Softest of Tongues

Interesting to see what the British academic community is up to:

UK Academics Vote to Boycott Israeli Academia

Everyone has an agenda, but what Fidel writes here is pretty interesting.

The comments on the blog are also amusing (:

Read “Ideas Cannot Be Killed, Mr. Bush”

It’s also interesting that one of the great contentions against Islam has been the permissibility of possesing slaves: however, often ignored are the conditions that must be met (e.g. one must feed their slave as they feed themselves and family, the slave cannot be asked to do work which the master would be unwilling to do, and others besides. a search on sunnipath.com will yield results iA) – moreoever, it’s extremely hypocritical to propose that Islam is archaic and evil when in the modern era we’ve merely developed loopholes by which we can conviently label people as ‘free’ (theoretically), while practically speaking they are worse off than slaves – as some have commented, a slave had to be fed and maintained by the master, simply because the master wanted to get as much out of him or her as possible: these farm workers, on the other hand, can be exploited to no end, because there’s nothing to really bind them to the employer – whether they live or die is the same, and so the employer can get away with paying them less than a dollar for more than 12 hrs of work every day…

***

‘Coffee is one of the least transparent industries in the world,’ said Nick. ‘We’re supposed to be marking 200 years since the abolition of slavery. The coffee industry is not slavery, but when people are being paid half a dollar a day it is not far off. The companies argue that it’s better than nothing, and that’s a problem. By which standard is an equitable wage being judged? The companies who supply us with coffee wouldn’t treat their own employees the same way.

I gave a khutba a little while ago on a previous blog entry regarding chocolate and being more conscientious about our purchases, and this article really drives the point home. One of the big problems that we currently face is that we’re wont to enjoy things without ever thinking about where they come from… our deen, however, teaches us exactly the opposite:  through ensuring that our meat (and the rest of our food) as well as clothing, wealth, etc all come from halal means, we’re taught to think about what lies behind the apparent, and to take things at a deeper level than their face value.

 Whether or not we want to take the time and effort to make conscientious purchases is really irrelevant here, as we should recognize that its a religious obligation. Imagine – the Prophet, peace be upon him, said that the person who fills his stomach while his neighbour is hungry is not a believer – so what about filling our stomachs at the expense of our neighbours, whose suffering is compounded with every bite we take?

In today’s global village, where we’re all really neighbours, and sending money to aid agencies or orphanages (or Neiman Marcus, Holt Renfrew, Louis Vitton, etc) is only a click or phone call away, we should take care to keep that aspect of the faith in mind…

 ***

It was at Sundance, Robert Redford’s film festival held in the Utah mountains, that Black Gold became more than just another angry film. Nick and Marc Francis, the British brothers who made the low-budget documentary about the global coffee trade, were asked by a sell-out audience how much it would cost to help farmers finish building a school they had filmed in Ethiopia. The answer was $10,000. An audience member raised his hand and pledged to donate the full amount. He wrote a cheque on the spot.

Black Gold is galvanising audiences wherever it plays. The Francis brothers receive hundreds of emails a day from people in the coffee industry who, appalled by images of women in factories handpicking coffee beans for wages of half a dollar a day, want to change the way they do business. Employees of the multinationals which dominate the £40bn-a-year coffee industry – the world’s second most valuable after crude oil – have told the brothers they had no idea they were perpetuating such a system.

Marc said: ‘At the end of the day, every cup of coffee we drink relies on exploitation.’ It is not a message the coffee giants wish to gain currency. Starbucks reportedly sent an email to its employees in Britain describing Black Gold as ‘inaccurate and incomplete’ before it was screened at the London Film Festival. At Sundance, the company distributed a statement saying that it thinks ‘coffee farmers should make a living wage and be paid fair prices’, and invited the Francis brothers to its headquarters in Seattle, having previously refused to grant them an interview.

Read more, and more, and more. Then think. Then Act.

‘Until then, can we buy ethical coffee anywhere? When asked, the makers of Black Gold, for once, hesitated. Nick’s eventual reply was not wholly optimistic: ‘The question for consumers is whether we can find a coffee that is less exploitative than the others. Maybe that is all we can say for now.”

Ya Allah -

help those who have no one to help them save You… help those whom your servants have neglected and forgotten, and who suffer in the worst of conditions and in the darkest recesses this facade of dunya…

***

The court martial into the death of Iraqi hotel worker Baha Mousa, who died after sustaining 93 separate injuries, heard evidence that senior British officers in Iraq sanctioned the ‘conditioning’ of prisoners, which included the use of hooding and forcing detainees to stand for hours in stressful positions.

The MoD, however, told the joint committee during its recent inquiry into the UK’s compliance with the UN Convention Against Torture that the use of hooding and stress positioning for the purpose of interrogation has been prohibited since 1972.

Mousa, 26, was detained in 2003, with a number of other Iraqis, by members of The Queen’s Lancashire Regiment at a hotel in Basra where weapons and suspected bomb-making equipment were found.

The prosecution said that, while undergoing ‘conditioning’ for interrogation, the detainees were forced to stand with their arms outstretched and their knees bent. The seven soldiers faced a variety of charges ranging from manslaughter, inhuman treatment, perverting the course of justice, causing actual bodily harm and negligently performing a duty.

Six of the accused, including the regiment’s commanding officer, Colonel Jorge Mendonca, were cleared. Corporal Donald Payne pleaded guilty to ‘inhuman treatment of persons protected under the Geneva Convention’ and was jailed for a year.

fr. The Guardian article

In replying to Basit’s comment on a previous post, I thought of the following verse, and its dual interpretations, both of which fit well with the essence of what I was trying to capture:

 ”Wa dhar allatheena’atakhadhu deenahum la’iban wa lahwan wa gharrathumul hayyatad-dunya” (Surat al An’am)

 1. “Leave those who take as their way of life idle play and amusement, and have been beguiled by the material world”

2. “Leave those whose take their religion as idle play and amusement, and have been beguiled by the material world”

i.e. those whose religion IS the dunya, and those for whom religion is a joke.

For those who don’t follow Angry Arab News, now is the time. He’s really angry, and rightfully so.

fr. Today:

For those who care. The only interview I have given. I can’t say no to Electronic Intifada. “Interview: As’ad Abukhalil on the Nahr al-Bared siege.”

“ABUKHALIL: First, I understand the Lebanese army was hit hard last summer. It’s morale and its prestige suffered tremendously because of the lack of performance in the face of brutal Israeli attacks. Because there are no unitary symbols for Lebanon, people always want to underline, well, ‘maybe it’s the army.’ It can’t always be baba ghanouj or hummus. It has to be something more concrete. And this is why there is a rush to support the Lebanese army.
Second, there is a general racist attitude — classical racism towards Palestinians…”

Its always interesting to look at the effects of a fitna, or tribulation, on different people – usually, it will bring out either the best or the worst of a person’s character, while others will fail to recognize that there is a tribulation at all.

Take chocolate. I am very, very fond of chocolate, to put things mildly. And so it deeply troubles me when I hear that now, because of a bit of rennet – a chemical taken from the lining of calves’ stomachs – people are suddenly up in arms as to whether its halal or not to consume.

Far more disturbing than the rennet, for me, is the fact ‘that cocoa beans imported from the Ivory Coast — used to make nearly half the chocolate consumed in this country — are harvested in large part by children, some as young as 9, and many of whom are considered slaves, trafficked from desperately poor countries like Mali and Burkina Faso.’

Read on, read on, even though you don’t want to – because its much easier in the short term to indulge in ignorance than take responsibility for our habits. Read ‘the stories of boys in the Ivory Coast, most of them 12 to 16 years old, some as young as 9, who had been sold and then tricked into indentured labor on cocoa farms. The boys told reporters that they were underfed, locked in their filthy sleeping quarters, and forced to work more than 12 hours a day, sometimes hauling 50-pound bags of beans that were bigger than they were.’ Read about ‘boys enslaved on Ivory Coast cocoa farms, showing children with heavily scarred backs from beatings with whips and switches.’

And we’re worried about rennet? Rennet is an issue in MasterFoods products. A google search will quickly show that they produce a few notable choclate bars, but not as many as are affected by this issue: ‘Hershey’s and M&M/Mars control two-thirds of the U.S. chocolate market, which generated $13 billion from retail sales of 3.1 billion pounds of chocolate in 2001. Both companies, along with other major producers like Nestlé, Archer Daniels Midland, Cadbury, Guittard and Bernard Callebaut, import cocoa beans from the Ivory Coast..’

***

So, “Do you believe in some parts of the book, and reject the rest?” (2: 85)

It seems to me that we often take the rules regarding slaughter very seriously, but completely ignore equally important issues – such as what was the meat that we’re eating fed? In many cases, as long as its throat was slit and the basmala and takbeer said upon it, we can overlook the fact that it was raised on a diet including hormone injections and other animals’ flesh and parts.

We look at literal rulings, while forgetting larger objectives and principles behind Sacred Law, forgetting Allah’s oft-repeated question: “Do you not think??” (Afalaa ta’qiloon?).

No, we don’t think. We have no minds left with which to reason, because they’ve been taken over by the appetites of stomachs that are wilfully satiated on other’s misery. When anyone raises a concern, the very same people that are so adamant with regards to eating ‘halal’ food become the quickest to remind us that ‘the deen is easy! don’t make things difficult!’  – do you think its easy for the kids working on those plantations? Why is the concept of ‘ease’ in that hadith (Ad-Deenu yusr) always perceived of as ‘doing what I want to do’ instead of ‘this deen makes it easy to do good, because it provides us with a framework from which to understand whether something is moral or immoral, so that we can easily follow the right path’ ?

***

“Oh you who believe! Obey Allah and His Messenger, and do not turn away when you hear (this message) –

Nor be like those who say “We hear!” but are not listening –

For truly, the most vile of creatures in the sight of Allah is the deaf and the blind, who do not think at all” (8: 20-22)

***

I’ve found that the biggest complaint to eating properly (by which I mean both healthy and virtously) is money – it costs too much to buy organic/fair trade/etc. But that’s the nature of halal anything – it costs more in the dunya,  and we get something better in the akhira – because our current lifestyle choices are really our afterlifestyle choices.

I’ve long had some contentions about Harry Potter, and thought the following article by Khalid Baig put things nicely. It’s odd that in an age where we pride ourselves on technological advancement we’re still bewitched by magic, the occult, and superstition.

 ***

fr. ‘Harry Potter: Facts About Fiction’

‘The books glorify magic and sorcery. Harry and his classmates regularly cast spells, brew potions, learn to tell the future, communicate with the spirits of the dead, train magical animals, and ride brooms. They study astrology, crystal gazing, numerology, transfiguration, and divination. Darker things occur as well such as murder, human sacrifice, drinking of unicorn blood, etc. The fight between good and evil in this book is actually a conflict between “good magic” and “evil magic”, both of which are evil.

The books are in effect promoters of paganism. They glorify magic and paganism while non-magical people, called Muggles, are despised and portrayed as boring, narrow-minded, and paranoid of magic.

Not surprisingly, the main characters in the story have few noble qualities; they lie with impunity, use profanity, don’t respect their elders, break rules regularly, and are unrepentant.

And for all these qualities and more, the books are popular and are having an effect. It is the “in” thing to purchase the book. And not just the book. Children have gone crazy over Harry Potter memorabilia, surrounding themselves with Harry Potter T-shirts, posters, toys, costumes, wands, hats, etc.

Welcome to the world of capitalism and paganism, where superstitions and the occult reign supreme in the hearts and minds of people, and where the twin forces have forged an “alliance of the willing” that is doing its “magic” on a global scale.

Capitalism is all about maximization of profits and if that requires appealing to the lowest instincts and the darkest recesses of human nature, so be it. Millions of dollars have been spent on advertising the latest craze on billboards, buttons, bumper stickers, and posters etc. U.S. publisher Scholastic alone has planned a $4 million marketing budget for this single book – among the largest advertising budgets ever for a book.’

Stasi scent-tracking methods are being used to keep a check on selected protesters planning to demonstrate at next month’s G8 summit.Scent traces collected directly from everything from people’s palm sweat to their vests and cigarette lighters have been made available to investigators so that sniffer dogs can detect potentially violent protesters, federal prosecutors confirmed yesterday following reports in the German media.

“This has happened to several suspects,” said Andreas Christeleit, a spokesman for the prosecutors. It is believed that most samples were collected during recent early-morning raids across Germany.

The revelations have immediately led to comparisons with the methods of the former East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, who habitually collected the scents of dissidents to identify suspects at a later date. It was thought that such chilling espionage techniques had been consigned to history.

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