Theology is the entry of the philosophical mind-set (i.e “mind productions”) into the domain of religion. It’s cost /benefit ratio is probably nil i.e. the costs( over-riding the need for actual spiritual experience and mysticism in favour of mental gymnastics) is at least as onerous as its benefits- at least when well-done (providing clarity in one’s formulation of beliefs- on which to base one’s behaviour.) Much unnecessary confusion and conflict has been generated by this form of activity!For best effect, it needs to be detoxified by actual spiritual experience-of one sort or another. Salaams,Sufi Ibrahim
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Husn Al Dhann and Radical Positivity!
Husn Al Dhann (having a good opinion) is a much vaunted Islamic virtue. It is based mostly on the Quranic ayat 49:12 where we are encouraged to “avoid suspicion” and to not back bite. However, most of the scholars go well beyond the text and encourage us to have a good opinion both of our Lord and our fellow man. Noble aspiration, no doubt! In this article, we will go into the idea of Husn Al Dhann regarding our Lord. As I mentioned in my previous article on this subject having universally and systematically a good opinion of man seems to fly in the face of much life experience and even of the Quran and hadith themselves. So let’s stick to our Creator for now.If we return again to the Quran 2:30 we find the angels, who are created to be obedient, objecting to Allah’s creation of man. “Wilt thou place therein one who will make mischief therein and shed blood?’ They are truly clairvoyant! Ever noticed the veracity of their prediction lol?! They see what is going to happen on Earth, as we also can now see it, and protest! So what does Allah respond? “I know what you know not”. And as opposed to most people they do not argue back lol. They submit! Wouldn’t it be nice if men wee like that-submitting immediately to the Truth?! But don’t hold your breath. For the Quran itself tells us that ‘insan’ is disputatious. He keeps arguing his opinion no matter what Truth is put forward-most of the time anyway.
Most of us, unfortunately, are still in the state of the angels before Allah’s clarification. So there is a serious level of hypocrisy going on-even in the hearts of the believers?! They say they have a good opinion of Allah and His creation but as soon as things go wrong, they assume that Allah has made a mistake! Estagfirullah. The examples of this are legion: “This child should not have died so early”; “This car accident should never have happened”; “This war is a mistake”. The examples in our minds and hearts are multiple. We want to be the correctors of Allah. WE know better! Allah should conform to our beliefs rather than to HIS Wisdom. The believers, at least, don’t formulate it that way since it sounds wrong but once you get into the nitty-gritty you will see that is what they are thinking!.
So what is the opposite point of view? It is that Allah is in charge. Everything is happening from His Will and with His permission. No exceptions! Then we must submit. But instead our nafs rebels “This( (the war in Ukraine, the killing of American children in their schools, the establishment of the state of Israel, the American invasion of Iraq-take your choice. It’s all a big mistake! It shouldn’t be” it screams mostly inside our heads.
Btw one of the groups that understands this point well are the Advaita Vedantists. We do not agree with most of their theology but on this point they are spot on. Here is a quote from one of their great teachers, the American Robert Adams -who was a direct disciple of Ramana Maharshi, a remarkable Hindu saint “Nothing is wrong. Everything is right just the way it is.(“I know what you know not” says Allah) Do not try to figure it out Leave it alone(tawakuul in our language) And also.” Be aware of yourself, always(muraqaba).The world goes through its own karma(the Divine plan) It has absolutely nothing to do with you. You belong to God( ina lillahi) Everything you see is God (wahadat al wujud).What a ‘hal’ this man possessed. We need to learn from this!
So let me begin to lay out an alternative approach beginning with a few anecdotes. The first involves a defrocked psychoanalyst who gave up on his practice, finding that the results were few and far between. Instead he developed a very successful program for schizophrenics called “Case Management” In that program instead of using expensive, over-trained mental health professionals, people with a simple university bachelor’s degree were hired to be available(read humans as opposed to the professionals lol) on a full-time basis, a bit like parents)and to respond as needed instead of during office hours with long-delayed appointments-the usual M.O. of health care systems. They were assigned to have 6-8 people to watch over and help in a practical way over a period of time. The results were so remarkable that this program became the standard of care in most mental health systems-at least those that were front-line and competent!
But the real point of this story is what the psychoanalyst responded when asked by a member of the audience whether his psychoanalytic experience had been of any use whatsoever. And he responded: “What I learnt from my psychoanalytic therapy was to be brutally honest with myself” Can we, as believers, say the same thing? Do we have the same capacity for self-observation as this psychiatrist. If we do, then we will acknowledge that we are regularly opposing the actions of Allah .i.e. Reality!
Before we address some possible remedies to this situation let me tell you another story-the story of Sheikh Hashimi. Before he passed on the great sheikh and Sufi Ahmad Al Alawi named muqaddams(representatives) to be assigned to most of the surrounding Arab countries. Representatives were sent to Morocco and Tunisia a nd Syria amongst others. And the representative he sent to Syria was an Algerian man named Muhammad al Hashimi. For those who are cognizant of the world of Sufi silsilas(chains of transmission) Sheikh Hashimi was the sheikh of Abdur Rahman Shaghouri who was the sheikh of Sheikh Nuh.
Sheikh Hashimi was well beloved of the Syrians. When he died after 40 years of teaching them and serving them, they were missing him and so they went to his “khadim*(servant) and asked him what he remembered of Sheikh Hashimi’s teachings. He responded: “I only learnt one thing from the sheikh but it sufficed me for my entire Life”! “Only one thing .During fourty years of service?!” They were astounded but asked the inevitable follow-up question: “Alright, So what was that one thing?” “Fi kooli shay khareen”(In every thing there is goodness).A fitting explanation if not a complete one, to the ayat where Allah tells us that He knows what we do not. That there is goodness in everything-A Divine Plan and Divine Wisdom!
Before we get to the solution to this dilemma, let me tell you one more story-from my pre-Islamic days. I got into my real spiritual search somewhere in the early seventies while I was still a Marxist -albeit an unconvinced one(discernment even then lol).I read a lot and visited where I could. One of my earliest visits(1973 I believe) was to Ojai ,California to see Krishnamurti, I was hoping to connect with a fellow psychiatrist named Shainberg I believe but Allah had other, more relevant plans in mind.
Instead, I met with an “ordinary Joe” American. I asked him what he was doin g there (seemed so out of place) and then he told me his story .He was a Korean war veteran.(It is 1973 so the Korean war had finished 20 years earlier.)It was the worst possible situation. In the trenches- filled with mud and dead bodies and blood and gore. You can just imagine or maybe you can’t! And then he was hit by an artillery shell of the Communists. At that moment the sky opened up and he saw another scene of battle but that one was Luminous and Glorious and Ecstatic! In that dimension everything made sense and more. Then he lost consciousness.
When he awoke, he was in intense pain from the wound he had incurred. He required constant pulmonary drainage and opiates and round the clock nursing! But he survived. It was now 20 years later and he was still looking to retrieve his “hal”(spiritual state) that he had experienced in Korea. That is why he came to see Krishnamurti. Amazing, eh?
So now, after all that preamble ,we get to the heart of the matter. How do we stop disputing with our Lord and begin accepting His Will- not in theory but in actual practice. I have a few recommendations and perhaps together we can discover more. Inshallah. So this is the program I propose for arriving at Husn Al Dhann which is also “rida” (acceptance) and “tawakuul” (trust in Allah.
1- First let us remember the famous statement of Ali Jemal r.a. of Fes “Everything to you is from you” i.e. it is a specific response to your situation, your actions, your educational needs, your merits and defects. Nothing is random! Everything is purposeful! That is what Allah is saying when he states that He knows what the angels do not!
When the horrible tsunami hit East Asia in 2004 I saw an Islamic scholar on public television saying: “this is just a geological event(tectonic plates moving) not a theological one”! I couldn’t believe my ears! Does he not understand in any way the workings of our Lord?! Clearly not.
As is my habit, I then started researching what was going on in those areas.The worst hit places turned out to be Aceh province in Indonesia and the Tamil areas of Sri Lanka. Aha! In both places there were civil wars going on. Clearly not pleasing to Allah who encourages us in the Quran itself to accept all peoples and nations. Then the Earthquake hit Pakistan in Muzaffarabad and Belokot in 2005.What do you know?! Al Qaida was organizing in those areas. According to the Indian army sources, they still are! Could that be the reason for these disasters? Only Allah knows but it would be reasonable to arrive at those conclusions. Just remember, nothing is random.
The same is true on a personal level. But most people don’t want to go there. The “bala”(misfortune) is either a consequence of some bad behaviour or a stimulus to growth through the purification effect of suffering. Admittedly not always obvious which of the two it is!
When Muhammad Ali may Allah be pleased with his efforts and sincerity was asked if he thought his Parkinsonism was a consequence of his boxing career he answered humbly: “No. I made a grave mistake in saying ‘I am the Greatest’ when the only great One is my Lord. This is the consequence!” Humble man. Mashallah. So whenever something “negative” occurs to you, look deeply into yourself. Is there anything you did wrong? If so, ask forgiveness and begin correcting it. If not, praise the Lord for elevating you still higher.
2-Ask yourself “What is good in this apparent evil?” What is the silver lining in the cloud?” How can I see this as the glass half-full rather than half-empty?” Hamza Yusuf tells the story of a Moroccan man who had a stroke and was paralyzed on one side of his body. When people would meet him, he would point to the side that was still working and say something like: “Look how merciful is Allah. He left me with this entire side that works” Or the story of the great wali of the Tablighi people, Maulana Zakariah, who was dying of terminal stage 4 cancer and saying on his deathbed: “Ya Karim’, Ya Karim” These are very high levels of faith but we can take learnings from these examples.
3-Think about how it could have been worse. A few years ago, I had a knee injury. When I finally got to a competent orthopedist, he diagnosed me with an “insufficiency fracture”- something I had never heard of in medical school. He told me I had to take all pressure of the knee(i.e. I needed to sit for salat) and it would cure itself over several months .Which is exactly what happened! I thought to myself: “Thank God it wasn’t progressive osteoarthritis as the G.P. had thought because then I would be looking at a knee-replacement(very painful!) down the road. Don’t feel too bad! I am not always that good about my Husn Al Dhann lol.
My father when he was still alive would taunt people with the statement:” We have the best weather in the world here in Montreal”. People would think he was crazy! “What?! – the terrible cold and snowstorms in the winter and the hot ,muggy days of the summer! How could you say that?” He would answer” We don’t have hurricanes, we don’t have volcanoes. Tornadoes are very rare and we have almost no earthquakes. What’s a blizzard in the winter. You hunker down for a day. Then you take out your shovel the next day and you’re good to go”.
As you watch the weather trends nowadays, you can’t help thinking that he had a point. The massive heat waves in southern USA, the hurricanes in Florida and the West Coast, the drought in the mid-West and the wildfires in California and the West Coast! We are doing pretty well in Montreal lol.( For the nit-pickers and naysayers and contradiction detectors -the people I love to hate lol-yes there was an ice-storm in 1998 that did considerable damage-not many deaths however. The exception that proves the rule.
So my father was practicing Husn Al Dhann about the weather. He would have been shocked to learn that he was performing an act of piety lol. Like the time I caught him resonating with the Hare Krishna crowd at Philip’s Square! “But Dad I thought you don’t believe in religion” I said. “I Know. But I like this music. It gets to me” Too bad he didn’t go further in his spiritual quest!
4- Seeing the compassion in the pain. You have a chronic pain condition. But it comes and goes. Your skin is burning and itching. But then it disappears enough for you to get a decent sleep. Your money is running out. And suddenly a source of ‘risq’ occurs. None of this was predictable. None of it even makes sense! If you have no cartiledge at the knee joint or between the vertebrae why does the pain come and go?! Shouldn’t it be there all the time. No doctor can explain that. It is from the Mercy of Allah. And He is micromanaging our experience on a moment by moment basis. See if you can observe it!
5-What is this difficult experience designed to teach you. There is almost always a heuristic component to every hardship. I remember a social worker who told me about ending up in the hospital with acute appendicitis. Only then did she realize she was in an abusive relationship and needed to get out. Or the Kashmiri businessman from Sri Nagar who found out that his partner was emptying the cash register every night which led to the bankrupcy of their enterprise. He came running to the Naqshbandi Mujaddid sheikh in Gutlibagh(Mir Alam) and said that was the best decision of his life.
So “hold your horses” before saying “this shouldn’t be”, exercise self -restraint and above all remeber:”fi kulli shay khairin(in everything is goodness) and praise the Lord. Alhumdulillah Rabbil Alamin. May Allah help us all in this challenging task of having a good opinion of His actions-always!
Addendum: The “elephant in the room” here is doubt! “Shakk”-the fifth klesa if you wish. The doubt comes from us believing in what is in our minds rather than in what Allah is doing. It is the cause of much of our errors and most of our anxiety! The only way to deal with it is to become acutely aware of it and to defuse it with tawakuul as soon as it comes up.
As Muslims we know the story of our Prophet saws with Abu Bakr Siddiq in the cave as they are fleeing to Madina. Abu Bakr r.a. is worrying(i.e. doubting), for one of the few times, about the safety of our Prophet saws who responds;” Are you not aware that Allah is with us on this journey” the Noble One explains. If Abu Bakr.one of the great ones, the Siddiq has doubts ,what about us.
The opposite of doubt is certitude -“Yaqin” but that is a very high state in Reality. As mentionned in the article most believers have that certainty in theory. But in Reality ,especially when being tested, that is another matter.So let us continue working on it.! Inshallah. Sufi Ibrahim
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Study,Schmudy-The Wrong Paradigm
Preamble: I touched upon this same theme in my first writings for Islamica Magazine. This article was republished in my latest book “Understanding Life: Insights Spiritual and Worldly” available from Amazon in a chapter called “The Modern Institution as Obsessional Personality” So I have been interested in this problem for a long time. If your interest is piqued here you can look up the chapter in the book via Amazon or your local library or order it online at this same blogsite. Happy reading!
in C.J. Jung in an article entitled “Psychology and the East” made the following profound statement: “Many scientific-minded persons have even sacrificed their religious and philosophical leanings for fear of uncontrolled subjectivism.(i.e. they have succumbed to the modernist disease of Empiricism).. By way of compensation for the loss of a world that pulsed with our blood and breathed with our breath (i.e. had a spiritual dimension to it!), we have developed an enthusiasm for facts-mountains of facts far beyond any single individual’s (or group for that matter)power to survey. We have the pious(hardly pious lol) hope that this incidental accumulation of facts will form a meaningful whole” Spot on! Although this was written more than fifty years ago, the intellectual élite of our times, let alone the common people, have still not caught on?!
So, whenever there is a serious problem, our institutions launch a “study”! That is going to solve the problem ,they believe. But does it? Look at the last 50 years of history and see if that hypothesis is true. Most of us have heard of Einstein’s definition of insanity lol: “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result” lol. By that definition, all of our modern institutions are insane! What else is new?
Let me give you a couple of examples close to home. I got my medical licence in 1972! At that same time the Canadian government introduced socialized medicine-Medicare if you wish. In Quebec we now call it the RAMQ -Régie de L’Assurance Maladie de Québec. Since 1972 when I first graduated ,each year has seen a decrement in service. From when I started, I could go to the E.R. and be seen in less than an hour each time (no,n ot as a doctor, as an ordinary citizen)No one waited more than an hour in a clinic and doctors were easy to find in every specialty. Now the waiting time in an E.R. in Montreal can easily go to 18 hours! Many specialties are almost totally unavailable and if you don’t call the walk-in clinic at the moment their reception services open and not a minute later, you don’t get an appointment.
But we have the solution, no? .A good study?! Studies have been done ad nauseum. Experts have been convened ,committees have ben formed over and over again by governments on all sides of the political spectrum, data -piles and piles of data -just as Jung described have been amassed. Commissions of Enquiry, even a Royal Commission(the queen of all studies) on a Federal level .Has that helped?! Not at all.
So what is going on? Are these people running these studies and Commissions just stupid?! I don’t think so. Are they simply corrupt and greedy?! May be but still doesn’t explain the phenomenon. Something is awry. The paradigm is wrong. T he M.O. of problem-solving is ineffective. Before we get into analyzing why that may be, let me give you another telling example.
In the 80’s I was still working in a large institution -the Douglas Hospital-a teaching hospital connected with McGill University. A position had been vacated and a new administrative doctor was required to fill it. It was a high-status position. And we had an ambitious candidate from the Western part of Canada who was eager to take it on and make it into a world-class research center. He came to the hospital for 1 day, met with some of the nursing and medical staff from various departments and gave us his report the next day. In that brief time he had identified most of the major problems at the hospital and had some ideas as to how we could correct them!
But the hospital was run at the time by an MBA type who was not satisfied with such a subjective approach?! So he hired a comsultation firm. After 6 months and $300,000 fees (approximately) they handed in their report-full of data ,graphs charts, demographics etc,,etc. I didn’t recognize our institution in that report! For all it said, they could have been studying any company or even the city administration. The heart of the matter had been totally missed! So what is going on here?
This entire approach to problem-solving is defective and wrong! Reams of data ,statistical analysis and “management science” theoretical formulae will never get to the core of the matter. And this is true whether it is about the functioning of a medical institution, controlling a pandemic or countering climate change. Simply put ,it doesn’t work. We have enough evidence by now for that conclusion.
So what is the alternative?! If we go back to some of my writings on Epistemology, we will see that we need inner vision, proper ,as opposed to biased and self-interested, hearing, insight and intuition. That is what the visiting doctor brought to the table without formulating it as such and that is what the management consultants missed.
Now ,sometimes the solution is right in front of us. Let us go back to the first example-that of the medical system. There are medical systems that work far better than the Canadian one. The last time I looked ,Canada was second to last in the performance of our medical system. Only our neighbours to the south (remember, the exceptional ones lol) ranked lower than us! But if one looks into the U.N. reports ,the same countries are always near the top of the list-the Scandinavian ones. Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. Norway, Denmark, Finland and Sweden. Occasionally you will see a country like Switzerland or France?! near the top but they are outliers,
So why do we not learn from them?Are our politicians with all their studies not aware of this? A public servant I once treated told me confidentially that they have all this information .Are we simply too proud?! I think that may well be part of it. Are the political calculations getting in the way? Could be. Our Prime Minister Legault once mentioned that the Medical Syndicates were more powerful than the mafias?! So are they intimidated by them? Are they afraid it would be too expensive? Actually the Scandinavian countries are spending LESS/capita than Canada on their medical services.
Not an easy puzzle to figure out why none of this is happening. But one thing for sure. The people who are leading us are not looking at the Reality square in the face. They are not being transparent. And they often, in fact, seem confused. Their hold on reality is tenuous at best. Their only solution seems to be to throw more money at the problem.
One more anecdote from my experience with the medical system -just to show you how perverse it can be. By the 80’s when I was working as a teaching psychiatrist in one of the Douglas Hospital’s satellite clinics ,it was already obvious that there was a serious problem in our E.R,s. The Minister of Health at the time was the respected psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Camille Laurin. He decided to visit ta select group of E.R.s in Montreal to see what was happening. I couldn’t believe what happened next. The hospitals designated for inspection were given 48 hours notice! By the time Dr. Laurin got there, they had cleaned up the mess and there were very few people in the waiting room. Dr. Laurin concluded that everything was fine.
“There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark”‘.Dr. Laurin was no simpleton. People who worked with him said he was brilliant. So he must have known what was going on !Now we need to change the name in the famous Shakespearian quote from Denmark to Canada lol! Something rotten in the state of Canada-or at least Quebec! Denmark has it’s medical situation more or less under control by now.
So what is the bottom line? We need to change our paradigm of problem-solving. It has to be simpler, it has to involve people and their front-line experiences, we need politicians who are courageous and visionary -real leaders not bureaucrats and manipulators and people-pleasers. We need a totally new approach! Otherwise, these problems will just increase and increase as they are doing right now and condemn us to self-destruction on a global sc ale.But I am not by any means sure that this is in the Divine plan. Especially since none of our current leaders believe in the Divine planÉ! .Despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary they still believe they are in control. Witness the World Economic Forum and the Great Reset if you need more proof! May God make it easy on us because our leaders surely won’t!
Stop Objecting!
Stop Objecting!
Had a dream last nite. I was in a room full of people and I noticed something special. Everyone was objecting! Ajib! Not only to what I was saying but to each other as well. Be careful,now! I can hear your psychoanalytic minds objecting already.”That’s your dream,Ibrahim.So the rest is projection onto us” Wrong! It’s an issue for everyone so hold on and hear me out. Control your objections for once lol.
So, IWW ( My least favourite acronym lol. I was wrong).The educational system does teach critical thinking or should we call it more accurately “reflex criticism thinking”! Just watch the mainstream media(CNN for example).You can see the journalists just looking for a chance to catch their interviewees on an error or a contradiction! That’s how they earn their living! You can also see this in couples and between parents and children. And sometimes even between friends-now the most protected majority. You can criticize your parents, your teachers, your politicians, your priests but don’t criticize friends. They are your true allies?! Really?!
Saw a television report a few weeks ago about a local high-school teacher who was proud of teaching “critical thinking”. When the interviewer questioned the students ,they, too, were proud to say that they were critical of climate change deniers and vaccine-hesitant people and people who were not comfortable with the LGBTQ2 movement! That is not “critical -thinking?! That is sheep-like behaviour. The woke movement incarnate.
In any case, we don’t need critical thinking! We need “discerning” thinking. Being able to discern right from wrong, good from bad, truth from falsehood. That is what is required to get back on track. Not echo-chamber objections. And that ‘discerning thinking” is sorely lacking in this relativistic, individualistic consensus-driven culture.
So yes, men are men and women are women. Arabs are like this and Jews are like that , Germans are like this and Brits are like that. Canadian winters are brutally cold and Yemen is brutally hot! Get used to it. Stop objecting. That is the way God created it!
While still a Marxist?! I came across this passage in the Gospels. I was shocked myself. ”How could a man of God possibly say this/” My mind objected! But after observing the world and all the attempts by authoritarian governments to eliminate poverty (think Soviet Union and Mao’s China) I realized that Jesus a.s. was right! Get used to it. There is wisdom therein.
Jesus Anointed at Bethany
6 While Jesus was in Bethany in the home of Simon the Leper, 7 a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, which she poured on his head as he was reclining at the table.
8 When the disciples saw this, they were indignant. “Why this waste?” they asked. 9 “This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor.”
10 Aware of this, Jesus said to them, “Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me. 11 The poor you will always have with you,[a] but you will not always have me. 12 When she poured this perfume on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial. 13 Truly I tell you, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”
So, getting back to the modern world, whenever in a group or individual setting, one person states the Truth,10 people stand up to object. Because they don’t have that idea in their own minds. Then they justify their objections with rationality and logic(that’s a great way to get to Truth lol).Btw, why are they doing that?1 Because they want Reality to conform to how they think it should be. So ,they object-like the angels in surat al Baqara. And what does Allah answer?”I know what you know not”i.e. there is a plan and a positive purpose to everything.
Yes, everything! The young child who gets killed in the crossfire of gang-related violence( may Allah spare us such tragedy!, the Covid pandemic, the Ukraine War. It all has a purpose. Get used to it. Reality ain’t what you think it should be.
So, what do we do instead? Instead of objecting, we accept. Like when Sheikh Nazim used to ask: ”Are you accepting”. The answer is “yes, we are accepting” So try that out. Take a few situations in your life that you don’t like and practice accepting. You will be surprised at the results and the benefits.
Now, I don’t want to leave the pragmatists feeling abandoned lol,! They are the people who now ask: ”So what do we do about it? Accept AND adapt. Behave accordingly rather than disputing Reality. Canada is cold! Get a good winter jacket lol. Yemen is hot. Find shelter in thick-walled structures. Men are often unaware of the subtleties of relationships; women are often emotionally overwrought .Factor that into your behaviour.Stop the”blame, shame and humiliation”(C.F. Ed Hallowell).Adapt.Work with the Reality rather than against it. That is the way to success. May Allah be with you and remember” He knows what he is doing” lol Stop objecting to His acts. You will feel a lot better, believe me. Salaams, Ibrahim.
Mystic Medicine Interview podcast
Have a listen to this interview with my old friend .naturopath and Sufi Rehan Zaidi
The Trump Issue
The Trump issue! What is the bottom line?! This is how I see it. What is worse- an obviously corrupt individual like Trump or the deeply corrupted, perverse and biased institutions like the FBI, the FDA,the CDC, the NIH and the DOJ?! Any thinking individual who is not stuck in his own Puritanical and woke bigotry should be able to see that the latter has been and still is a much more serious threat to the nation than one individual like Donald.
In terms of specifics, there should be no doubt in any thinking person’s mind that the last election was stolen! Not in the way that the Trump people think of it- as ballot stuffing and destruction or the 10,000 mules but simply in terms of the FBI investigations and persecutions. There should’ be no doubt in anyone’s mind that the overinvestigation of Trump( Russia collusion et al) and the under investigation of Hunter Biden, his father and previously Hilary Clinton led to Trumps election defeat in 2020.In that sense alone, the election was stolen!!And it was stolen by forces that are much more toxic and perverse than Donald could ever be?!
To add to this issue and give it context, this abuse of Truth is now immanent in almost every single major government institution. Amongst other things it has led to the complete mismanagement of the Covid crisis from its inception in U.S. laboratories as “gain of function” research to its illicit transfer to the Wuhan lab to the denial of early treatment and dishonest risk/benefit analysis of the vaccines. All of this has led to millions of unnecessary deaths worldwide! The list goes on and on… But there should be no doubt about the most important conclusion ” The erosion of democratic institutions from the initial benevolent intent to the wildly manipulated outcomes they have become is a MUCH,MUCH bigger problem that Trump could ever be! And the fact that most people still don’t see this is just a proof of how the manipulation of minds and hearts has been so successful and so corrosive! May God help us all! Salaams,Ibrahim
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Climate Change Update
Climate Change- “The Fear Porn” Persists”
As we watch , in horror, the wildfires in Yosemite National Park and British Columbia, the record heat in Great Britain and the heat waves in Spain and Portugal, it is easy to feel desperate and overwhelmed. That is exactly what the media and the government want! The media love it because it is spectacular and makes for good ratings and the government loves it because it allows them to have more control over the population. But what is the reality?! Is it as dire as they claim?! Are we all doomed to perdition as the powers to be would like us to believe?! And perhaps most important of all “Are all these perturbations man-made?!”
Good news! More and more people are beginning to question the official narrative. There have always been dissenting voices like Henrik Svensmark, the astrophysicist from Denmark who believes climate change has more to do with Cosmic Rays and Nir Shaviv , physicist from Israel, who points out that the geological record indicates that climate has been changing up and down since the beginning of the Earth’s existence! Often changes more extreme than those we are currently experiencing. Then there is David Collum all-purpose intellectual lol from Columbia who writes an annual report for the Peak Prosperity website. These people have been questioning the narrative for a long time!
But recently two important books have come out that turn the entire narrative upside down. The first is called “Unsettled” by Steven Koonin. Dr. Koonin was a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech-one of the leading engineering schools in the country and then went on to become Undersecretary of Science in the Obama administration. So we are not talking about lightweights and conspiracy theorists here. We are talking about credible scientists who are willing to step out of their professional bubbles and echo-chambers and say ”One moment ,here! The science is by no means settled”. In fact science is never settled. There is no such thing as consensus in science. It is always being debated and always moving forward! “Consensus” is a political concept not a scientific one!.
Dr. Koonin’s book is certainly valid and well thought-out. But it is too cautious and overly-detailed to be of use to most laymen.
So the book I would like to focus on is that by the geologist Gregory Wrightstone. called “Inconvenient Facts” IMHO equally authoritative to the other scientists previously mentioned but more succinct and to the point. All of his points are derived from credible scientific and institutional sources. I will organize them in bullet-point fashion to make it as user-friendly as possible
• Carbon Dioxide is NOT the primary greenhouse gas. Water vapour is. It determines 60-90 % of the greenhouse effect!
• CO2 is absolutely necessary for plant growth. Its reduction is much more dangerous than its increase!
• Our current geological period has the lowest CO2 levels in the history of the Earth.
• Michael Mann’s hockey-stick graph so promoted by Al Gore’s documentaries is bogus! ”We now know that the hockey-stick is fraudulent” Dr. Micheal Fox, Professor of Chemistry at Idaho State University. ”Michael Mann’s hockey stick has indeed been substantially discredited” Dr. Hamish Campbell ,New Zealand Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences.
• The Medieval Warming period (1000-1400 A.D). reached temperatures considerably higher than present days!
• The current warming trend began in the mid-!7th century at least 200 years before any contribution of man to the carbon imprint!
• Temperatures have been changing for 800,000 years! The periods of glaciation last for 70,000- 125,000 years. The interglacial warming periods last for 10-15,000 years. We are currently 11,000 years into an interglacial ;period. We could enter an ice Age at any point. And that would be far more catastrophic than any warming trend.(I have heard Dr. Svensmark say the same thing as well as other scientists who have been denounced for pointing these things out!)
• The last interglacial period(about 120,000 years ago ) was 8 degrees C warmer than currently. The polar bears survived and the Greenland ice cap was only reduced by 25%)
• For 6,100 of the last 10,000 years, it was warmer than today!
• For most of the Earth’s history it was 10 degrees C warmer than today!
• The 97 % consensus of scientists mentioned by John Cook in his 2013 article entitled “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature” is bogus and fraudulent. He manipulated and misrepresented the data to further his climate activism. David Legates in a 2015 paper in Science Education reviewed the data and came to the conclusion that only 0.3% of the abstracts endorsed man-made global warming as they defined it.From 97% to 0.3% ?! If anyone still believes in scientific objectivity they need to seriously re-examine their convictions lol,.
• The Earth over the last 25 years has been growing greener! 25-50% of the Earth’s surface has been showing significant greening while only 4% has been browning This according to NASA satellite data!
• Hurricane frequency has been declining for 250 years!
• There are more polar bears now than we have had for 50 years! And they are thriving-even in areas where the ice is diminishing!
• Antartica has 90% of the worlds land-based ice mass. Most of the continent is cooling and its ice-mass is increasing!(bet you never heard that one lol)
• And so much more…..Have a look at the book ”Inconvenient Facts” for more information and supporting data
• So what is happening? How could this be?! We are being manipulated on so many levels. Just like the ever-oft repeated mantra “Vaccines are safe and effective” about the Covid vaccine. The other mantra we hear is “Climate change is due to man-made effects from burning fossil fuels’. I don’t beiieve that any more! I consider it fear-mongering and the policies it is engendering by governments are largely counter-productive and harmful.
• Personally, I do believe we are experiencing climate change. But it is mostly a natural occurrence due to the change in the energy of the sun! And ultimately due to our Lord.It is human hubris, yes pride, to believe we can be so powerful! What to do?!Get right with your Lord.He will take care of it if you do.! There is absolutely no way our governments are going to solve this problem! Especially when they are working with the wrong diagnosis?!
Salaams,Ibrahim
Three Approaches to Ramadan Fasting
Asalamu aleykum, brothers and sisters. I have noticed over the years that fasters break down into three basic categories, the last one being the least popular but the most recommended. What else is new? The most common being the worst! So what are the three?
1-The Deniers affectionately known as the “mu mishkila “(What me worry?) people . I met those people first in Damascus. The political situation was horrid. The tension was palpable in the air. But when you brought it up, without attempting to blame anyone, you got “the mu mishkila ” response. “We have some of the finest Islamic scholars in the world”(True). “We have some great Sufi tariqats-“True! What could possibly go wrong.?! Well, we all know where that led to- catastrophe! 100’s of thousands killed, millions displaced! Now, I am not saying the denial led to the catastrophe .But it certainly didn’t help. And once you are in denial, thus ignoring the cause, there is no way out! But catastrophe.
And now we have Zelensky of the Ukraine doing the same thing. The Americans warned him! “They are planning an invasion” they told him (There were already 150,000 troops at his doorstep) “What invasion. Don’t say that!” He reproached the Americans for their realism. And look where that led?!Deniers pay a very heavy price for their temporary delusional relief.
Now how does this play out with the fasting process? In many Muslim societies but especially amongst the Arab societies you get the following narrative: “Fasting, it’s so easy for me. I do everything I usually do except I don’t eat” Easy-peasy. Really?! Well, first it’s their wives that out them: “Ahmad is in such a foul mood all the time he is fasting.” And its their bosses “My employees make so many more mistakes during this month”. What?! I thought it was so easy for them.
The first person that alerted me to this problem was a French-Canadian lady whose husband worked for the Canadian embassy in Morocco. They regularly noticed that their Moroccan Muslim employees became more irritable and more impatient while fasting. Gradually they learnt to be more careful in addressing them. You can be sure that confronted with this phenomenon the employees would be in complete denial: “Me, I am no different than usual. Better, actually because I don’t have to take breaks for eating”. Ya, right. The outsiders could see through their self-deception.
Btw in the hadith Ramadan is referred to as “the month of patience”. Think about it. We don’t have to be patient with things that are easy and pleasant.” Be patient with your well-behaved child” or” be patient with your delicious ice cream” Makes no sense, right? You have to be patient with difficult things. And Ramadan is difficult, make no bones about it! Mubarak for sure ,full of rewards in the hereafter, an order from Allah, for sure. But difficult, nevertheless- as are many of the edicts from our Lord.
I grew up hating denial.( The other side of that coin was that I had a strong inclination for Truth-regardless of the social influences around me.Still do, btw! My mother, may God forgive her and reward her for all her hard work raising us four rebels lol was a somatizer. She would get angry with one of us and get stomachaches after. When I would try to indicate to her that the stomachaches were her emotional reaction to our bad behaviour, we would get denial. “No its not that. I just ate too much lasagna at dinner.” Lol. My mom was not an overeater!
To indicate why this is important, I can tell you that at a younger age I too had stomacaches. Once again my mother would try to put it on the food! When I finally got into group therapy at the ripe age of 23 ,i understood the connection with my emotions during the stomachaches and I have never had any since! Except when I do eat bad food lol and get gastroenteritis. But NOT from emotions! So it makes a big difference when you stop denying! Then you can adapt and modify your behaviour and often enough solve the underlying problem!
Then I studied psychoanalysis and learnt that “denial is the most primitive defense mechanism of all!” And when I started researching the Arabic dictionnary I realized that denial and lying came from the same Arabic trilateral root- k-dh-b. And Allah uses them almost interchangeably in the Quran. So this is important stuff!
There are so many manifestations of this denial mechanism but we can only mention a few here. Here is one that bothered me a lot during the pre-Covid period when I went to Jumaa prayer on a regular basis. Somewhere around the 25th day or so the Iman would get up on the pulpit and say something like:”25 days of Ramadan and it has gone by in the wink of an eye”. Really?! I don’t know what world this Imam is living in but it ain’t mine lol. Each day had its own particular struggle. At one point during almost every day it seemed like the fast would never end. Ever had one of those fasting days? That’s why our Prophet saws called it the month of patience. Maybe I missed the hadith where it says “Ramadan goes by in the wink of an eye” but I doubt it. Instead the Imam should be saying something like; “Congratulations on all your efforts. You are all doing a great job.” Like a good teacher trying to encourage their students or a good coach trying to spur his team on to victory.. That would be compassionate, that would be empathic. I think they need to add on a course in pedagogy and psychology in the Madrassas. But instead we constantly get the message that we are not doing enough! That is what drove the Catholics away from their Churches. Let’s not make the same mistake!
2– The Complainers (or in the vernacular the kvetches lol) These people go around the entire month complaining about their symptoms- much to the chagrin of the Muslims around them. They tell us about their tiredness ,their headaches, their lack of cognitive abilities and brain fog. The deniers hate them. “Stop that brother or sister, you are going to lose all your “ajr”(reward).”You will be rewarded for your sufferings on the other side” True- but that most often doesn’t take away the symptoms. It just makes the first person feel like you have no empathy or compassion. Instead of empathy you get guilt. The famous ADHD researcher Ed Hallowell called that the school of “shame, blame and humiliation”-apparently standard in most traditional societies!
Now the physical symptoms are an important part of the experience and need to be properly managed. For example one thing I learnt early on was that many headaches were actually ,in fact, caffeine withdrawal headaches. One of my convert friends got it so bad one year that he went to the emergency room thinking that he had meningitis! Until we figured it out. I watched my sheikh of the time, Sheikh Nazim breaking fast every day with a cup of tea and taking a cup of tea as the last thing in suhoor(pre-Fajr meal).Only later did I realize that he was managing his caffeine withdrawal that way. Now that is my regular practice-one cup of coffee at iftar and one at suhoor. And most often I will get away without the headache-especially if the fast is only 15 hours or less.
Here, I would like to tell another type of story(a bad management story) to illustrate another aspect of the managing symptoms story .One year when I went to London for Ramadan- as I did regularly for many years-to be with my sheikh, I met a young Irish convert from a very difficult background. He had had a father who was an episodic alcoholic with a very bad character. His father would get angry and throw him up against the wall when that happened. Due to multiple traumas like that -many of which gave him concussions, he developed grand-mal epilepsy! So at the beginning of Ramadan he came to consult with me as to how he should manage the fast. I suggested he should go slowly ,perhaps every second day at the beginning, He would hear nothing of it!
It seemed to be working well early on but during the last ten days ,his defenses broke down and he had a grand-mal seizure in the middle of the mosque during Tarawih prayer.There was a group of fanatics there- followers of someone we knew as Greensheikh. They were convinced that this was not a medical condition but rather a jinn possession and wanted to do an exorcism. Most of the attendees however, including myself, saw it for what it was-a neurological event that needed medical attention! A fight broke out between the two groups, a member of the Greensheikh group pulled out a knife and the police had to be called in(Very well-trained British cops I must say) In the end we accompanied the murid to the hospital but one of the “reasonable” group had to deal with a knife-wound to the hand that took weeks to heal after getting infected.. Such is the price of denial.
In fact, many of us know people that are unable to fast-because of diabetes or heart conditions or migraines and many other illnesses. So it must be acknowledged that fasting is a physiological stress. You have to in relatively good health to do it. So beware of deniers! They can be dangerous to your health and even to your life!
3-The Embracers; This is the approach I am recommending. Embrace ALL the Reality-the glory and upliftment and transcendent aspects of Ramadan(the states of Grace) AND the difficult parts. The openings may be brief and subtle. They may be evanescent and hard to capture at times. But they ARE there. What one of my shuyukh called “nafahat” (spiritual breezes).But don’t miss them. Enjoy them -like butterflies in the summer. If they linger, then you are truly blessed. The sufferings will be rewarded as well. So don’t let your physical symptoms distract you from the “barakat” of the month. It’s all good! Embrace it all! The physical symptoms can be managed -with compassion and wisdom-and the transcendent aspects can be savoured-especially if you can open your eyes and your heart to what is occuring on the inner planes. May Allah make this the best and holiest Ramadan ever. And if we don’t see the results on this side of the curtain we will certainly see them on the other side ! Ramadan Mubarak and Ramadan Karim.
Pathological Doubt-A Fundamental Problem for Science.
Anyone who has done a basic course in statistics-one of the pillars of the modern scientific method-knows about “the null hypothesis”. In order to prove a causal connection, the scientists begin by testing the “null hypothesis”-the hypothesis that the connection between the two variables studied could have happened by chance alone. Then they perform their magic and show via “p” values (known as statistical significance) that this is highly unlikely to be the case.
All of this might seem like purely technical issues but it is ,in fact, much deeper than that! It is symbolic or perhaps more precisely symptomatic, of an approach-an approach that begins, at the very start and in a very fundamental way, with the negative. No surprise then that scientists when they are being scientists ,as opposed to marketers and propagandists which many do become, seem unsure, confused, overly complicated and generally unimpressive in their personalities.( Ever been to University lol?)
Once again, this may all seem abstract and unimportant but that is very far from the Truth. The consequences are enormous! Let me give you some examples. In the current pandemic of SARS Covid-2 there were early signs that hydroxychloriquine and other forms of chloroquine could be effective against the virus. Chloroquine had already been shown to be effective against Covid-1 and MERS.Early clinical reports from docs like Didier Raoult in France and Peter McCullough in the U.S. were showing promising results. Then Ivermectin came on the scene and the results seemed even better.
But the ” scientific” types were not buying it. There were no “large-scale randomized, double-blind peer-reviewed studies that had published in prestigious journals”(their religious belief lol) to prove it, they claimed.. Only two years later when Pfizer came out with Paxlovid-in limited quantities- was there possibly an equivalent. Because of this “doubting” mindset it is very likely that hundreds of thousands of Americans and Millions of people world-wide died and many more were seriously ill with long-term consequences. This is no laughing matter! The cost of doubt can be extremely high.
Now, just in case you are doubting my analysis( which if you were well-educated you should be doing by now lol)I am well-aware of the economic incentives to deny the truth of the efficacy of these cheap, repurposed drugs! And that is certainly an important variable. However,I feel that it is VERY important not to deny the intellectual fault-line as well as the economic one. After all ,that is what the Faucis and organizations like the WHO use to justify and convince the medical community about their corrupt practices.
Another example of this “Pathological Doubting” occurs in the literature about near-death experiences. It is patently clear that these experiencers have left their bodies and travelled with their souls to other worlds. In a normal world, there should be no doubt(see the chapter on “The Doubters” in my book “The Big Questions:Evidence-Based Faith”.)But instead of accepting these accounts on face value ,the doubters come along and develop all kinds of far-fetched theories about brain chemistry and neurophysiology. What is even more incredible is that many “normal”people (those who haven’t joined the cult yet!) because the doubting voices sound “scientific” buy into it. More brain-washing from our educational system!
Now, surprisingly and paradoxically, this same “scientific” community is involved in “Pathological Certainty'” as well! Wtf you might think?! Yes, they don’t even remain consistent even though consistency is one of their main beliefs-one of the Ten Commandments of the Rationnalists. Aristotle must be turning over in his grave lol.
So what do I mean by “Pathological Certainly.” Two examples come to mind. One from the world of Vaccinology and one from the proponents of Anthropogenic Climate Change. Let us start with the first. All over the media, as well as in medical conferences, one hears the mantra: “Vaccines are Safe and Effective’ .Not even any caveats as we see on American TV when new medications come out.”This medication can cause this and that problem .It should not be used in this or that situation”. None of that! “Vaccines are Safe and Effective” .And yet all around us -with the slightest bit of research(have you seen the VAERS?!) or even looking around us, we can see the contrary. We see people who have been vaccine injured and we see people who have gotten sick with Covid despite being fully vaccinated. No mention of those realities in the Infomercials that pass as Public Health Announcements about vaccines. Nope “safe and effective” period. Do they take us for idiots?! Yes, they do. The problem is they may be not that far from the Truth lol.People are refusing to look into these questions for fear of the consequences to their personal lives. So they live in ignorance.
Now well before the Covid epidemic there were issues about the vaccine mandate in children. Were the vaccines causing autism? Were they doing irreversible damage to the neurological and immune systems of our children? We didn’t know. However, in the last three years we have some very credible studies done by credible scientists like Brian Hooker and James Lyons- Weiler, showing clearly the long-term detrimental effects of the vaccine mandates on children(see the “Vaccine Issue” on this blog.)Anyone in the scientific community noticing?! Certainly not the champions of “science”. They just keep repeating the mantra:”Vaccines are Safe and Effective”.
The other example of “Pathological Certaintly” occurs in the domain of climate change. We are told repeatedly that the theory of “Anthrogenic(man-made) Climate Change is irrefutable. A consensus of 97% of published papers confirm it. A gerry-madered statistic by the way. I never really bought the theory?! After all, we have no control over earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes and volcanoes-all the other climate events. How come we have control over the Earths temperature?! Never really made sense to me. Sounded like human hubris! We are in control, right? Wrong! The temperature of the Earth has been changing up and down since the beginning of Creation! it has been a lot colder and a lot hotter. And the Neaderthals ,a time of greater warming than now, were NOT driving SUVs and burning coa-l as far as I know lol.
For those who like documentation and data ,there are two relatively new books “Unsettled” by Steven E. Koonin- a theoretical physicist trained at the world-famous Caltech and “Inconvenient Facts’ by Gregory Wrighthouse who covers much of the same material in a more user-friendly format, that seriously challenge the catechismic belief that “man is responsible for the current climate changes because of the “greenhouse effect” due to the carbon imprint on the atmosphere”. If you want a lighter read you can check out “Climate Change;An Alternative Analysis” on this very blog. S o you can have plenty of support for the counter-argument that man has very little impact on climate generally. All he can do is ‘adapt“. If you think more metaphysically, that is our usual Existential position-relative impotence. That’s why we need belief in a Higher Power-a subject for a later essay lol
So… bottom line; Contemporary man is contaminated by both “Pathological Doubt” and “Pathological Certainty” -both in the name of science! Btw who started this cult?! It could and is leading to our destruction! But I won’t say “certainly” lol so as to distinguish my approach from that of the so-called “scientists”
Humanity On Notice
Humanity on Notice
You have drunk the Kool-Aid!(add the name here of the person whom you are addressing!) The Koolaid of the social consensus narrative of Empiricism and Rationalism. Once that is the case ,there is little to be done. The intoxicant in the Koolaid prevents you from seeing or hearing or feeling any Reality that goes against your conceptual framework. This is the way the world ends–not so much in conflict as in ignorance. The conflict is only a by-product of the ignorance. God Help us!
P.S. Feel free to send this to anyone who needs the medicine. I have released the Copyright lol