I faced so many different perspectives this Ramadan, and walked away with a different contemplation from each. Ramadan began while I was still in Turkey, and I’ve experienced something thing that I’ve never seen before. The generosity and love that spills from the hearts of the people in Kahramanmaras, Turkey was astonishing. We would be invited into their homes, treated like long time friends, feel comfortable and have an amazing time, and even receive a gift at the end. The people of Turkey have something the rest of the world lacks, that is their generosity.
A week later I flew back home to Michigan and enjoyed two days with family and friends before I began packing for yet another adventure. I’ve prayed taraweeh at the local mosque, and realized how easy it was for fundraisers to gather donations. Random ladies walked around passing out mamoul cookies and snacks to those around them. Others would simply smile, and I realized how people change during these nights. People’s hearts open up, smile at by passers, and give to those in need. Little did I know this was the least I would see.
We drove down to Charlotte, North Carolina, my hometown, where my uncle and many old family friends live. We went to their local masjid and again, donations between and after prayers were very successful as Muslims invested in their hereafter bank accounts. The third night there we went to a Syrian Fundraising Dinner, where they auctioned off flags and other novelties at a great donated deal. The fundraising was successful unsurprisingly, and Muslims did not fail to help those in need across the globe.
We continued our road trip down to Florida to see my brother who was invited to lead prayers in a masjid for the month. I was amazed at the welcoming community and enjoyed praying in different masjids. Again, the organizations that sponsored orphans, Syrian refugees, and hungry Muslims worldwide were uncountable.
Via the web, my email and Facebook stream flooded with different fundraisers and groups, the one that touched me most was the Joplin Mosque Fundraising. This mosque was burned down in Missouri August 6, 2012. They had a goal of raising 205,000 over a period of approximately 50 days. Within days they far passed that goal, and the unity of the Muslims shined. It saddened me to know the true figures of hungry Muslims across the globe, and the statistics of the Syrian refugees distressed me even more.
It truly amazes me how generous people become during this month, and I find it important for us to understand how our dollar can stretch into a meal for another family out there. We as Muslims know it is to our greater benefit to give, as the prophet Muhammad (s) taught us and was a great role model of giving. Whether it’s sponsoring an orphan, or simply giving someone a date, every deed is taken into account. We are aware it is Ramadan, and deeds are multiplied, so it would be unwise of one to be stingy during this time. It is as if the stock market is promising a great boost, and we decide to not invest. We are given an opportunity for great reward, and we must not let it bypass.
A Dubai-based businessman has been named as the single largest shareholder in historic Scottish football club Rangers, however the value of such an investment is not as great as it would have been just a year ago. Arif Naqvi, chief executive and founder of private equity firm Abraaj Capital owns just under 18 percent in the club which went into liquidation during the summer, the BBC reported. The BBC also reported that Naqvi agreed to invest two million pounds in the club this past June.
Rangers were founded in 1872 and were one of the ten founding members of the Scottish Football League. They dominated the top division until the end of the 2011–12 season, when the company became financially insolvent and declared bankruptcy. After failing to agree a settlement with its creditors, Rangers’ assets, business and history were bought by a consortium of investors who then reformed the club as a new entity. However, their application for admittance to the Scottish Premier League was rejected, and they had to settle for a place in the Third Division starting with the 2012–13 season.
In Scottish football, Rangers have won more league titles than any other club in the world, winning the league title 54 times, the Scottish Cup 33 times and the Scottish League Cup 27 times, and achieving all three in the same season as the treble seven times. In European football, Rangers were the first British club to reach a UEFA European tournament final. They won the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1972 after being runner up twice in 1961 and 1967. A third runners up finish came in the UEFA Cup in 2008. Rangers have a long-standing rivalry with Celtic since the late 1800’s. These two powerhouse Glasgow clubs are collectively known as the Old Firm.
Naqvi, who founded Abraaj in 2002 and has raised $7bn since then, said in March he believes an IPO will provide the company with a currency to continue to grow.Dubai-based Abraaj Capital, the Middle East’s largest private equity firm, owns stakes in Orascom Construction, budget carrier Air Arabia and supermarket chain Spinneys.
Pakistani-British boxer Amir Khan officially announced what the general public had already gotten wind of when he confirmed that he had split from renowned trainer Freddie Roach. The change was made in the wake of damaging defeats at the hands of Lamont Petersen and most recently Danny Garcia, the latter of which resulted in the loss of his WBA and WBC light-welterweight titles.
“Officially I’ve left Freddie Roach. Just spoke to him and had a good professional chat and maybe in the future we work together,†Khan wrote on Twitter. “After nearly four years together, in which we enjoyed some great success, I part ways with my trainer Freddie Roach,†he wrote.
“I would like to thank him for all his hard work and help during this period and express my gratitude to him for the progress he helped bring about whilst I was under him. I would also like to thank his team. I loved every minute training in LA at the Wildcard Gym, learning and sparring alongside some truly great fighters and meeting some fantastic people. I feel now, however, is the right time in my career to make a fresh change and bring in a new trainer. I’m looking forward, and am excited, about the prospect of working alongside someone new. I will make an announcement in due course of who this will be. There are some specific aspects of my game I’m looking to work on and hopefully improve. My next training camp begins in early October and I will have everything in place by then.â€
Khan may have grown tired of playing second fiddle to Roach’s highest profile client, Manny Pacquiao, who is generally considered the world’s best fighter pound-for-found. And Pacquiao’s schedule often dictated that Khan travel from his native England to such far-flung sites as Los Angeles and the Philippines in order to work with Roach.
Bowler Irfan Pathan took five wickets as India warmed up for the World Twenty20 with a comfortable 26-run victory over hosts Sri Lanka in their first practice match this past weekend.
The Indian batsmen scored 146 runs for 5, and then Pathan took over the show with an impressive 5 wickets for 25 to bowl the Islanders for 120 in 19.3 overs at the P Sara Oval. Pathan plowed through the Sri Lankan top order before coming back to dismiss the lower middle order in the end. Pathan was then followed by Lakshmipathy Balaji, who claimed 3 wickets for 28.
Set a victory target of 147, Sri Lanka received an early jolt as Pathan castled opener Dilshan Munaweera on the last ball of the first over. He dismissed Tillakaratne Dilshan with the last ball of his second over to leave the hosts reeling at 15 for two from the first three overs. Kumar Sangakkara (32) combined with Angelo Mathews (16) to resurrect the Lankan innings but with Balaji getting better of Mathews, the target seemed to be a distant one for the hosts.
Pathan then came back to haunt the Sri Lankan batsmen as he dismissed Thisara Perara and skipper Mahela Jayawardene of successive deliveries before cleaning off Jeevan Mendis on the last ball of his spell to close the doors on the hosts. Balaji completed the formalities as India walked away with an easy victory.
Earlier, electing to bat, India were in a precarious situation at four for 51 before Dhoni and Rohit Sharma (37) stitched a 78-run partnership for the fifth wicket to lend some respectability to the Indian total. The visitors did not have an auspicious beginning as Gautam Gambhir was forced to leave the field as early as in the first over after being hit on the right wrist by a Lasith Malinga delivery.
“I’m really happy with my seam position, and I’ve done a lot of work on that. I’m really happy with the way things are going and the zip that I’m getting off the wicket,†Irfan told the press after the warmup with Sri Lanka. “A lot of people talk about my pace, but I’m generally never bothered. I’m not an out-and-out quick bowler. Everyone has their own gifts and I have my strengths and weaknesses as well.â€
“This is what I’ve learnt throughout the year. I love playing, but sometimes you just put too much pressure on yourself by thinking about performance. Eventually you have to come down to the level where you love the game and you just play. I’ve tried to learn a few tricks in terms of thinking out the batsmen. The more experience I have, the better I’m getting in terms of that. I think that long term, that’s what I want to keep working on. I will do whatever the team needs.â€
India, however, lost their next warmup match to India by five wickets two days later. The T20 World Cup has begun in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and India opens their play later this week against Afghanistan.
A rhinoceros is any of five surviving species of odd-toed ungulate in the family Rhinocerotidae. All five are native to Africa or Asia.
Several other species became extinct within geologically recent times, notably the Giant Unicorn and the Woolly Rhinoceros in Eurasia : the extent to which climate change or human predation was responsible is debated. Suffice to say that they had survived many climate changes when modern man arrived.
Rhinoceros-like animals first appeared in the Eocene as rather slender animals, and by the late Miocene there were many different species. Most were large. One, Indricotherium weighed about 30 tons and (so far as is known) was the largest terrestrial mammal that ever lived. Rhinos became extinct during the Pliocene in North America, and during the Pleistocene in northern Asia and Europe.
The five living species fall into three tribes. The critically endangered Sumatran Rhinoceros is the only surviving representative of the most primitive group, the Dicerorhinini, which emerged in the Miocene (abut 20 million years ago). There are two living Rhinocerotini species, the endangered Indian Rhinoceros and the critically endangered Javan Rhinoceros, which are said to have diverged from one another about 10 million years go. The extinct Wooly Rhinoceros of northern Europe and Asia was also a member of this tribe. The two African species, the White Rhinoceros and the Black Rhinoceros, diverged during the early Pliocene (about 5 million years ago) but the Dicerotini group to which they belong originated in the middle Miocene, about 14 million years ago.
Rhinoceros horns are used in traditional Asian medicine, and for dagger handles in Yemen and Oman. None of the five rhinoceros species have secure futures: the White Rhino is perhaps the least endangered, the Javanese Rhino survives in only tiny numbers (estimated at 60 animals in 2002) and is one of the two or three most endangered large mammals anywhere in the world.
Rhino protection campaigns began in the 1970s, but rhino populations have continued to decline dramatically. Trade in rhinoceros parts is forbidden under the CITES agreements, but poaching is a severe threat to all rhinoceros species.
The most obvious distinguishing characteristic of the rhinos is a large horn on the nose. The word rhinoceros comes from the Greek words rhino (nose) and keros (horn). Rhinoceros horns, unlike those of other horned mammals, consist of densely compacted hair.
The rhinoceros is a large, primitive looking mammal that in fact dates from the Miocene era millions of years ago. In recent decades rhinos have been relentlessly hunted to the point of near extinction. Since 1970 the world rhino population has declined by 90 percent, with five species remaining in the world today, all of which are endangered.
The white or square-lipped rhino is one of two rhino species in Africa. It in turn occurs as two subspecies, the southern and the northern. The southern dwindled almost to extinction in the early 20th century, but was protected on farms and reserves, enabling it to increase enough to be reintroduced. The northern white rhino has recovered in Democratic Republic of Congo from about 15 in 1984 to about 30 in the late 1990s. This population has been threatened by political conflict and instability.
QUICK FACTS
Name: Black Rhinoceros – Diceros bicornis Name: White Rhinoceros – Ceratotherium simum
The White Rhino: The white rhino’s name derives from the Dutch “weit,†meaning wide, a reference to its wide, square muzzle adapted for grazing. The white rhino, which is actually grey, has a pronounced hump on the neck and a long face.
The Black Rhino: The black, or hooked-lipped rhino, along with all other rhino species, is an odd-toed ungulate (three toes on each foot). It has a thick, hairless, grey hide. Both the black and white rhino have two horns, the longer of which sits at the front of the nose.
Size: The rhinoceros stands about 60 inches at the shoulder. Weight: Black Rhino: 1 to 1½ tons. White Rhino: over 2 tons.
Habitat: Grassland and open savannahs. Black rhinos have various habitats, but mainly areas with dense, woody vegetation. White rhinos live in savannahs with water holes, mud wallows and shade trees.
Diet: Vegetarian. Black Rhino – browser. White Rhino – grazer.
Diet Description: The black rhino is a browser, with a triangular-shaped upper lip ending in a mobile grasping point. It eats a large variety of vegetation, including leaves, buds and shoots of plants, bushes and trees. The white rhino is a grazer feeding on grasses.
By Muhammad Azim, member of the AMDA Board of Trustees
Cong. John Conyers prepares to address the gathering at the AMDA groundbreaking.
Moin Asjad, Chairman of AMDA’s Board of Trustees, welcomes the guests.
Congressman Gary Peters (r) and Mayor Richard Notte of Rochester Hills (middle, in hat) perform the groundbreaking for the AMDA masjid.
American Muslim Diversity Association (AMDA), a Sterling Heights, Michigan based Islamic organization, held a ground breaking ceremony for its new Masjid on Saturday, September 15. The Masjid construction will start soon at AMDA’s site in Sterling Heights at 44760 Ryan Road. The ceremony was attended by more than 200 people including Mr. Richard Notte, Honorable Mayor of Sterling Heights, City officials, Honorable Congressman John Conyers and Gary Peters, Imams and leaders of other area Masjids, community leaders, Muslims from all over Metro Detroit. Dr. A.R. Nakadar, Editor of The Muslim Observer, also attended as a special guest.
Mr. Ferdous Ghazi, a trustee of the AMDA Board, was the MC of the event. The program started with the recitation and translation of verses from the Holy Quran by Hafez Ifdhal Khan. The verses recited related to the importance of building the Masjid. Mr. Moin Asjad, a trustee of the AMDA Board, welcomed the audience and reiterated that the new center would promote peace and understanding among communities and thus would uphold the true teachings of Islam. He thanked all the distinguished guests and AMDA members for attending the event and sought their continued support in the future.
Mr. Richard Notte, the Honorable Mayor of the City of Sterling Heights, spoke about the diversity in his City and characterized the city as the melting pot of the world. He welcomed AMDA and hoped that it would enrich the diversity that already exists and would have a peaceful coexistence with people of other faiths and ethnicities.
Honorable Congressman John Conyers welcomed the new center and reflected upon his association with Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and how his ideals can help us all to coexist peacefully. Honorable Congressman Gary Peters spoke about the incredible diversity in the Metro Detroit area and identified AMDA as a strong member of that diverse community. He also welcomed the new center where the community can practice their faith and project the peaceful nature of Islam.
Lena Masri, Staff attorney of CAIR Michigan, highlighted all the advocacy work that her organization does to protect the civil rights of the Muslims. It may be noted here that Ms. Masri was instrumental in presenting AMDA site Plan to the city Planning Commission and getting the approval.
The gathering was then addressed by the Imams, the community leaders and youth representatives of the community. The speakers include, among others, Imam El Basheer of Al- Salam Masjid of Dearborn, Imam Abdul Latif of Al-Falah Masjid of Hamtramck, Dr. Nasir Ahmed of IAGD, Dr. Nakadar of the Muslim Observer, and Fariha Ghazi.
All the guests then took part in the ground breaking. Balloons and white pigeons were released as a symbol of peace.
Imam Abdullah El Amin of Detroit Muslim Center led the prayer seeking Allah’s Mercy to guide us to the straight path and a peaceful life. The event was adjourned with a concluding remark by Dr. Muhammad Azim, a Trustee of the AMDA Board. He thanked the audience for their attendance and asked for their continued prayer and support.
Everyone was treated with hearty snacks and soft drinks afterwards.
The construction of the Masjid is expected to start in the next two weeks.
Left, Faiz Khan of the Pakistani Michigan Democratic Caucus, and Dr. Syed Taj, right.
Bloomfield Hills–A successful fundraiser was held this past weekend, sponsored by Dr. AS Nakadar and attended by many prominent members of Michigan’s Muslim community, to support Syed Taj, a Democrat running for the spot vacated by Thaddeus McCotter, (MI-11th); Taj may have an edge going into the election; he is facing a reindeer rancher, Kerry Bentivolio, in his congressional race.
Taj’s district leans Republican, despite its slowly changing demographic makeup; however Taj has made a very good name for himself as a physician and in his previous work in local politics–in fact he has been endorsed by many of the Republican politicians of his own district, showing his very good relations.
He has strong mainstream credentials, with endorsements from the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press. His Republican opponent is a failed businessman, who has never held elected office, who has been shunned by the mainstream Republican establishment.
In past interviews with TMO, Taj showed himself to be a very humble and accommodating individual, an unassuming but very intelligent and helpful person. He doesn’t have the brashness or arrogance of some in politics, but he does have a keen interest in and knowledge of the components of a successful election. So far he has built a very successful campaign which vaulted from near impossibility to strong likelihood with the bizarre breakdown of the Thaddeus McCotter campaign over signature fraud.
In the primary Dr. Taj defeated a Lyndon Larouche “Democratic†candidate who was set against him because of his perceived weakness as a candidate, as he bears a foreign name. However Taj emerged victorious.
Faiz Khan, the Chair of the Pakistani Michigan Democratic Caucus, welcomed the fundraising guests to the home of Dr. Nakadar this weekend, and also welcomed the board members of his own caucus. He spoke of the importance of protecting our community, and the responsibility of the community to support Dr. Taj in the election.
Dr. Taj discussed issues dear to his heart such as national healthcare, employment, strengthening the economy, increasing the number of jobs. He said that, if elected, he would like to form a Muslim Democratic Caucus, with Muslim congressmen Ellison and Carson.
ISTANBUL/DUBAI, Sept 19 (Reuters) – Turkey’s issue of its first sovereign sukuk this week paves the way for Turkish companies to raise money through Islamic bonds, and may help the country become a major market for Islamic investors from the Gulf and southeast Asia.
After coming to power a decade ago, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s government, which espouses Islamic values, largely shied away from Islamic finance for fear of opening itself to charges that it was trying to roll back state secularism.
This prevented the world’s eighth most populous Muslim nation from participating fully in rapid growth of the industry. Islamic financial assets globally hit $1.3 trillion in 2011, a 150 percent increase over five years, according to an estimate by lobby group TheCityUK’s UK Islamic Finance Secretariat.
The Turkish government’s issue of a $1.5 billion Islamic bond this week, which drew heavy bids totalling about $7.5 billion from global investors, is a step towards bringing Turkey into the mainstream of Islamic finance, potentially giving it more access to tens of billions of dollars of Islamic investment funds from other Muslim nations.
The sukuk is expected to serve as a benchmark for the pricing of future Islamic bond issues in the Turkish private sector. Other Islamic financial practices, such as takaful or Islamic insurance, may also attract more demand in Turkey after the government’s shift.
“This is a landmark for Islamic finance in Turkey. Sukuk would help to deepen capital markets in Turkey,†said Ibrahim Oguducu, head of the financial institutions business at Bank Asya, the country’s largest Islamic bank.
Market Share
Islamic finance, which operates according to religious principles such as bans on interest and pure monetary speculation, has been growing during the global financial crisis partly because it can draw on a huge pool of religiously- oriented investment funds from the oil-rich Gulf.
But Turkey has only four Islamic banks, which held a combined 61 billion lira ($33.9 billion) of assets in June, only 4.8 percent of the country’s banking assets, according to Turkish brokerage IS Investment. In the Gulf Arab states, Islamic institutions hold roughly a quarter of the market, according to an estimate by consultants Ernst & Young.
Because of political sensitivities in Turkey, and to adhere to local law, Islamic banks in the country do not describe themselves as such but use the label “participation banksâ€. Sukuk are described as “participation certificatesâ€, a reference to the fact that instead of paying investors interest, they pay returns on a pool of assets.
This week’s sukuk issue suggests Turkey is moving away from such squeamishness about Islamic finance. Another sign of this is the government’s 2007-2013 economic development plan, which refers in general terms to “asset-based†and “interest-free†financial instruments as part of efforts to develop the country as a regional financial centre.
“We have strong expectation for the Turkish treasury to continue sukuk issuances in the following years,†said Yavuz Yeter, group manager for investment banking, treasury product development and marketing at Kuveyt Turk, one of the Islamic banks.
One reason for the policy shift appears to be the growing confidence in power of Turkey’s ruling AK Party, which in the last several years has succeeded in reducing the political power of the secularist military.
A bigger reason may be economic trends. The Middle East and North Africa are becoming increasingly important to Turkish companies as growth in Europe and the United States stagnates.
“In this year, 34 percent of Turkish exports went to the MENA, so we need a similar kind of story for financials, foreign direct investment and any kind of debt issuance,†Melis Metiner, senior economist at HSBC Turkey, said at the bank’s MENA-Turkey forum, held in Dubai this week.
“In terms of debt issuance I think that would be a very attractive market.â€
Guidance
Turkey’s Islamic banks have so far issued only two sukuk. Both were issued by Kuveyt Turk, 62 percent owned by Kuwait Finance House, which raised a total of $450 million in 2010 and 2011. The sovereign sukuk is expected to stimulate more issuance by the banks, by giving investors a benchmark off which to calculate yields they will accept. Kuveyt Turk has said it plans to sell a lira-denominated sukuk this year. Last November Bank Asya shelved a plan for a $300 million, five-year sukuk issue, citing “adverse developments in international marketsâ€, but it may eventually revive the plan. Al Baraka Turk, a unit of Bahraini lender Al Baraka, has been talking about a possible $200 million sukuk issue. Current market conditions for Turkish sukuk issuance appear excellent. Because of a big overhang of unsatisfied investor demand for sukuk in the Gulf and elsewhere – Ernst & Young estimates outstanding demand globally is over twice this year’s expected supply of sukuk – many borrowers have been able to issue Islamic bonds more cheaply than conventional bonds. “In the current context, where Turkish banks have been able to obtain international financing via Eurobonds at relatively cheap rates, there is room for advantageous pricing,†said Ugursel Onder, senior associate at IS Investment. Turkey’s Islamic banks have so far been depending largely on retail deposits and short-term syndicated loans for funding, and have had limited access to international markets. So borrowing longer-term money via sukuk could improve their funding structures, Yeter said. Onder said sukuk might help Turkey’s Islamic banks meet minimum capital adequacy ratios as regulators tighten standards around the world. Since sukuk are asset-based instruments, they may in some cases be treated as a form of capital on banks’ balance sheets, unlike conventional bonds which are pure debt, she said. “Participation banks can issue sukuk as capital-like loans. In that way, these can be considered as Tier 2 capital and be treated like equity, which will in return boost their capital adequacy ratios.†Corporates Once Islamic banks issue their own sukuk, they may shift their attention to underwriting sukuk for Turkish companies seeking to raise money. “The first non-financial sukuk could come as early as 2013. I think corporates will closely watch the sovereign issuance first,†Onder said. “As the know-how improves in the market, big corporates, holding companies and commercial firms would be much more interested,†said Oguducu. “A number of corporates are interested in issuing sukuk, especially in the domestic market.†Since many international investors would require companies to have investment-grade credit ratings before buying their sukuk, some companies will focus on attracting domestic investors with lira-denominated sukuk, analysts said. Turkey’s sovereign sukuk uses an ijara structure, a leasing contract in which investors acquire partial ownership of an underlying asset and share in returns on renting it out. Broadening the types of sukuk in the market to include structures such as musharaka and mudaraba, which resemble partnerships or asset management contracts, would encourage corporate issuance, Yeter said – though the necessary expertise would take time to develop in Turkey. Another important issue is tax policy. Because sukuk can involve two or more transfers of their underlying assets – one at the time of issue, and a second when the sukuk matures – they can be taxed more than once, making them less attractive. The Turkish government currently exempts ijara sukuk from multiple taxation but not other structures, Yeter said. In addition to demand for Turkish sukuk from international investors, significant interest is expected from Turkish pension funds, some of which offer Islamic products, and from other investment funds keen to diversify their fixed-income holdings, Oguducu said. Sukuk could eventually hold a share of the lira corporate bond market that exceeds the roughly 5 percent share which Islamic lenders have in the banking sector, Ibrahim Turhan, chairman and chief executive of the Istanbul Stock Exchange, told Reuters. “In sukuk, I expect a better performance.â€
Plenty are convinced the Internet is filled with intellectual vitamins – (San Jose Library) By Claudia Ehrenstein
BERLIN – Dr. Manfred Spitzer knows that people find his arguments provocative. In his first book, he warned parents of the very real dangers of letting their children spend too much time in front of the TV. Now, in a second book called Digitale Demenz [Digital Dementia], he’s telling them that teaching young kids finger-counting games is much better for them than letting them explore on a laptop.
Spitzer, 54, may be a member of the slide-rule generation that learned multiplication tables by heart, but his work as a neuropsychiatrist has shown him that when young children spend too much time using a computer, their brain development suffers and that the deficits are irreversible and cannot be made up for later in life.
South Korean doctors were the first to describe this phenomenon, and dubbed it digital dementia – whence the title of Spitzer’s book. Simplistically, the message can be summed up this way: the Internet makes you dumb. And it is of course a message that outrages all those who feel utterly comfortable in the digital world. In the aftermath of the publication of Spitzer’s book, they have lost no time venting their wrath across Germany.
And yet Spitzer has accumulated a wealth of scientific information that gives his thesis solid underpinnings, and the studies and data he draws on offer more than enough room for consternation. Everything leaves traces in the brain
According to his study, many young people today use more than one medium at a time: they place calls while playing computer games or writing e-mails. That means that some of them are packing 8.5 hours of media use per day into 6.5 hours. Multitasking like this comes at the cost of concentration – experiments by American researchers have established this. And to Spitzer, those results mean just one thing: “Multitasking is not something we should be encouraging in future generations.â€
Because everything a person does leaves traces in the brain. When development is optimum, memory links are formed and built on during the first months and years of life, and the structure adds up to a kind of basic foundation for everything else we learn. Scientists call this ability of the brain to adjust to new challenges “neuroplasticity.†It is one of the reasons for the evolutionary success of the human species. Spitzer also sees it as a source of present danger.
When drivers depend exclusively on their navigation technology, they do not develop the ability to orient themselves, although of course the brain offers them the possibility of learning how to do so. The same applies to children who use electronic styluses on a SMART board instead of learning how to write — the brain is kept in check. And because computers take over many classrooms and other functions that are actually good practice for kids, “it inevitably has a negative effect on learning,†Spitzer argues.
Digital media should be banned from classrooms
Stating that there have so far been no independent studies “that unequivocally establish that computers and screens in the classroom makes learning any more effective,†Spitzer goes so far as to recommend that digital media be banned from the classroom. Even more drastically, he writes: “In reality, using digital media in kindergarten or primary school is actually a way of getting children addicted.†Strong stuff for the generations who take computers and the Internet for granted, using them as a source of information and a space to communicate via social networks — and who enjoy doing so. The Internet has become the fourth cultural technology, alongside reading, writing and arithmetic.
Spitzer quotes Swiss pedagogue and educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), who wrote that the process of learning involves the heart along with the brain and the hands. He believes it would be better if kids learned finger games to help them deal with numbers, instead of relying on computers. In a country like Germany, whose major resource is smart people and innovative ideas, maybe we should be taking Spitzer’s warnings more seriously.
Family friend who knew Mr al-Hilli for 20 years fears his internet chatroom attacks on Israel and Jews is reason for Alps murders
The British engineer killed in the French Alps ¬secretly held extreme anti-Israeli beliefs which could be the key to the massacre that has baffled police, a close friend claims.
To his wealthy neighbours, Saad al-Hilli was a devoted family man. But behind closed doors he is said to have spent hours on his computer bombarding Arabic chatrooms with anti-Israeli posts.
Now one of Saad’s oldest friends believes he and his dentist wife Ikbal, 47, and her mother Suhaila Al Saffar, 74, could have paid a high price for his rants… in an execution by the feared Israeli secret service Mossad.
Tonight Gary Aked, who had known Saad for nearly 20 years, is being -questioned by two Surrey police officers about his explosive new clues to the -killings, which are contained in chatroom and online forum messages posted by Saad showing the dangerous depths of his hatred.
Gary, 52, became a close friend of Iraqi-born Saad after meeting him in 1993 when they worked for the same engineering firm. They even went on holiday together.
“He was a difficult man to get to know, but I did over the years,†Gary said. “The one thing that always worried me about him was how vocal he was on internet chatrooms about Iraq and also the Arab-Israeli conflict.
“He would forever be talking about how the Israelis were taking over the world and specifically taking over America. He hated Israeli Jews taking big banks and strongholds in America.
“He thought 9/11 was an inside job by the Israelis to create hatred against the Arabic nations. After 9/11 his involvement in chatrooms increased dramatically. He was very passionate about his beliefs. He didn’t believe the Jews should be in Israel. He thought the land should be Palestinian.
“When I heard Saad and Ikbal had been murdered my first thought was, “What has he said? What has he done?’ I think it’s possible he has offended someone and Mossad has taken offence and put a hit out on him.â€
But despite Saad’s extreme beliefs, Gary insists his friend was not a terrorist or member of a fundamentalist group and was a man of “words and beliefsâ€, not action and violence. “I know that Saad was not a terrorist because he would have never done anything to put his family in danger. He was not a violent person,†he said.
Since the shootings, which have baffled both French police and Surrey officers who have searched the family’s £1.5 million home in Claygate, conspiracy theories have ranged from a family feud to ¬nuclear weapons development, because of Saad’s software expertise and his work for a satellite company.
But Gary dismissed these as nonsense. “I would rule out work. He wasn’t into anything nuclear, he wasn’t into any defence contracts,†he said.
“In any case he wouldn’t have got the clearance for sensitive defence contracts because of his Iraq background. It was definitely not the cause of his death.â€
Gary says he was startled when his friend’s pro-Arab passion took a new twist during his late nights online a few months ago.
Both men regularly chatted on Skype and Gary recalls Saad recently replacing his profile picture from a photo of his eldest daughter to an image of a bearded Arabic leader.
In April he also posted a web link to an interview conducted by controversial Wikileaks founder Julian Assange with Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, the Lebanese organisation fighting against Israel.
Gary said: “Saad didn’t have a problem with Jews generally, just those in Israel. He read the Koran and it was always left open in the front living room of the house. He was guarded about who he spoke to about his beliefs, but he did confide in me.â€
Gary also had access to the family home where Saad went online to post his anti-Israeli rants.
He believes police need to look at his friend’s banks of computers to get to the truth of what happened in France.
He used a rear upstairs room to house four computers and a laptop worth up to £20,000 which he used to write his beliefs in Arabic forums. Saad also had a number of other PCs in an outside shed which Gary helped to build.
The chatrooms Saad used were not only a magnet for hate-filled Islamic fundamentalists… but also for opposing forces trying to identify enemies.
Gary believes Mossad – whose secret agents have been responsible for many assassinations – could have been ¬tracking Saad’s outspoken views. British security services are already said to have put him under surveillance in the 1990s.
Baghdad-born Saad arrived in the UK in the 1970s when his parents fled Iraq and one of his uncles was killed by Saddam Hussein’s henchmen. But he owned land in the war-torn country and often returned.
“Saad was incredibly sad that his home city was bombed,†said Gary.
“And he did go back there to live for a short time but it disturbed him that there were ¬frequently gunshots and deaths. He told me that Iraq would become a third world country. He was pleased Saddam went but he believed an American puppet would take over. He said the devil you know is sometimes better than the devil you don’t know. He loved his homeland.â€
In a Skype message to Gary in October 2009, Saad told how he was looking forward to visiting Iraq to try to secure a £800,000 property deal, adding fondly: “Iraq is still warm.â€
But back in Britain, he loathed the country’s affection for the Royal Family. In a Skype conversation nine days before William and Kate’s wedding in April last year, Saad said: “I hope it buckets it down on Friday… so they get drenched.
“I was invited to the street partyon our road. My reply was, ‘On mydead body’.â€
But Gary says Saad’s own family meant the world to him. And he’s sure reports of a feud between Saad and his brother Zaid, 53, of Chessington, Surrey, over their father’s will are well wide of the mark in the search for a motive.
Gary, who also knows Zaid, said: “They are very different characters, Zaid was the serious older one, the accountant, whereas Saad was more the cheeky chappy one, less serious. “I don’t know about any big feud. Saad was very upset when his father died in Spain a year ago.
“His family involved in this? ¬Definitely not. His brother? No way.â€
In Skype messages, Saad talks about his heartbreak when his dad Kadhem died in August last year, saying: “I can’t seem to come to terms with not going over and seeing him any more.â€
Now Gary prefers to remember Saad as a devoted family man.
He joked that when they first met at an engineering firm, Saad had stolen his then-girlfriend.
He said: “Saad was a bit of a ladies man in those days, but it all changed when he met Ikbal. He became a ¬devoted family man.â€
In a Skype conversation in June 2010, Saad, who did not become a father until he was 42, wrote: “Home life is good thanks and the kids are my whole life… I just wish I had them long ago.â€
Gary said: “Saad was a workaholic. We went skiing in Italy once but he took his laptop so he could work.
“He never stopped. Everything was about his ¬family. He wanted his girlsto have the best education, the best upbringing.
“He was fun to be with. He had a cheekiness and sense of humour, a love of life.â€
Now Gary wants the information he has given to police to help them trace his friend’s killers.
“I just hope the police find the chatrooms and what Saad has been saying and doing on there,†he said.
Mohatta Palace is a beautiful building built with pink Jodhpur stone in the 1920s which is located near the Arabian Sea in the city of Karachi. Shivratan Chandraratan Mohatta a self-made Sikh businessman as his summer home built it. The palace is built on an area of 18,500 sq. ft. There are 9 domes with a larger dome in the center. The front windows are of blue color and the back windows are arched shape with beautiful stained glass. The teak staircase in the palace looks majestic, and first floor has some large stately rooms. A beautiful temple occupies the terrace. The first floor has a large hall in the center with bedrooms, restrooms and dressing rooms. The roof top gives a fascinating view of the landscaping of the palace and the Arabian Sea. The staircase connects the rooftop. On each corner of the palace are octagonal towers. Another staircase leads towards a hot water pool which has adjoining changing rooms. There also a door, leading to a secret tunnel. It is believed that this tunnel was built for the businessman’s wife for her daily worship. The palace has some intricate detailed stone work all across the building. One can see beautiful carved peacock and marigold motifs in stone work around each of the nine domes.
After Mohatta’s departure the government of Pakistan seized the palace. Fatima Jinnah sister of the founder of Pakistan moved in here in 1964. Later her sister Shireen Jinnah moved in the ground floor until her death in 1980 after which the palace was sealed. It was in the year 1995 that the palace was bought by the Government of Sindh. A museum was formally opened in 1999 and a trust was established to manage the property. All exhibitions at Mohatta Palace are put together for a time of 2 to 2 1/2 years. The Palace has featured various exhibitions like “The Art of Calligraphyâ€, “Miniature Paintingsâ€, “Sadequain; the Holy Sinnerâ€, and “The birth of Pakistan†hosted by the citizen’s archive of Pakistan.
The Palace is a landmark of the city of Karachi and is visited by hundreds of tourists every day.
Berkeley–As riots run all over the Islamic world – including Pakistan — this article becomes more poignant. The American Secretary of State has emphasized the United States government had no part in the production of the highly offensive Islamophic film shown over YouTube. In fact, the government has asked its parent company, Google, to take it down, which it has refused to do, that only shows how bad and irresponsible a corporate citizen that company has become. The conglomerate has blocked it in Egypt and Tunisia on their own response to the civil unrest there, and in India and Indonesia when informed that the video violated their laws, and those countries were prepared to prosecute them in their courts which could potentially ban Google from their lucrative markets. It does not violate U.S. laws due to the First Amendment to the Constitution (freedom of expression), and, for some unexplained reason, is not judged to be within the “fighting words†limitation. The local authorities in Southern California are looking into a technical violation of a breaking of probation for uploading the video which would send the individual responsible to prison for a short time. Ultimately, the culprit is American Capitalism as it is currently interpreted within the Republic.
II. Neil Joeck and the U.S.’ Perspective on the U.S.-Pakistani Relationship
Neil Joeck, whom your scribe has personally known for several years, is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Security Research (CGSR) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for International Studies (IIS) at the University of California here at Berkeley.
Dr. Joeck has worked on India and Pakistan as a political analyst and group leader at LLNL . Taking leave from that National Lab in Livermore California in 2001, he served as a member of the Policy Planning Staff at the Department of State in Washington until 2003. From 2004 to 2005, he was the Director for counter-proliferation Strategy at the National Security Council, and from 2009 to 2011 he was the National Intelligence Officer for South Asia in the Office of the Director for National Intelligence.
In other words, he is an insider in the U.S. intelligence and policy regime in the War Against Terror (GWOT) in South Asia which includes Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The United States’ vision for the future of Pakistan is that of a democratic and prosperous Islamic nation although at the present there is some concern over their nuclear capability. Pakistan is one of the foci of the “terror nexus†which, also, includes India, Pakistan Afghanistan and the United States of America.
There is a fear in the three other capitals that Islamabad will collapse from within even though, historically, the District of Columbia and Rawalpindi have been in alliance throughout the Cold War. Yet Pakistan has deemed as distressing ancillary U.S. policies.
For instance, the Global War on Terror is not entirely in the Islamic Republic’s interests. They are fretful about their own safety and security. Any accident within the uneasy alliance on this GWOT could flare up the traditional tensions between India and Pakistan. This has put a barrier to a fulfilling relationship between America and Pakistan.
Their nuclear stockpile is not fully weaponized; and, therefore, is safe in peacetime. Yet, there is always possibility of a religious fundamentalist “coup.†Therefore, the American military is training their Command and Control in nuclear security. The COAS (Commander of the Armed Services) has overseen the development of a 10,000 person nuclear security force. Because of this, the proliferation of their nuclear ability is not a reasonable supposition in Dr. Joeck’s opinion at this time.
Terrorists cannot be contained by a nuclear strike. Yet, on the State level during the Prime Ministership of Benazir Bhutto nuclear technology may have been transferred (for missile expertise with North Korea). Neil Joek affirms that all transfer of technologies should be under (international) supervision. There is always a danger for a nuclear war in the Indo-Pak Theater. Pakistan made the decision on developing the bomb after the experience of losing East Pakistan (now the Muslim-majority nation of Bangladesh).
A War between India and Pakistan could break out over a terrorist incident (and we have seen that almost happening twice.) India is prepared for engagement with Pakistan, and Pakistan is ready for a reply. “Once bombs fly, they will be hard to stop;†thus, the U.S., of course, urges restraint.
“Al’ Qaeda is by no means is defunct†(even after the death of Osama bin-Laden and other high commanders.) There is still considerable support for them within Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Provinces (NWP) although the actors themselves are mainly Arab mercenaries.
Some of the remnants of Al ’Qaeda have attacked India while the allied Taliban is at war with the post 9-11 Afghani State. A decade ago the U.S. was not in favor of the Afghani anti-Taliban Northern Alliance pushing the Taliban totally out of Afghanistan’s future political structure. The States’ desire was to glue a coalition of some sort together.
The Af-Pak border is most porous. The Haqqani network works in tandem with the Taliban and Al ’Qaeda on the Durand Line (i.e., frontier), but, curiously, Neil claims they are under the control of the Pakistani ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence agency) even though the Haqqani family fights against the interests of the Government at the Center.
The U.S. response to the GWOT has been Homeland Security. Its purpose is to intercept any Weapons Of Mass Destruction (WMDs), and those who plan to use them within the Metropole (i.e., Imperial Homeland), and it is a chief institution of counter-terrorism since September 11th 2001.
Through all the frictions, the United States and Pakistan remain the closest of allies. The most exacerbating of those abrasions has been Rawalpindi’s refusal to help Kabul to control their Taliban by totally eradicating them from their bases in the NWP. D.C. (the District of Columbia) sees this as ingratitude in the wake of the U.S.A.’s support to Islamabad against terrorism that aims to destabilize the Pakistani State. More so now, since talks with those radical Afghanistani “Students†have fallen apart.
This paper is the first installment on this important interchange with a top U.S. diplomatic intelligence analyst on the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. As can be seen, he acknowledges the deep long-lasting friendship between two incongruous allies for the interests of each converge and diverge.
In future installments we shall examine how this works in real time.
The story of Jane Digby (1807–1881) is presented among other historical biographies of white women who escaped the confines of 19th Century Europe by going to live among the Muslims in “The Wilder Shores of Love†by Lesley Blanch. Digby, born an aristocrat in Norfolk England, was known in Europe as Lady Ellenborough, Baroness Vennigan, and later as Countess Theotoky. She had married and divorced four times and was 48 years old when she met her fifth and last husband, her true love, a dark-skinned Syrian warlord Sheik Abdul Medjuel El Mezrab, who was fifteen years her junior. She died in his arms after nearly thirty years of marriage.
Jane Digby’s life was such a fabulous scandal that I am surprised that I had never heard of her before. During her youth, she was the mistress of many princes and kings, including Napoleon before he was famous. In old age, she slept in a Bedouin tent and rode side by side with her husband on horseback to battle, also granting protection to desert travelers in exchange for a large fee. She received adventurous royalty and traveling dignitaries from all over Europe in her husband’s luxurious Damascus home, including Richard Burton, the famed “Lawrence of Arabia.†His wife, Isabel Burton, knew Jane Digby since youth and regarded her as a peer. Blanch writes: “Everyone who knew her in Syria, from the local missionaries to Dom Pedro, Emperor of Brazil, was enchanted with the timeless charm and simplicity of the real woman.â€
While other women of that era were fighting for the right to vote, Digby never doubted her equality with men. Clearly, she loved men. She had no sense of being bound by the social conventions of her time. Her freedom was of course enhanced by the regular income she received by right of her noble status, yet she was not a manipulative person, nor was she seeking political influence. There was just something about her that instantly attracted men of high caliber. She was very well-read, which made her an exceedingly pleasant conversational partner. Traveling scholars would seek her to learn of the latest news in archeology, for she was considered to be very knowledgeable on that topic. Yet she was no academic. She was a Romantic. She was athletic, wild and adventurous, and she possessed some kind of eternal idealism free of cynicism. She was 74 years old when she finally accepted the role of a wife who stays home while her husband goes out, and this pained her as greatly as her death which soon followed.
Her passionate love of horses no doubt contributed to her mystique and led her to her fate. She went to Syria to purchase an Arabian stallion. There she met a desert nomad who told her, “This horse is untameable, but I love it more than I love my three wives.†It is said that this Lady had made slaves of kings just by making eye contact and this horse was no different. The animal submitted to her, seemingly without any effort on her part. The Sheik told her, “I see you have tamed my wild horse, but still I will not sell it to you for any price, except one.†It was in this fashion that he proposed marriage. She considered it on condition that he dismiss his other wives and live with her as man and wife in the European sense. He protested, “But I am not a poor man. It would be embarrassing for someone of my stature to only have one wife.†So, she went on with her travels, marrying another Muslim man, who took her on pilgrimage to Iraq. Upon hearing news of her return and learning that the relationship with this other man did not work out, the Sheik sent someone to meet her en route with a gift of his best horse. This time she agreed to marry him.
Her marriage with the Sheik is an interesting lesson in both interfaith and intercultural relations. First off, they agreed to a marital compromise that for three years, he would be her monogamous husband. After that, he was free to reinstate his harem. He lived with her for life as a devoted husband, though in later years he quietly married his son’s step-daughter. Half the year, they camped in a tent and half the year they lived in the house.
Jane Digby never converted to Islam. Given her British noble ancestry, this made political sense. She served as a cultural bridge between the Christian and Muslim worlds. She didn’t want to live as a secluded Arab wife. She insisted on being her noble husband’s equal. She threw herself into her husband’s culture with pleasure, for she spoke Arabic fluently in many dialects, and she was having a great time, dressing in the Muslim gear, smoking from the nargila and sleeping on the ground. By remaining a Christian, she was able to continue to define herself by her own rules, never to conform, except as she chose.
Digby insisted upon being buried in a Protestant Christian cemetery when she died. However, she gave up her British citizenship and became a Turkish citizen upon marriage. This became a problem in 1871, for the British embassy could be of no assistance when Kurds and Druze reportedly raped, massacred and mutilated all the Christians in Damascus. It is said that corpses were piled high and the stench and noise of the tortured and dying filled the air. Digby’s house on the outskirts of town remained unharmed, for she was protected by her husband. However, upon hearing of the carnage, Jane left her home to go see what was going on in the city. There was not much of anything she could do, and she returned home soon. But her action embarrassed the Sheik, for it seemed that she was taking sides with the Christians, and his interest in her cooled. True to fashion, she used this opportunity to kindle a brief flame with a rival Arabian warlord Sheik Fares. She made her husband jealous and won him back into her spell. Digby’s life was never boring. She was not a saint, but she was a genius.
During her very solemn funeral procession, her husband caused a scene by jumping out of his carriage and running away. His action surely caused a lot of whispers. However, just as she was about to be put in the ground, he returned, galloping on his wife’s favorite black steed. He knew that she would want her horse to be in attendance at her burial. The Sheik truly understood that beloved woman, even if no one else ever will. Like Cleopatra, Umm el-Laban was a remarkable woman who never lost her beauty. Her life makes clear that through Allah, all things are possible.
Ali Minai, a professor in the electrical and computer engineering department at the University of Cincinnati, recently was awarded the Integrated NSF Support Promoting Interdisciplinary Research and Education (or the INSPIRE award) for his project, “The Hunting of the Spark: A Systematic Study of Natural Creativity in Human Networks.â€
INSPIRE grants, from the National Science Foundation, target complicated and important scientific problems in interdisciplinary studies.
Before coming to UC, Minai received his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering in Pakistan; he then came to the United States in 1985 to study for his master’s and PhD in electrical engineering at the University of Virginia. After completing his post-doctoral work in neuroscience at the University of Virginia, Minai landed his first teaching job in 1993 at the University of Cincinnati.
A demonstrator holds up a sign in front of the U.S. embassy in Bangkok September 18, 2012, at a peaceful protest against the anti-Islam film.
REUTERS/Chaiwat Subprasom
I was raised as an evangelical Christian in America, and any discussion of Christian-Jewish-Muslim relations around the world must include the phenomenon of American Islamophobia, for which large sectors of evangelical Christianity in America serve as a greenhouse.
At a time when U.S. embassies are being attacked and when people are getting killed over an offensive, adolescent and puerile film targeting Islam – beyond pathetic in its tawdriness – we must begin to own up to the reality of evangelical Islamaphobia.
Many of my own relatives receive and forward pious-sounding and alarm-bell-ringing e-mails that trumpet (IN LOTS OF CAPITAL LETTERS WITH EXCLAMATION POINTS!) the evils of Islam, that call their fellow evangelicals and charismatics to prayer and “spiritual warfare†against those alleged evils, and that often – truth be told – contain lots of downright lies.
For example, one recent e-mail claimed “Egyptian Christians in Grave Danger as Muslim Brotherhood Crucifies Opponents.†Of course, that claim has been thoroughly debunked, but the sender’s website still (as of Friday) claims that the Muslim Brotherhood has “crucified those opposing†Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy “naked on trees in front of the presidential palace while abusing others.â€
Many sincere and good-hearted evangelicals have never yet had a real Muslim friend, and now they probably never will because their minds have been so prejudiced by Islamophobic broadcasts on so-called Christian television and radio.
Janet Parshall, for example, a popular talk show host on the Moody Radio Network, frequently hosts Walid Shoebat, a Muslim-evangelical convert whose anti-Muslim claims, along with claims about his own biography, are frequently questioned. John Hagee, a popular televangelist, also hosts Shoebat as an expert on Islam, as does the 700 Club.
Many Christian bookstores that (used to) sell my books, still sell books such as Paul Sperry’s “Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington†(Thomas Nelson, 2008). In so doing, they fuel conspiracy theories such as the ones U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minnesota, promoted earlier this year.
In recent days, we’ve seen how irresponsible Muslim media outlets used the tawdry 13-minute video created by a tiny handful of fringe Christian extremists to create a disgusting caricature of all Christians – and all Americans – in Muslim minds. But too few Americans realize how frequently American Christian media personalities in the U.S. similarly prejudice their hearers’ minds with mirror-image stereotypes of Muslims.
Ambassador’s killing shines light on Muslim sensitivities around Prophet Mohammed (s).
Meanwhile, many who are pastors and leaders in evangelicalism hide their heads in the current issue of Christianity Today or World Magazine, acting as if the kinds of people who host Islamophobic sentiments swim in a tiny sidestream, not in the mainstream, of our common heritage. I wish that were true.
The events of this past week, if we let them, could mark a turning point – a hitting bottom, if you will – in the complicity of evangelicalism in Islamophobia. If enough evangelicals watch or try to watch the film trailer that has sparked such outrage in the Middle East, they may move beyond the tipping point.
I tried to watch it, but I couldn’t make it halfway to the 13-minute mark. Everything about it was tawdry, pathetic, even pornographic. All but the most fundamentalist believers from my evangelical Christian tribe who watch that video will be appalled and ashamed to be associated with it.
It is hate speech. It is no different from the anti-Semitic garbage that has been all too common in Western Christian history. It is sub-Christian – beneath the dignity of anyone with a functioning moral compass.
Islamophobic evangelical Christians – and the neo-conservative Catholics and even some Jewish folks who are their unlikely political bedfellows of late – must choose.
Will they press on in their current path, letting Islamophobia spread even further amongst them? Or will they stop, rethink and seek to a more charitable approach to our Muslim neighbors? Will they realize that evangelical religious identity is under assault, not by Shariah law, not by the liberal media, not by secular humanism from the outside, but by forces within the evangelical community that infect that religious identity with hostility?
If I could get one message through to my evangelical friends, it would be this: The greatest threat to evangelicalism is evangelicals who tolerate hate and who promote hate camouflaged as piety.
No one can serve two masters. You can’t serve God and greed, nor can you serve God and fear, nor God and hate.
The broad highway of us-them thinking and the offense-outrage-revenge reaction cycle leads to self-destruction. There is a better way, the way of Christ who, when reviled, did not revile in return, who when insulted, did not insult in return, and who taught his followers to love even those who define themselves as enemies.
Yes, “they†– the tiny minority of Muslims who turn piety into violence – have big problems of their own. But the way of Christ requires all who claim to be Christians to examine our own eyes for planks before trying to perform first aid on the eyes of others. We must admit that we have our own tiny minority whose message and methods we have not firmly, unitedly and publicly repudiated and rejected.
To choose the way of Christ is not appeasement. It is not being a “sympathizer.â€
The way of Christ is a gentle strength that transcends the vicious cycles of offense-outrage-revenge.
During our morning drive to school, my daughter and I discussed the recent YouTube video about the Prophet (s). This video has caused a lot of pain to Muslims all over the world but most unfortunately has caused violence, destruction of properties, and deaths of fellow human beings.
Four American diplomats and the same number of Yemeni citizens have died so far. My daughter asked me, “Have you seen this video?â€, I said “No†and “ I have no desire to see itâ€. I told her I avoid watching or reading anything which denigrates any religion or any figure the followers of that religion consider holy. I know my Prophet (s) well. God mentions him in the Quran as the “Mercy to the worldsâ€. I have read so many of his biographies and I love him more than anything in this world (including my children and parents).
My daughter and I talked about how someone can post an offensive video like this which can hurt the feelings of 1.5 billion Muslims all over the world from Morocco to Indonesia. Is it OK to do that? What are boundaries of freedom of speech? Just while we were talking, NPR had a story on this as well. It talked about Google blocking this video in Egypt and Libya. It compared this to how all the Nazi related videos are banned in Germany.
We talked about freedom of expression. We talked about how the freedom of expression does not apply to somebody who wants to roam the streets stark naked or want to call out “fire†in a dark movie theater, but how to apply this to other situations like this video which has similar effect if not worse. Honestly there are no good answers. Freedom comes with a lot of personal responsibilities and there are always going to be individuals who will take advantage of it and incite people by using their right to freely express. As the saying goes, freedom is not free, neither is the “freedom to expressâ€. This cherished value of ours should not be used to hurt other human beings or their faith.
She and I also talked about how an Egyptian TV channel used their newly acquired “freedom to express†and caused this ensuing violence. I think they are more responsible for this violence then the misguided person who produced this video (this person also misguided all the actors in the video by not telling them the real purpose behind this video).
We talked about how we cannot get incited by any Tom, Dick and Harry who is out there to outrage us. It is the responsibility of the leaders to educate the masses that the solution to every problem is not to riot or to destroy. In countries like Egypt, Libya, Yemen, etc. there are millions of uneducated, unemployed, and unmarried youth. This is a volatile combination which leaders of these countries need to address, rather than burning flags and throwing stones at the consulates of other nations (who are their guests). If we truly believe in God and his Prophet (s), then we need to show that in action. Words have no meaning if they are not translated into action.
One can quote numerous examples from the life of the Prophet (s), where he forgave his enemies and did not bother to respond to their criticism. He did not respond to hatred, with hate. In one of the narrated incidents in the life of prophet a person not only tried to verbally insult him but also physical injured him by throwing garbage at him and he not only refused to react, but when that person fell sick, he visited that person to give comfort. I can recall reading another incident from the life of the prophet where a Christian delegation (diplomats) visited him in Medina and they wanted a place to worship during their extended stay. He simply pitched a tent in the mosque and gave them space to pray and worship as they pleased. This is how one should treat diplomats.
The Prophet (s) continued on his mission despite facing insults, injuries and sometime even death threats from his enemies. He did not take anything personally. It is about time, Muslims need to adopt the prophet’s way. We need to outperform everybody in being good, noble, and compassionate in our action & in our reaction to insults like this video.
We deliberated about the need to make sure that if somebody wants to learn about the Prophet (s) he/she is able to find the right information about him. When somebody Googles his name, he finds the objective information about this greatest of human beings. More importantly our day to day actions should reflect our belief in God (The Ultimate Judge of all actions), and all the prophets (including Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad (s), who patiently endured insults from their enemies). Anybody with any common sense who really wants to learn about the life & mission of the Prophet (s) would ask somebody who follows his message, not look for answers in a perverted video.
Editor’s note: S. Syed is from Troy, Michigan, and has gone to Turkey representing the Syrian Medical Association, to distribute medical supplies. He is on the Board of Directors of The Muslim Observer Youth Group.
An internally displaced child living in a police hospital at the Dumar area of the capital, after her family fled the violence in their hometowns due to incessant clashes, in Damascus September 16, 2012. Tens of thousands of Syrians who moved into schools after air strikes and fighting drove them from their homes will be on the move again Sunday when the government plans to start the school year despite unrelenting violence.
REUTERS/Khaled al-Hariri
August 29, 2012–GAZIANTEP, Turkey – A painfully thin Free Syrian soldier from Homs, immobile and unable to eat or drink for weeks, with shrapnel from a blast cutting his trachea; a 4-year old boy with a damaged eye who also lost his sister in the bombing of Azaz; an Aleppan university student and revolutionary fighter recovering from shrapnel wounds and still thinking of ways to deliver supplies to his comrades; an elementary school child whose leg was shattered when a bomb exploded outside his house and blew in his door and whose family was prevented from crossing the border; a Turkish volunteer solider recovering from wounds to his extremities in a room with three Syrian patients who can’t understand him; a school-age Aleppan girl whose eye was damaged in an air raid that cost her six family members, including her parents; these are just some of the casualties of the Syrian conflict currently recovering in a Turkish hospital, and as absurd as it may seem, some may consider these to be the “lucky†ones.
In addition to welcoming tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, Turkey is also treating many wounded Syrians in its hospitals. While field hospitals within Syria receive and treat most Syrian casualties, in cases where supplies are scarce or equipment or expertise is limited, patients make the journey into Turkey. One Syrian doctor in Gaziantep estimates that about 50 Syrian patients are currently being treated just in Gaziantep, with about 20 in the university hospital where he works. “Every couple of days, we discharge a Syrian patient and another one is admitted.†Thousands have been treated across Turkey during the crisis.
Patients are arriving in Turkey with all types of wounds from different sources, including sniper shots, aircraft bombardment, and shrapnel from explosions. In the Gaziantep university hospital, patients with wounds in their limbs or eyes are recovering in rooms of four or two. Those with wounds in their torsos or necks are receiving more critical care in isolation.
Most of the patients arrive from Aleppo and the surrounding northern areas. Previously, patients had been able to arrive from further south, but the regime has cut off many areas in recent weeks. For example, the secret sewer routes used to transport one patient from Homs to Turkey have been reportedly closed down earlier this week.
Sometimes, family members or friends accompany the wounded. In one example, Abu Ahmed accompanied his young son to Turkey for treatment after burying his daughter and other family members lost to the shelling in Azaz. He also makes the rounds to other hospitals where additional family members are being treated. In a striking example of how this conflict is being covered, Abu Ahmed was able to quickly pull up a YouTube video that showed the exact attack and devastation that cost him his home and his loved ones.
Unfortunately, not all patients had the support of loved ones. In one case, a young boy’s family was not allowed to cross the border with him into Turkey. However, in those cases, the other Syrians in the hospitals try to fill the void. “He wants to feel loved,†explained a neighboring Syrian patient, encouraging visitors to at least give the child a hug.
Some of the Syrians being treated in Turkey are active in resisting the regime, but most are children or non-combatants. As they lay in their beds, several patients declared their commitment to the struggle as their friends or family looked on. If their families weren’t resisting the regime before, many are thinking of how to support the revolution now.
In the visual arts, the English word perspective refers to the optical illusion whereby a picture on a flat, two-dimensional plane appears to be three-dimensional; as if the represented objects were actually in a deep space receding behind the picture surface (like looking at them through a window or in a mirror), and in some cases seeming even to project forward in front of the picture. The term itself derives from the Latin participle perspectus of the verb perspicere, meaning “to see through.†While artists in nearly every world culture since the beginning of the human race have sought to create some kind of illusion of visual reality in their image-making, none were so preoccupied with perspective mathematics as the painters of the Italian (and then pan-European) Renaissance. Sometime in the late thirteenth century in central Italy, artists hired to paint frescoes on the walls of the new churches began to conceive of their pictures not as flat patterns in the traditional Romanesque manner, but as if they thought of their painted spaces as framed theatrical proscenia behind which the sacred scenes of the life of Christ and his saints were being acted out. Indeed, these artists may well have been inspired by the plethora of miracle plays performed on street corners, town squares, and even in the portals of churches in cities all overEurope during those intense years of religious uncertainty after the Crusades failed and the papacy fell into schism. Italian painters from Rome (who still remembered ancient wall-painting techniques) and from Florence—including the brilliant Giotto di Bondone (c. 1266/67–1337)—all working in the new basilica dedicated to the recently canonized Saint Francis in the Umbrian town of Assisi (Fig. 1), inadvertently began a revolution that was to radically change the style, and ultimately the content of Western art for the next six hundred years.
These early perspective paintings were simply intent on depicting religious scenes as if they were being acted out before their eyes de naturale, or according to nature.
They even introduced cast shadows and modeling as if the subjects they painted were illuminated on one side and in shade on the other, giving an effect of sculpture in relief. This nascent perspective style is often called empirical to distinguish it from the more systematic mathematization of art that followed in the fifteenth century.
Art historians remain in some disagreement as to whether this early development of perspective from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century was an evolution within the painters’ profession itself, that is, isolated from the ideology and politics of contemporaneous Christian Europe, or whether it was nudged, so to speak, by a remarkable science, ancient to the Greeks and Arabs, but quite new to the Latin West when manuscripts of it were first discovered in Moorish Spain and Sicily after the Christian reconquest in the twelfth century. This science was called, in Greek, optika, that is, optics, which translated into Latin as perspectiva, but having no association yet to the art of painting, later termed perspectiva artificialis to distinguish it from the originalperspectiva naturalis. In fact, the original perspectiva had only to do with explaining the nature of light rays, how they always travel in straight lines, how they are reflected in mirrors, refracted when entering a denser medium, and, especially, how they affect the way the human eye sees.
Perspectiva naturalis was regarded as the special handmaiden of Euclidean geometry, the latter also just revealed in the West in the twelfth century. Since light rays were understood by the ancient Greeks as always radiating from their source in the shape of a pyramid (a three-dimensional triangle), Euclid reasoned that the images framed by them must conform to his fundamental law of similar triangles; for instance, in Fig. 2, if A be the point of light source, and BCD the surface illuminated, then a consistent proportion always exists between the distance of AC from BCD and the relative size of BCD; in other words, AC:BCD as AF:EFG as AI:HIJ, etc. Greek and Arab commentators on Euclid were quick to realize the significance of this in explaining how the images of very large objects can penetrate the tiny pupil of the eye. Let A in Fig. 2 now stand for the human eye, and HIJ the object being observed (Arab commentators liked to use the camel as their example). As the distance AI between these points diminishes to AF and then to AC and so on, the illuminated “camel†will grow ever smaller in proportion until it is finally able to enter the eye and be “seen.â€
Medieval Christian theologians were fascinated by these Greek and Arab revelations. The English bishop Robert Grosseteste (c. 1175–1253) noted that since God created light on the first day (Genesis), he intended to apply the absolute laws of geometry in the creation of the universe. Indeed, he must have formed its tiny shape a priori in his divine mind’s eye and then projected it full-scale into the void, creating the world’s three-dimensional space and volume according to the same Euclidean theorems. In other words, the science of optics seemed to be the very key to the mind of God.
Members of the young Franciscan order, headquartered in the Basilica of their founding saint in Assisi, were especially moved by these ideas, and none more so than his fellow Englishman, Roger Bacon (c. 1220–1292). Bacon’s famous treatise, the Opus majus (Great work), is replete with calls upon Christian leaders to study both Euclidean geometry and perspectiva naturalis as weapons against the Moors. Bacon was particularly intrigued by the way concave mirrors can convert light to heat, and so considered how they might be made to burn Moorish ships! Furthermore, he advised, geometry had application to the visual arts. If only religious pictures of, say, the Ark of Noah and other sacred objects mentioned in Scripture, were represented in the exact scale of their biblical description, Christians would be inspired as never before to renew the holy crusade and retake Jerusalem.
Speculum, Latin for mirror, became almost a synonym for divine revelation during the Middle Ages. Numbers of treatises with titles like Speculum salvationis humanis (Mirror of human salvation) were published everywhere in Christian Europe. Moreover, the technology of manufacturing mirrors was improving at this time, too, particularly in Venice where both flat and convex mirrors of glass began to be manufactured in convenient size, eventually becoming upper-class household items where their reflections might be compared, both actually and symbolically, with painted pictures.
According to medieval optical theory, the eye itself was nothing less than a mirror. The convex lens within the eye was understood (incorrectly, as we now know) to receive and display the minutely scaled image of whatever object is being seen, just as if reflected in a mirror; the image then passed to the optic nerve for cognition in the brain. It should come as no surprise that the next critical development in the history of Renaissance perspective involved comparison to a mirror reflection. It is now generally agreed that the great Florentine architect, engineer, and impresario Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) created the first picture ever to be constructed by adapting the geometric laws of perspectiva naturalis. The fact is that the optical pyramid explains both how a large image can be reduced to scale, and also how a small image might be similarly increased in reverse, in much the way that a modern film projector magnifies a small transparency that becomes enlarged to the same scale when it reaches the screen. Indeed, by this means, God must have formed the universe: first, it was a tiny shape in His divine mind’s eye, and then God projected it full-blown into the void. What Brunelleschi apparently realized is that the eye level of the person looking into a mirror sees not only his or her own eye reflected at that same level, but the edges of other reflected objects parallel to the ground on which the viewer stands, all appearing to converge to “vanishing points†on that same eye-level line. This is referred to as the “horizon†principle (Fig. 3).
In any event, sometime between 1413 and 1425, Brunelleschi did paint a small picture of the Baptistery of Florence as seen from the portal of the Duomo. Unfortunately, this historic painting is lost, but its composition was probably based on a geometric diagram combining mirror principles with certain other traditional measuring techniques employed by land surveyors, and possibly new projection methods inspired by cartography. We may presume the mirror connection because Brunelleschi’s biographer distinctly recalled that his hero demonstrated the first perspective picture by having the viewer hold its back side against one eye, the front side of the picture facing away, then peep through a small hole bored through the back side and see the painted image of the Baptistery on the obverse side reflected in a flat mirror held in the viewer’s other hand (Fig. 4). This was apparently the earliest acknowledgement of the true vanishing point in a perspective picture on line with the artist’s eye from which the depicted scene was imagined, and at which all receding perpendicular edges of objects represented in the picture appear illusionistically to converge.
In 1435 and 1436, the humanist Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), having just returned to Florence after a lifelong exile from the home of his forefathers, was so impressed by the city’s fecund artistic activities that he wrote a treatise, Della pittura (On painting), dedicated to Brunelleschi and other contemporary artists. At the beginning of his book, Alberti advocated that painters must learn geometry if they are to be successful; he even spelled out the basic Euclidean definitions of point, line, and plane, and then proposed a simple geometric optical formula for laying out a perspective picture, perhaps a simplified codification of Brunelleschi’s method. (See the sidebar for Alberti’s textual explanation with accompanying illustrations.) Rather than comparing his system to a mirror, he likened it to looking through a window fixed with a gridwork of strings (Fig. 6). “Alberti’s window†has since become the metaphor of Western civilization’s concept of linear perspective, that is, perspective determined only by drawn lines signifying edges of things seen that converge or recede toward a single horizon.
Why was linear perspective so unique to Western civilization? As argued above, the advent of artificial linear perspective in the West had much to do with an idealized geometry that seemed to reveal the workings of God’s mind, and thus, when applied to the making of holy pictures, should reenergize Christian faith. Perhaps it was no coincidence that the very first monumental painting to be constructed according to Brunelleschi’s perspective had as its subject the Holy Trinity (Fig. 5), a large fresco depicting near-life-size figures on the nave wall of the Church of Santa Maria Novella painted c. 1425 by his friend Masaccio (1401–1428). This picture was certainly an attempt to convince Christian viewers that the most metaphysical mystery in all Christian theology could actually be manifested in physical form before their very eyes.
Some present-day scholars, nonetheless, still maintain that Masaccio’s Trinity, as well as Renaissance perspective from the very beginning, were secular reactions to medieval religiosity. Hubert Damisch, for example, thinks its advent is better explained ahistorically, by means of postmodern structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis (Damisch, 1994). In any case, by the sixteenth century, artists and their aristocratic patrons were showing less interest in applying perspective to uplifting religious pictures than to the revival of pagan antiquity. Indeed, instead of elevating human eyes to an intensified contemplation of the divine, Alberti’s window had actually succeeded in bringing heaven down to earth, revealing more materiality than spirituality in its ethereal essence. Even angels were henceforth transmogrified as secular solids, rigid Euclidean volumes that raised questions as to how they could convincingly appear to take flight. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), beginning his career as a teacher of perspective at the Florentine Academy of Art, grew so expert that he built his own optical telescope in order to observe the moon. With an eye long nurtured by artificial perspective, especially from drawing shades and shadows of spherical solids, he was able to discern what no one in the world had ever understood before: that the lunar surface was covered not with mysterious supernatural blotches, but high mountains and low valleys catching sunlight and casting shadows—just like the Alpine region of northern Italy. In the long run, linear perspective’s most important contribution to Western art has been to its technology rather than its aesthetics. Even more importantly, it changed not just the way we draw pictures, but how we can actually see what we draw—but that’s another story.
Other “Perspectivesâ€
Although every human being (of whatever ethnicity) experiences the natural visual illusion of parallel edges—like roadsides or railroad tracks—appearing to converge toward a point as they approach the horizon, it is not natural to reproduce this illusion in pictures. In other words, while everybody sees the same phenomenon in reality, no one, no matter how artistically talented, is innately predisposed to picture it (except, remarkably, certain autistic prodigies). Perspective is a technique that generally must be learned. Therefore there is no reason to believe that nature rather than nurture had anything to do with why artists in other ages and cultures did not pursue the “realism†preferred in the West. Young children do instinctively make pictures from a number of viewpoints simultaneously, as in Fig. 7, a drawing by Anna, a five-year-old Ukrainian girl. Notice how she shows the trees and hammock in schematic side view but, because she wants to indicate her mother lying inside the hammock, depicts her posed as teetering on the edge; it is as if her mother is now imagined as being viewed from above. Until the infusion of Euclidean geometry and optics in the arts of western Europe during the early Renaissance, no artists anywhere had cultural need to have their pictures replicate the optics of single-viewpoint vision, and almost all the conventions they employed for signifying solid form and distant space—even in the most sophisticated art of the pre-Renaissance West and all other non-Western cultures—evolved from similar expressions found in the instinctive art of children.
This does not mean that non-perspectival pictures should be labeled “childlike†in the sense of being primitive (or inferior) to the Western style. Quite the contrary. Multiple viewpoints and other innate pictorial signifiers, such as placing nearby figures and objects at the bottom of the picture surface and those more distant at the top, have been refined into some of the most aesthetically beautiful and stylish painting in all art history. Manuscript illumination in medieval Persia is a fine example (Fig. 8). Interestingly, while medievalIslam possessed Greek optics, including Euclidean geometry, long before the West—with Muslim philosophers even adding their own commentary—Muslim painters never applied optics to art, and only used geometry for the creation of elaborate abstract designs in their magnificent architecture.
Artists in China and Japan, on the other hand, refined two perspective conventions that had naught to do with optical geometry. (Euclid was unknown in the Far East until the seventeenth century.) One method was a kind of axonometric projection whereby rectilinear objects were drawn as if their perpendicular sides were set at an angle, just as in Western perspective, but with their parallel edges remaining parallel and never converging (Fig. 9). The other convention, called aerial or atmospheric perspective, provided an effective illusion of distant landscape simply through the tonality of color. Far-off mountains, for instance, were painted in hazy gray or blue in contrast to the brighter colors of nearer foreground objects, thus creating an ideal complement to the Chinese predilection for philosophic contemplation. During the Renaissance, atmospheric perspective was also explored by Western artists, notably Leonardo da Vinci.
