of reaching the ideal, Jannah. Imagine being up against such a psychotic and desperate infantry!