Kill Those Palestinians.



Al Salamu 'Alaykum.

The following is a UN report on developments in occupied Palestine and the killing of children by the Israelis.

Eleven Palestinian children were killed and 360 injured (342 boys and 18 girls) in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, in incidents related to the armed conflict. Of the 360 children injured, 58 were under the age of 12; 83 per cent of the injuries occurred in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and 17 per cent in Gaza; 302 children were injured by the Israeli security forces, 40 by Israeli settlers, 11 by unexploded ordnance, and 2 by unidentified perpetrators. In addition, five children were injured by mishandling weapons and explosives, including one incident allegedly related to interfactional fighting by Palestinian armed groups. No Israeli children were killed in 2010 as a result of the conflict, but two were injured, including one as a result of a rocket from the Gaza Strip on 21 December launched by an unidentified Palestinian armed group.

There are serious concerns regarding the increasing number of civilians, including children, shot and injured in the so-called Gaza buffer zone imposed by Israel, which covers the area up to 300 metres from the Gaza fence. The exact boundaries of the zone are unclear, given that it is not physically delimited, but is known to be an area where there are clashes between militants and the Israeli security forces. In May 2009, the Israeli Army made a statement indicating that any individual entering the zone would be endangering his or her life. However, Palestinians continue to collect gravel and scrap metal in abandoned settlements and industrial zones near the fence, which they later sell to support their families. In 2010, 40 boys and 4 girls were allegedly injured by Israeli fire in or near the buffer zone. Of those, 26 boys, some as young as 13, were shot while collecting gravel within 800 metres of the fence. In cases where sworn affidavits were taken, 19 children were shot in the leg, 2 in the arm and 1 child was shot in the head.

For the third consecutive year, the use of Palestinian children as human shields by Israeli security forces was reported, with three new cases documented in three separate incidents in the West Bank in 2010. A 16-year-old girl and a 13-year-old boy were used as human shields during house searches in two separate incidents in Nablus, and a 14-year-old boy was forced to walk in front of Israeli soldiers as a shield while stones were being thrown at them during clashes in Hebron. In the first prosecution of its kind, on 11 March 2010, two soldiers were charged with using a boy as a human shield during “Operation Cast Lead”. The soldiers were convicted by an Israeli military court on 3 October 2010 for “inappropriate behaviour” and “overstepping authority”. They were demoted from the rank of staff sergeant to sergeant and given three-month suspended prison sentences. To date, the measures taken by the Israeli security forces to prevent and punish the use of children as human shields have not reflected the gravity of such conduct.

As of December 2010, 213 Palestinian children between the ages of 12 and 17 were in Israeli detention or imprisoned by the Israeli security forces, including one girl on conflict-related charges. Two Palestinian children were held in administrative detention without charge or trial in 2010, including one boy having been detained for over 10 months. Of particular concern is the sharp increase in the last quarter of 2010 in the documented cases of arrest of young children in the Silwan neighbourhood of East Jerusalem. There are also increasing reports of violence and mistreatment of children by Israeli soldiers during patrols in Silwan, as well as during the arrest, transfer to detention and interrogation of children from East Jerusalem. According to Israeli police figures, 1,267 criminal files were opened against children accused of throwing stones in East Jerusalem between October 2009 and October 2010.

In 2010, 90 cases of ill treatment with regard to the treatment of Palestinian children in Israeli detention were documented by the United Nations and its partners, including through the sworn affidavits of children. Twenty-four of these children were below the age of 15, including two 10-year olds and one 7-year old. In more than 75 of these cases the excessive or extended use of hand-ties and blindfolds were reported, 62 children reported being beaten, 35 children reported position abuse and 16 children were kept in solitary confinement. In three cases, children reported the use of electric shocks on their bodies and four reported being threatened with electric shocks in the course of their interrogation, which resulted in confessions made under duress. Particularly concerning was the fact that there was an increase in documented cases of sexual violence, with 14 cases (13 boys and 1 girl) in 2010 compared to 9 cases (8 boys and 1 girl) in 2009. The cases involved threats of sexual violence (13 cases) and 1 actual sexual assault through the use of electrical cables on genitals. The high number of instances of such treatment reported and documented suggests that ill treatment of children is common in the Israeli military justice system. There is evidence that some children do not report incidents of ill treatment while in custody, owing to concerns about repercussions for making such complaints, and doubts about the effectiveness of the complaints process.

One case of ill treatment of a Palestinian boy by the Palestinian Preventive Security Force was also reported and documented in 2010. The case refers to an incident involving an alleged association with Hamas. The boy was threatened and beaten for the purposes of obtaining a confession. He was released after having been detained in solitary confinement for eight days after having been denied access to a lawyer or to presentation before a judge.

There was an increase in the number of attacks on schools and education facilities by Israeli security forces and settlers in 2010 (20 cases), compared to 2009 (9 cases). These attacks resulted in damage to schools or interruption of education, placing the safety of the children in Gaza and the West Bank at risk. The majority of cases involved the presence of Israeli security forces within school compounds following raids, forceful entry, and search and arrest operations, including the use of tear gas on students. There were also three incidents involving air strikes and shelling by Israeli security forces that resulted in damage to four schools in Gaza, although schools did not appear to have been directly targeted in these incidents. There was also an increasing number of incidents in 2010 in which Palestinian students were prevented from accessing schools and had their safety compromised by Israeli security forces. Thirty-six such incidents were documented in the West Bank in 2010, purportedly involving security measures such as road closures searches, harassment or assaults at checkpoints by Israeli authorities and settlers. In other cases, children were exposed to settler violence as Israeli authorities did not provide military escorts to protect children who pass near historically violent settlements and outposts in the West Bank, particularly Hebron. In this regard, the Israeli authorities have not yet responded to the request of my Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict in February 2009 to investigate the 2008 attack by Israeli settlers of children on their way to the Al-Tuwani School outside Hebron. Furthermore, they have failed to address the broader issue of settler violence against Palestinian children. In addition, the blockade on the Gaza Strip impacts on the availability, accessibility and quality of education in Gaza. Though the situation has improved since the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) commenced building 20 new schools after certain restrictions were lifted, UNRWA was unable to deliver education to a number of Palestinian refugee children owing to a shortage of school space resulting from the restriction on the importation of construction materials to rebuild schools destroyed or damaged during “Operation Cast Lead”. Those children are therefore attending Palestinian Authority schools.

In 2010, Palestinian armed groups were responsible for eight incidents related to access to education, including two attacks on UNRWA summer schools in Gaza and one incident of a rocket that was fired into Israel and landed near a kindergarten in Ashkelon. Of particular concern was the attack in May on UNRWA summer camps located in Gaza by masked assailants. The attack and intimidation against UNRWA officials, for which no group has claimed responsibility, was apparently intended to have a negative effect on the attendance of the quarter million boys and girls who participated in those summer camps.

On 20 June 2010, the Israeli Security Cabinet declared the easing of the Gaza blockade, particularly pertaining to civilian goods and humanitarian access. While this has resulted in some improvement in the entry of construction materials, it amounts to only a fraction of what is needed to meet the humanitarian needs of the population of Gaza. Gaza’s health-care system also suffers from a severe lack of adequate equipment and instruments. As a result, patients must seek treatment outside of Gaza. From January to November 2010, while 3,546 out of 3,851 (92 per cent) applications for children who sought medical assistance outside of Gaza were approved, 294 applications were delayed and 11 were denied. Both the delays and denials in processing applications can be life-threatening to child patients who are waiting for urgent medical treatment. Four children, all under the age of 3, died while waiting for the appropriate permits to travel outside of Gaza in 2010.

Forced displacement continues to affect the lives of hundreds of Palestinian families. More than 431 Palestinian structures were demolished in 2010 in the West Bank (including Area C and East Jerusalem), including 137 residential structures, leaving homeless at least 594 people, 299 of them children.

http://www.un.org/children/conflict/english/palestine.html

Wa Salamu 'Alaykum.

The Popes Of Rome.

What You Didn't Know About The Popes Of Rome
By Mark Owen

On the evening of Saturday April 2, 2005, after receiving the Rite of Extreme Unction, Pope John Paul II passed away. At this time his chamberlain would have gone to the papal hospital bed and asked the Bishop of Rome a question, "Are you dead?" There would be no reply from the Pope. The chamberlain would then pick up a silver hammer and strike the Pope on the head and repeat his question, "Are you dead?" Again there would be no reply. The chamberlain would then thrice call out the Pope's baptismal name. He would then declare the Pope to be dead.

 

This is the way the Church has determined papal deaths for centuries. This is the way of the world's oldest monarchy.

 

Since 1763 the august Almanach de Gotha has been the ultimate authority on the royal houses of Europe. Listed under 'Reigning Sovereign Houses' is the Holy See. Therein is stated, "the incumbent of the Holy See is considered by Christian sovereign families as the 'Father of the Family of Kings,' [and] his Holiness represents the OLDEST MONARCHY on earth"

 

The triple sovereignty of the Pope-Person, Holy See & Vatican City--is distinct in fact and in law. Internationally, he is not subject to any authority on earth. His Cardinals are considered to be Princes of the Church and peers of the sons of reigning monarchs. Each diocese is considered to be a royal fiefdom. The word 'diocese' originally signified an administrative unit devised by the Emperor Diocletian, a tyrant noted for his persecution of Christians.

 

Following are brief sketches of some of the more interesting holders of the title 'Vicar of Christ' (it should be noted that the Latin equivalent of the Greek 'anti' is 'vicarius,' from whence is derived the word 'vicar').

 

Without a doubt, there was one Pope who was completely mad. In 896 Stephen VII set in motion the trial of his rival, the late Pope Formosus who had been dead for 9 months at the time. Formosus' corpse was dragged from its tomb and arrayed on a throne in the council chamber. The corpse, wrapped in a hair shirt, was provided with council, who wisely remained silent while Pope Stephen raved and screamed at it. The crime of Formosus was that he had crowned emperor one of the numerous illegitimate heirs of Charlemagne after first having performed the same office for a candidate favored by Stephen. After Stephen's rant, the corpse was stripped of its clothes and its fingers were chopped off. It was then dragged through the palace and hurled from a balcony to a howling mob below who threw it into the Tiber. The body was later rescued by people sympathetic to Formosus and given a quiet burial. Stephen was strangled to death a few years later.

 

In 964 Pope Benedict V raped a young girl and absconded to Constantinople with the papal treasury only to reappear when the money ran out. Church historian Gerbert called Benedict 'the most iniquitous of all the monsters of ungodliness.' The pontiff was eventually slain by a jealous husband. His corpse, bearing a hundred dagger wounds, was dragged through the streets before being tossed into a cesspit.

 

In October 1032 the papal miter was purchased for the 11-year old Benedict IX. Upon reaching his 14th year, a chronicler wrote that Benedict had already surpassed in wantonness and profligacy all who had preceded him. He often had to leave Rome in a hurry.

 

Gregory VII was a master forger, surpassing even the great fraud known as the 'Donation of Constantine,' the document that created the Papal States. Gregory had an entire school of forgers turning out document after document bearing the papal seal of approval. These documents were later systematized in the mid-1100s in Bologna by Gratian, a Benedictine monk. He called his work the Decretum, or Code of Canon Law. It was peppered throughout with several centuries of forgeries along with Gratian's own fictional additions. Gregory also formalized the celibacy doctrine in order to curtail the many gifts of church lands being given away to all of the illegitimate children of priests and bishops. According to Catholic historian Peter de Rosa in his book Vicars of Christ:

 

"Popes had mistresses as young as fifteen years of age, were guilty of incest and sexual perversions of every sort, had innumerable children, were murdered in the very act of adultery. In the old Catholic phrase, why be holier than the Pope?"

 

Another interesting figure was Alexander VI (formerly Rodrigo Borgia). He reigned from 1492-1503. Alexander committed his first murder at the age of 12. Upon assuming the Papal miter he cried, "I am Pope, Vicar of Christ!" In his Decline and Fall Gibbon referred to Alexander as the Tiberius of Rome. Like his predecessor Innocent VIII, Alexander sired many children, baptized them personally and officiated at their weddings in the Vatican. He had ten known illegitimate children (including the notorious Cesare and Lucrezia), by his favorite mistress Vannoza Catanei. When she faded, Borgia took the 15-year old Giulia Farnese. Farnese obtained a Cardinal's red hat for her brother who later became Paul III.

 

Alexander was followed by Julius II who purchased the papacy with his own private fortune. He didn't even pretend to be a Christian. A notorious womanizer who sired any number of bastards, Julius was so eaten away with syphilis that he couldn't even expose his foot to be kissed.

 

Under Leo X (1513-21)--who cursed and excommunicated Martin Luther-specific prices were enumerated by the Roman Chancery for every imaginable crime. For instance, a deacon accused of murder could be absolved for 20 crowns. Once pardoned, he could not be prosecuted by civil authorities. Two hundred years earlier, John XXII had done much the same thing, setting prices for crimes ranging from incest to sodomy.

 

During his pontificate Innocent VIII (1484-92) granted a 20-year Butterbriefe indulgence to persons who met his price. For a sum, one could purchase the privilege of eating favorite dishes during Lent.

 

Leo X (Giovanni de Medici) commissioned the Dominican friar Tetzel to sell indulgences which released one from purgatory. Tetzel's famous refrain went, "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs!"

 

Pope Sixtus IV charged Roman brothels a Church tax. According to historian Will Durant, in 1490 there were 6800 registered prostitutes in Rome. Pius II declared that Rome was the only city run by bastards (the sons of Popes and Cardinals).

 

The iniquity of the various Popes has filled many books, and one has to wonder if the Church has been cursed from the very beginning. After all, Constantine leveled the Stadium of Caligula and the Temple of Apollo and used the stones and marble from them to erect the original basilica of Peter. Could he have been engaging in an act of sympathetic magic, as some have alleged? Constantine's choice of building materials might account for the observation made in Rome by Martin Luther centuries later who declared, "If there is a Hell, Rome is built over it. It is an abyss from whence issues every kind of sin."

 

Very brief mention should be made of the staggering scale of the Inquisition. In his History of the Inquisition, Canon Llorente, who was Secretary of the Inquistion in Madrid from 1790-92 estimated the number of condemned in Spain alone to have exceeded 3 million, with 300,000 burned at the stake. A Catholic historian comments on the events leading up to the suppression of the Spanish Inquisition:

 

"When Napoleon conquered Spain in 1808, a Polish officer in his army, Col. Lemanouski, reported that the Dominicans (in charge of the Inquisition) blockaded themselves in their monastery in Madrid. When Lemanouski's troops forced an entry, the inquisitors denied the existence of any torture chambers. The soldiers searched the monastery and discovered them under the floors. The chambers were full of prisoners, all naked, many insane. The French troops, used to cruelty and blood, could not stomach the sight. They emptied the torture chambers, laid gunpowder to the monastery and blew the place up"

 

Rome was truly drunk with the Martyr's blood.

 

And the Papacy isn't fairing much better in our modern age, and would appear to be in serious decline, if not in outright defeat.

 

In November 2000 Italian headlines screamed, "Devil Defeats Pope!" Il Messaggero reported that the Pope had been confronted by a teenage girl in the Vatican who screamed insults in a cavernous voice during an audience. John Paul attempted an exorcism but his ministrations had no effect on the girl.

 

Devils in the Vatican would come as no surprise to Msgr. Luigi Marinelli. His book Gone With the Wind at the Vatican fairly flew off the shelves in Italy, revealing as it did stories of money-laundering prelates, sex abuse and Satanic rituals performed within the walls of the Holy See.

 

Marinelli's comments echo those of the late Fr. Malachi Martin, a former Jesuit and exorcist, whose 1990 book The Keys of this Blood contains the following disturbing information:

 

"Most frighteningly for John Paul, he had come up against the irremovable presence of a malign strength in his own Vatican and in certain bishop's chanceries. It was what knowledgeable Churchmen called the 'superforce.' Rumors, difficult to verify, tied its installation to the beginning of Paul VIs reign in 1963. Indeed, Paul had alluded somberly to "the smoke of Satan which has entered the Sanctuary"-an oblique reference to an enthronement ceremony performed by Satanists in the Vatican. Besides, the incidence of Satanic pedophilia-rites and practices-was already documented among certain bishops and priests as widely dispersed as Turin in Italy and South Carolina in the United States. The cultic acts of Satanic pedophilia are considered by professionals to be the culmination of the Fallen Archangel's rites."

 

Adding fuel to the fire is ex-Jesuit Robert Kaiser with his recent book Clerical Error. Kaiser states that Malachi Martin was something of a confabulist who lived for 30 years as a kept man under the roof of Manhattan socialite Kakia Livanos, the ex-wife of Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos. Kaiser goes on to say that Martin also stole his wife Mary from him at one point in the 60s when all three were quartered in Rome. Kaiser also surmises that Martin may have been a paid lobbyist for the American Jewish Committee.

 

In his new book Glimpses of the Devil, psychiatrist M. Scott Peck weighs in with many interesting comments on possession and exorcism. He also declares Martin to have been most scrupulous in his histories of the exorcisms recounted in Hostage to the Devil. However, according to Peck, although a formidable scholar and gifted polyglot (17 languages), Martin could by turns be a 'pathological liar' and a 'leprechaun.' Needless to say, the jury is still out on the legacy of Malachi Martin.

 

On the other hand, the verdict on the pederasty that is endemic to the Roman priesthood, is in. The Church paid out more than $1 billion in claims to victims of sex abuse by clergy in the 1990s alone. And the American branch offers a very disturbing treatment method to offenders. One startling example should suffice:

 

Fr. Jay Mullin was accused of molesting a boy more than 20 years ago in Boston. Then Cardinal Bernard Law commanded Mullin to be evaluated at St. Luke's Institute. The Institute is a Washington clinic that was profiled in a Boston Globe article of February 24, 2002:

 

"Mullin was flown south in 1992 to a clinic outside Washington, D.C. The church-run clinic had a huge collection of child pornography of varying degrees, which ranged from soft porn to hardcore S&M images, all featuring pre-teen boys and girls"

 

This would have to rate as the most devilish form of aversion therapy ever known. It would be akin to treating alcoholics with copious quantities of vintage wine or bombarding junkies with free packets of China White heroin. Truly degenerate and depraved lunatics were running the asylum known as St. Lukes.

 

Notwithstanding the scandal and shock of the aforementioned, Rome carries on quietly with her program of world dominion. They lead the competition to establish the first one-world system that has ever existed. Their ultimate goal is global religious syncretism, and to eventually wield control and authority over every individual on earth. The human solidarity goals of the Roman Church are identical to the goals and objectives of the United Nations. This is why they are such an perfect fit. Rome only gives the appearance of objecting to the UN agenda. At the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome Cardinal Angelo Sodana pledged the Holy See's support for the UNs humanistic 'Programs of Action.'

 

Rome also has designs on Jerusalem.

 

For 46 years after Israel's rebirth the Vatican refused to acknowledge Israel's right to exist. But Rome wants to exert premier influence over Jerusalem, which will one day function as the capital of her World Church.

 

In a 1993 letter to the Pope, Shimon Peres promised to internationalize Jerusalem, granting the UN political control of the Old City and the Vatican hegemony over the holy sites within. This was confirmed by the Italian newspaper La Stampa. In March 1995 the Israeli radio station Arutz Sheva was leaked a cable from the Israeli Embassy in Rome, confirming the hand over of Jerusalem to the Vatican.

 

The future Pope will establish his throne one day within the walls of the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem. It is from here that he will rule his World Church.

 

And this day may not be as far off as many believe. The cornerstones for the Third Temple have already been quarried by the Jewish group known as the Temple Mount Faithful. They are extremely well financed and organized. They have also produced priestly vestments in accordance with scriptural outlines and are presently attempting to breed a perfect red heifer in anticipation of the coming dedication ceremonies. Obviously, Rome and the Temple Mount Faithful are headed for a showdown.

 

In a letter sent to the Vatican in January 2004, the TMF demanded that Pope John Paul return the Temple Menorah and other vessels and treasures removed in 70AD by Titus and taken to Rome, where they are presently held within the Secret Vatican Archives.

 

Mark Owen is a freelance writer living in Toronto, Canada.

Wa'laykum Salam.

The Life Of Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall.

Al Salamu 'Alaykum.

Marmaduke was born in 1875, and when his father died five years later the family sold the Suffolk rectory and moved to the capital. For the little boy the trauma of the exodus from a country idyll to a cold and cheerless house in London was a deep blow to the soul, and his later delight in the freedom of traditional life in the Middle East may have owed much to that early formative transition. The claustrophobia was only made worse when he entered Harrow, whose arcane rituals and fagging system he was later to send up in his novel Sir Limpidus. Friends were his only consolation: perhaps his closest was Winston Churchill.

Once the sloth and bullying of Harrow were behind him he was able to indulge a growing range of youthful passions. In the Jura he acquired his lifelong love of mountaineering, and in Wales and Ireland he learned Welsh and Gaelic. So remarkable a gift for languages impelled his teachers to put him forward for a Foreign Office vacancy; yet he failed the exam. On the rebound, as it were, he proposed to Muriel Smith, the girl who was to become his wife. She accepted, only to lose her betrothed for several years in one of the sudden picaresque changes of direction which were to mark his later life. Hoping to learn enough Arabic to earn him a consular job in Palestine, and with introductions in Jerusalem, Pickthall had sailed for Port Said. He was not yet eighteen years old.

The Orient came as a revelation. Later in life he wrote: ‘When I read The Arabian Nights I see the daily life of Damascus, Jerusalem, Aleppo, Cairo, and the other cities as I found it in the early nineties of last century. What struck me, even in its decay and poverty, was the joyousness of that life compared with anything that I had seen in Europe. The people seemed quite independent of our cares of life, our anxious clutching after wealth, our fear of death.’ He found a khoja to teach him more Arabic, and armed with a rapidly increasing fluency took ship for Jaffa, where, to the horror of European residents and missionaries, he donned native garb and disappeared into the depths of the Palestinian hinterland.

Some of his experiences in the twilight of that exotic world may be re-read in his travelogue, Oriental Encounters. He had found, as he explains, a world of freedom unimaginable to a public schoolboy raised on an almost idolatrous passion for The State. Most Palestinians never set eyes on a policeman, and lived for decades without engaging with government in any way. Islamic law was administered in its time-honoured fashion, by qadis who, with the exception of the Sahn and Ayasofya graduates in the cities, were local scholars. Villages chose their own headmen, or inherited them, and the same was true for the bedouin tribes. The population revered and loved the Sultan-Caliph in faraway Istanbul, but understood that it was not his place to interfere with their lives.

Throughout his life Pickthall saw Islam as radical freedom, a freedom from the encroachments of the State as much as from the claws of the ego. It also offered freedom from narrow fanaticism and sectarian bigotry. Late Ottoman Palestine was teeming with missionaries of every Christian sect, each convinced, in those pre-ecumenical days, of its own solitary rightness. He was appalled by the hate-filled rivalry of the sects, which, he thought, should at least be united in the land holy to their faith. But Christian Jerusalem was a maze of rival shrines and liturgies, where punches were frequently thrown in churches, while the Jerusalem of Islam was gloriously united under the Dome, the physical crown of the city, and of her complex history.

1897 found him in Damascus, the silent city of lanes, hidden rose-bowers, and walnut trees. It was in this deep peacefulness, resting from his adventures that he worked methodically through the mysteries of Arabic grammar. He read poetry and history; but seemed drawn, irresistibly, to the Holy Qur’an. Initially led to it by curiosity, he soon came to suspect that he had unearthed the end of the Englishman’s eternal religious quest. The link was Thomas Traherne and Gerrard Winstanley, who, with their nature mysticism and insistence on personal freedom from an intrusive state or priesthood, had been his inspiration since his early teens. Now their words seemed to be bearing fruit.

Oddly, then, Pickthall came home in Damascus. The picaresque adventures of his days in Palestine had given way to a serious spiritual and intellectual quest. Like Henry Stubbe, another Commonwealth dissident, he saw in Islam the fulfillment of the English dream of a reasonable and just religion, free of superstition and metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, and bearing fruit in a wonderful and joyful fellowship. As the New Statesman put it in 1930, reviewing his Koranic translation: ‘Mr Marmaduke Pickthall was always a great lover of Islam. When he became a Muslim it was regarded less as conversion than as self-discovery.’

If this was his Road to Damascus, why, then, did he hold back? Some have thought that the reason was his concern for the feelings of his aged mother, with her own Christian certainties. This was his later explanation:

‘The man who did not become a Muslim when he was nineteen years old because he was afraid that it would break his mother’s heart does not exist, I am sorry to say. The sad fact is that he was anxious to become a Muslim, forgetting all about his mother. It was his Muslim teacher – the Sheykh-ul-Ulema of the great mosque at Damascus – a noble and benign old man, to whom he one day mentioned his desire to become a Muslim, who reminded him of his duty to his mother and forbade him to profess Islam until he had consulted her. ‘No, my son,’ were his words, ‘wait until you are older, and have seen again your native land. You are alone among us as our boys are alone among the Christians. God knows how I should feel if any Christian teacher dealt with a son of mine otherwise than as I now deal with you.’ […] If he had become a Muslim at that time he would pretty certainly have repented it – quite apart from the unhappiness he would have caused his mother, which would have made him unhappy – because he had not thought and learnt enough about religion to be certain of his faith. It was only the romance and pageant of the East which then attracted him. He became a Muslim in real earnest twenty years after.’

He left Damascus, then, without Islam. But jobs were beckoning. The British Museum offered him a post on the basis of his knowledge of ancient Welsh and Irish, but he declined. He was offered the vice-consulship at the British consulate in Haifa, but this was withdrawn when it was learnt how young he was. His family, and his patient Muriel, summoned him home, and, penniless, he obeyed.

He traveled back slowly, considering the meaning of his steps. As he left the sun behind him, he seemed to leave courtesy and contentment as well. The Muslims were the happiest people on earth, never complaining even when faced with dire threats. The Christians among them were protected and privileged by the Capitulations. The Ottoman Balkans, under the sultans a place of refuge for victims of church wars, had been cruelly diminished by crusade and insurrection, prompted, in every case, from outside. He saw the Morea, the first land of Greek independence, in which a third of a million Muslims had been slaughtered by priests and peasants. The remaining corners of Ottoman Europe seemed overshadowed by a similar fate; but still the people smiled. It was the grace of rida.

Back in London, Pickthall recalled his romantic duties. He paced the pavement outside Muriel’s home in the time-honored way, and battered down her parents’ resistance. They married in September 1896, the groom having fasted the previous day as a mark of respect for what he still considered a sacrament of the Church. Then he bore her swiftly away to Geneva, partly for the skiing, and partly, too, to associate with the literary circles which Pickthall admired.

During his sojourn in the dour Calvinist capital, Pickthall honed the skills which would make him one of the world’s most distinguished exponents both of novel-writing, and of the still underdeveloped sport of skiing. He began a novel, and kept a diary, in which, despite his youth, his mature descriptive gift is already evident. He wrote of ‘a pearly mist delicately flushed from the sunset, on lake and mountains. The twin sails of a baroque and the hull itself seemed motionless, yet were surely slipping past the piers. There was something remote about the whole scene, or so it appeared to me. I was able to separate myself from the landscape: to stand back, as it were, and admire it as one admires a fine painting. I crossed a bridge: starless night on the one hand: dying day on the other. There was a mist about the city: a mist that glowed with a blue spirit light which burned everywhere or nowhere, out of which the yellow lights looked over their dancing semblance in the water watchfully, as from a citadel. The distance of the streets was inundated with stagnant grey light, from which the last warmth of light had just faded. As I penetrated the city it had no other light than that which the street lamps gave it, and the glow from a lamp-lit window here and there. But the sky was still pale and green, with a softness as of velvet. The great round globules of electric light, rising up on the bridge against illimitable space, and their lengthened reflections, caught the eye and blinded it.’

But this landscape concealed a tristesse, the local mood that Byron had dubbed ‘Lemancholy.’ By morning, a thick fog ‘hung over the city, like a veil on the face of a plain woman, hiding blemishes and defects, softening all hardness of outline, soothing with the suggestion of a non-existent beauty. It is a law of nature, as it is of art, that half-revelation is more attractive than nakedness. Unhappily there is another law which forbids a man to rest content until he has stripped his ideal and beheld it naked. Hence the end of most men’s dreams is disappointment. And this disappointment is proportionate to what the world calls success.’

By the shores of Lake Leman, then, the novelist-in-waiting acquired his love of light, which later became one of the strengths and hallmarks of his mature prose. Here, too, he developed that sense of the fragility, even the unreality, of observed nature, and the superficial nature of man’s passage upon it, which enrich his novels, and increased the readiness of his heart for Islam. In all these ways, his writing mirrored the sensitivity of the paintings of his great fellow-converts, Ivan Agueli, and Etienne Dinet. Agueli’s tableaux have a Sibelian sense of misty timelessless; while Dinet’s exuberant Algerian and Meccan paintings recall the Muslim sense that God is present in our daily joys: the utter ubiquity of the qibla. Pickthall’s novels, at their best, resemble a marriage of the two styles, just as he found in Islamic faith the ideal which he had sought in Christianity: a medieval liturgy combined with a low ecclesiology, the hieratic dignity of Laud invigorated by the social passions of Dissent.

Rare is the secular soul that can produce true literature; and Pickthall’s youthful agonies over faith energize the first of his writings to see print: his short stories ‘Monsieur le Président’ and ‘The Word of an Englishman’ both published in 1898. The novel he had begun in Switzerland was never published: it is simple juvenilia, a laboratory experiment that in print would have done him no good at all. Sadly, his first published novel, All Fools, was little better and contained morally problematic passages which were to saddle him in later years with the reputation of a libertine. Even his mother was disturbed by the most offending passage in the book, which used the word ‘stays’, an unmentionable item of Victorian underwear. The Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, to whom Pickthall unwisely sent a copy, was similarly agitated, and the young novelist lost many friends. Soon he bought up the unsold copies, and had them destroyed.

But by then he had already written much of the novel that was to catapult him to fame as one of the bestselling English novelists of the day: Said the Fisherman. This was published by Methuen in 1903, to spectacularly favorable reviews. A blizzard of fan-mail settled on his doormat. One especially pleasant letter came from H.G. Wells, who wrote, ‘I wish that I could feel as certain about my own work as I do of yours, that it will be alive and interesting people fifty years from now.’ Academics such as Granville Browne heaped praises upon it for its accurate portrayal of Arab life. In later years, Pickthall acknowledged that the novel’s focus on the less attractive aspects of the Arab personality which he had encountered in Palestine could never make the book popular among Arabs themselves; but even after his conversion, he insisted that the novelist’s mission was not to propagandize, but to tease out every aspect of the human personality, whether good or bad. As with his great harem novel, Veiled Women, he was concerned to be true to his perceptions; he would document English and Oriental life as he found it, not as he or others would wish it to be. The greatness of the Oriental vision would in this way shine through all the brighter.

His next novel returned him to England. Enid is the first of his celebrated Suffolk tales, reminiscent in some respects of the writings of the Powys brothers. It was followed by The House of Islam, which he wrote while nursing his mother in her final illness, and at a time when his life was saddened by the growing realization that he would never have children. The novel is unsteady and still immature: still only in his twenties, Pickthall could manage the comic scenes of Said the Fisherman, but could not fully sustain the grave, tragic theme which he chose for The House, which described the anguish of a Muslim compelled to take his sick daughter to a Western Christian doctor when traditional remedies had failed.

This productive but sober period of his life ended in 1907. An invitation to St James’s Palace to meet the wife of Captain Machell, advisor to the Egyptian Prime Minister Mustafa Fahmi Pasha, began with a discussion of his books, and led to an invitation to Alexandria.

Pickthall accepted with alacrity, and soon was back in his beloved East. In native dress again, he traveled through the countryside, marveling at the mawlid of al-Sayyid al-Badawi in Tanta, and immersing himself in Arab ways. The result was a series of short stories and his novel Children of the Nile. It also offered an opportunity to help his friend James Hanauer, the Anglican chaplain at Damascus, edit his anthology of Muslim, Christian and Jewish tales, Folklore of the Holy Land.

1908 brought intimations of the collapse of the old world. At first, the Young Turk revolution seemed to presage a renewed time of hope for the Empire. Pickthall welcomed the idealistic revolutionaries, imagining that they would hold the empire together better than the old Sultan, with his secretive ways. Here, perhaps, is the essence of his apparent remoteness towards Sheikh Abdullah Quilliam. Quilliam had been a confidant of Abdul Hamid, ‘the Sultan’s Englishman’, his private advisor and his emissary on sensitive missions to the Balkans. Quilliam knew the Sultan as Pickthall never did, and must have felt that his opposition to the Young Turk movement was fully vindicated by the disasters of the Balkan War of 1912, when the Empire lost almost all her remaining European territories to vengeful Christians. More calamitous still was the Unionist decision to cast in its lot with Prussian militarism during the First World War. Pickthall, too, became anxious for Turkey, seeing that the old British policy of upholding the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, which had begun even before Britain intervened on Turkey’s side in the Crimean War, and had been reinforced by Disraeli’s anti-Russian strategy, was steadily disintegrating in the face of Young Turk enthusiasm for Germany.

Coup and counter-coup let much gifted Osmanli blood. The Arabs and the Balkan Muslims, who had previously looked up to the Turks for political and religious leadership, began to wonder whether they should not heed the mermaid calls of the European Powers, and press for autonomy or outright independence from the Porte. Behind the agitation was, on the one hand, the traditional British fear that, in the words of Sir Mark Sykes, ‘the collapse of the Ottoman Empire would be a frightful disaster to us.’ On the other were ranged the powers of bloodsucking French banks, Gladstonian Christian Islamophobia, and a vicious pan-Slavism bankrolled from the darker recesses of Moscow’s bureaucracy.

As the dismal news rolled in, it seemed as though Heaven had finally abandoned the Empire to its fate. In England, Pickthall campaigned vigorously on Turkey’s behalf, but could do nothing against the new Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, who was, as Granville Browne commented, ‘russophile, germanophobe, and anti-Islamic.’ He wrote to a Foreign Office official demanding to know whether the new arrangements in the Balkans could be considered to further the cause of peace, and received the following reply: ‘Yes, and I’ll tell you why. It is not generally known. But the Muslim population has been practically wiped out – 240,000 killed in Western Thrace alone – that clears the ground.’

While campaigning for the dying Empire, Pickthall found time for more novels. Larkmeadow, another Suffolk tale, appeared in 1911, and in 1913 he produced one of his masterpieces, Veiled Women. This follows Saïd in its realistic, often Zola-like depiction of Middle Eastern life, but now there is an undercurrent of polemic. Edwardian imperial convictions about the evils of slavery stood little chance against the charming reality of a Cairo harem, where concubinage was an option desired earnestly by many Circassian girls, whose slave-guardians thanked God for the ease of their lot. Lord Cromer, although generally contemptuous of Egyptian ways, made an exception in the case of slavery, an institution whose Islamic expression he was able grudgingly to respect:

‘It may be doubted (Cromer wrote) whether in the majority of cases the lot of slaves in Egypt is, in its material aspects, harder than, or even as hard as that of many domestic servants in Europe. Indeed, from one point of view, the Eastern slave is in a better position than the Western servant. The latter can be thrown out of employment at any moment. […] Cases are frequent of masters who would be glad to get rid of their slaves, but who are unable to do so because the latter will not accept the gift of liberty. A moral obligation, which is universally recognised, rests on all masters to support aged and infirm slaves till they die; this obligation is often onerous in the case of those who have inherited slaves from their parents or other relatives.’ (Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt, New York, 1908, II, 496-7.). In its portrayal of the positive aspects of polygamy and slavery, Veiled Women was calculated to shock. It was, perhaps for this reason, one of his least popular works.

During the same period Pickthall contributed to the New Age, the fashionable literary magazine supported by Bernard Shaw, sharing its pages, almost weekly, with Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, and G.K. Chesterton. As a literary figure, if not as a political advocate, he had arrived.

Veiled Women gave him the fare to Istanbul. Lodged with a German lady (Miss Kate, Turkicised to Misket Hanum) in a house in the quiet suburb of Erenköy, he gathered material for his dramatic but sad With the Turk in Wartime, and his The Early Hours, perhaps the greatest of his novels. He also penned a series of passionate essays, The Black Crusade. During this time, despite the Balkan massacres, Christians went unmolested in the great city. He recorded a familiar scene at the Orthodox church in Pera one Easter Friday: ‘four different factions fighting which was to carry the big Cross, and the Bishop hitting out right and left upon their craniums with his crozier; many people wounded, women in fits. The Turkish mounted police had to come in force to stop further bloodshed.’ It was a perfect image of the classical Ottoman self-understanding: without the Sultan-Caliph, the minorities would murder each other. The Second Balkan War, which saw the victorious Orthodox powers squabbling over the amputated limbs of Turkey, looked like a full vindication of this.

Pickthall returned to an England full of glee at the Christian victories. As a lover of Turkey, he was shattered by the mood of triumph. The Bishop of London held a service of intercession to pray for the victory of the Bulgarian army as it marched on Istanbul. Where, in all this, was Pickthall’s high Anglicanism?

It was the English mood of holy war which finally drove him from the faith of his fathers. He had always felt uncomfortable with those English hymns that curse the infidel. One particular source of irritation was Bishop Cleveland Coxe’s merry song:

‘Trump of the Lord! I hear it blow!

Forward the Cross; the world shall know

Jehovah’s arms against the foe;

Down shall the cursed Crescent go!

To arms! To arms!

God wills it so.’

And now, in a small Sussex village church, Pickthall heard a vicar hurling imprecations against the devilish Turk. The last straw was Charles Wesley’s hymn ‘For the Mahometans’:

‘O, may thy blood once sprinkled cry

For those who spurn Thy sprinkled blood:

Assert thy glorious Deity

Stretch out thine arm thou triune God

The Unitarian fiend expel

And chase his doctrines back to Hell.’

Pickthall thought of the Carnegie Report, which declared, of the Greek attack on Valona, that ‘in a century of repentance they could not expiate it.’ He thought of the forced conversions of the Pomaks in Bulgaria. He remembered the refugees in Istanbul, their lips removed as trophies by Christian soldiers. He remembered that no Muslim would ever sing a hymn against Jesus. He could stand no more. He left the church before the end of the service, and never again considered himself a Christian.

In 1913, Lady Evelyn Cobbold, the Sutherland heiress and traveller, tried to convert him during a dinner at Claridges, explaining that the waiters would do perfectly well as witnesses. He politely demurred; but he could marshal no argument against hers. What he had seen and described, she had lived. As an English Muslim woman familiar with the heart of Asia, she knew that his love for Islam was grounded in much more than a Pierre Loti style enjoyment of exotica. And so, on 29 November 1914, during a lecture on ‘Islam and Progress’, he took the plunge, joining countless others of his kind. From now on, his life would be lived in the light of the One God of Islam. Muriel followed him soon afterwards.

Pickthall was now at his most passionate:

‘Objectivity is much more common in the East than in the West; nations, like individuals, are there judged by their words, not by their own idea of their intentions or beliefs; and these inconsistencies, which no doubt look very trifling to a British politician, impress the Oriental as a foul injustice and the outcome of fanaticism. The East preserves our record, and reviews it as a whole. There is no end visible to the absurdities into which this mental deficiency of our rulers may lead us. […] Nothing is too extravagant to be believed in this connection, when flustered mediocrities are in the place of genius.’

This bitter alienation from British policy, which now placed him at the opposite pole from his erstwhile friend Churchill, opened the next chapter in Pickthall’s life. Passionate Khilafatists invited him to become editor of a great Indian newspaper, the Bombay Chronicle, and he accepted. In September 1919 he reached the Apollo Bunder, and immediately found himself carried away in the maelstrom of Indian life and politics. When he arrived, most of the Chronicle’s staff were on strike; within six months he had turned it around and doubled its circulation, through a judicious but firm advocacy of Indian evolution towards independence. The Government was incandescent, but could do little. However Pickthall, who became a close associate of Gandhi, supported the ulema’s rejection of violent resistance to British rule, and their opposition to the growing migration of Indian Muslims to independent Afghanistan. Non-violence and non-co-operation seemed the most promising means by which India would emerge as a strong and free nation. When the Muslim League made its appearance under the very secular figure of Jinnah, Pickthall joined the great bulk of India’s ulema in rejecting the idea of partition. India’s great Muslim millions were one family, and must never be divided. Only together could they complete the millennial work of converting the whole country to Islam.

So the Englishman became an Indian nationalist leader, fluent in Urdu, and attending dawn prayers in the mosque, dressed in Gandhian homespun adorned with the purple crescent of the Khilafatists. He wrote to a friend: ‘They expect me to be a sort of political leader as well as a newspaper editor. I have grown quite used to haranguing multitudes of anything from 5 to 30,000 people in the open air, although I hate it still as much as ever and inwardly am just as miserably shy.’ He also continued his Friday sermons, preaching at the great mosque of Bijapur and elsewhere.

In 1924, the Raj authorities found the Chronicle guilty of misreporting an incident in which Indian protesters had been killed. Crushing fines were imposed on the newspaper, and Pickthall resigned. His beloved Khilafatist movement folded in the same year, following Atatürk’s abolition of the ancient title. Although he effectively left political life, he was always remembered gratefully by Gandhi, who was later to write these words to his widow:
‘Your husband and I met often enough to grow to love each other and I found Mr. Pickthall a most amiable and deeply religious man. And although he was a convert he had nothing of the fanatic in him that most converts, no matter to what faith they are converted, betray in their speech and act. Mr. Pickthall seemed to me to live his faith unobtrusively.’

His job was gone, but Pickthall’s desire to serve Islam burned brighter than ever. He accepted the headmastership of a boy’s school in the domains of the Nizam of Hyderabad, outside the authority of British India. This princely state boasted a long association with British Muslims, and had been many years earlier the home of one of the most colourful characters in India: William Linnaeus Gardner (1770-1835), a convert who fought in the Nizam’s forces against the French in 1798 before setting up his own regiment of irregulars, Gardner’s Horse, and marrying his son to a niece of the Moghul emperor Akbar Shah.

In the 1920s, Hyderabad resembled a surviving fragment of Moghul brilliance, and the Nizam, the richest man in the world, was busy turning his capital into an oasis of culture and art. The appointment of the celebrated Pickthall would add a further jewel to his crown. Pickthall’s monarchist sympathies were aroused by the Nizam, who had made his lands the pride of India. ‘He lives like a dervish’, Pickthall reported, ‘and devotes his time to every detail of the Government.’ It was his enthusiasm and generosity that enabled Pickthall to launch the journal Islamic Culture, which he edited for ten years, and which continues to be published in the city as one of the Muslim world’s leading academic journals. Under his editorship, a wide range of Muslim and non-Muslim scholars published on a huge variety of topics. A regular contributor was Josef Horowitz, the great German orientalist. Another was Henri Leon, now writing as Harun Mustafa Leon, who contributed learned articles on early Arabic poetry and rhetoric, on Abbasid medical institutions, and a piece on ‘The Languages of Afghanistan.’

Pickthall also directed the school for Hyderabadi civil servants, encouraging their attendance at prayer, and teaching them the protocols to observe when moving among the burra sahibs of British India. Prayer featured largely in all his activities: as he wrote to a friend, after attending a conference on eduction:
‘I attended prayers at Tellycherry. The masjids are all built like Hindu temples. There are no minarets, and the azan is called from the ground, as the Wahhabis call it. When I mentioned this fact, the reforming party were much amused because the maulvis of Malabar are very far from being Wahhabis. I stopped the Conference proceedings at each hour of prayer, and everyone went to the adjacent mosque. I impressed upon the young leaders the necessity of being particularly strict in observance of the essential discipline of Islam.’

In the midst of this educational activity, he managed to find time to write. He wrote a (never to be published) Moghul novel, Dust and the Peacock Throne, in 1926, and the following year he composed his Madras lectures, published as The Cultural Side of Islam, which are still widely read in the Subcontinent. But from 1929 until 1931 the Nizam gave him leave-of-absence to enable him to complete his Koranic translation. As he noted: ‘All Muslim India seems to be possessed with the idea that I ought to translate the Qur’an into real English.’ He was anxious that this should be the most accurate, as well as the most literate, version of the Scripture. As well as mastering the classical Islamic sources, he travelled to Germany to consult with leading Orientalists, and studied the groundbreaking work of Nöldeke and Schwally, the Geschichte des Qorans, to which his notes frequently refer.

When the work was completed, Pickthall realised that it was unlikely to gain wide acceptance among Muslims unless approved by Al-Azhar, which, with the abolition of the Ottoman post of Shaykh al-Islam, had become the leading religious authority in the Muslim world. So to Egypt he went, only to discover that powerful sections of the ulema considered unlawful any attempt to render ‘the meanings of the Book’ into a language other than Arabic. The controversy soon broke, as Shaykh Muhammad Shakir wrote in the newspaper Al-Ahram that all who aided such a project would burn in Hell for evermore. The Shaykh recommended that Pickthall translate Tabari’s commentary instead, a work that would amount to at least one hundred volumes in English. Other ulema demanded that his translation be retranslated into Arabic, to see if it differed from the original in any respect, however small.

Pickthall published, in Islamic Culture, a long account of his battle with the Shaykh and the mentality which he represented. He included this reflection:
‘Many Egyptian Muslims were as surprised as I was at the extraordinary ignorance of present world conditions of men who claimed to be the thinking heads of the Islamic world – men who think that the Arabs are still ‘the patrons,’ and the non-Arabs their ‘freedmen’; who cannot see that the positions have become reversed, that the Arabs are no longer the fighters and the non-Arabs the stay-at-homes but it is the non-Arabs who at present bear the brunt of the Jihâd; that the problems of the non-Arabs are not identical with those of the Arabs; that translation of the Qur’ân is for the non-Arabs a necessity, which, of course, it is not for Arabs; men who cannot conceive that there are Muslims in India as learned and devout, as capable as judgment and as careful for the safety of Islam, as any to be found in Egypt.’

The battle was won when Pickthall addressed, in Arabic, a large gathering of the ulema, including Rashid Rida, explaining the current situation of Islam in the world, and the enormous possibilities for the spread of Islam among the English-speaking people. He won the argument entirely. The wiser heads of al-Azhar, recognising their inability to understand the situation of English speakers and the subtle urgencies of da‘wa, accepted his translation. The former Shaykh al-Azhar, al-Maraghi, who could see his sincerity and his erudition, offered him these parting words: ‘If you feel so strongly convinced that you are right, go on in God’s name in the way that is clear to you, and pay no heed to what any of us say.’

The translation duly appeared, in 1930, and was hailed by the Times Literary Supplement as ‘a great literary achievement.’ Avoiding both the Jacobean archaisms of Sale, and the baroque flourishes and expansions of Yusuf Ali (whose translation Pickthall regarded as too free), it was recognised as the best translation ever of the Book, and, indeed, as a monument in the history of translation. Unusually for a translation, it was further translated into several other languages, including Tagalog, Turkish and Portuguese.

Pickthall, now a revered religious leader in his own right, was often asked for Hanafi fatwas on difficult issues, and continued to preach. As such, he was asked by the Nizam to arrange the marriage of the heir to his throne to the daughter of the last Ottoman caliph, Princess Dürrüsehvar. The Ottoman exiles lived in France as pensioners of the Nizam, and thither Pickthall and the Hyderabad suite travelled. His knowledge of Ottoman and Moghul protocol allowed Pickthall to bring off this brilliant match, which was to be followed by an umra visit, his private hope being that the Caliphate, which he regarded as still by right vested in the House of Osman, might now pass to a Hyderabadi prince yet to be born, who would use the wealth of India and the prestige and holiness of the Caliphate to initiate a new dawn of independence and success for Islam. Delhi’s decision to absorb the Nizam’s domains into independent India made that impossible; but the princess devoted her life to good works, which continue today, even after her ninetieth birthday, which she celebrated in January 2004.

In 1935 Pickthall left Hyderabad. His school was flourishing, and he had forever to deny that he was the Fielding of E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India. (He knew Forster well, and the charge may not be without foundation.) He handed over Islamic Culture to the new editor, the Galician convert Muhammad Asad. He then returned to England, where he set up a new society for Islamic work, and delivered a series of lectures.

Despite this new activity, however, his health was failing, and he must have felt as Winstanley felt:

‘And here I end, having put my arm as far as my strength will go to advance righteousness. I have writ, I have acted, I have peace: and now I must wait to see the Spirit do his own work in the hearts of others and whether England shall be the first land, or some other, wherein truth shall sit down in triumph.’ (Gerrard Winstanley, A New Year’s Gift for the Parliament and Army, 1650.)

He died in a cottage in the West Country on May 19 1936, of coronary thrombosis, and was laid to rest in the Muslim cemetery at Brookwood. After his death, his wife cleared his desk, where he had been revising his Madras lectures the night before he died, and she found that the last lines he had written were from the Qur’an:

‘Whosoever surrendereth his purpose to Allah, while doing good, his reward is with his Lord, and there shall no fear come upon them, neither shall they grieve.’

Taken from tauheed-sunnat.com. Shortened.

Wa'laykum Salam.



  

Losing My Islam.

Al Salamu 'Alaykum.

Indian celebrities, Muslim faith

By Ekram Haque.

From time to time, we hear about some Muslim celebrities in India engaging in practices that is akin to compromising their faith. A recent case in point is news reports of cricketer Zaheer Khan worshiping in a temple. There are also several cases of young Muslim men and women marrying spouses from other faiths. This is a serious problem, and the Muslim celebrities in the sports and entertainment world as well as the Muslim youth must be reminded about the implications of their actions.

As is well known, the Muslim testimony of faith – “I testify that there is no god, except Allah” – begins with the negation of all deities and affirmation of Allah as the only God. Worshiping anyone else, whether for political correctness or expediency, breaks this covenant. The struggle of all prophets throughout history, including the Prophet Muhammad (S), was to invite people to the worship of one true God. In the pursuit of this goal, some of the prophets and their followers went through severe persecution, including expulsion from their homelands.

The very first pillar of a Muslim’s faith is to testify to Allah’s lordship with the tongue, believe in it in the heart, and manifest it through actions. Faith without action is meaningless, and action without faith is deficient. It is often the last part where people fall short the most.

The pagans of Makkah had pleaded with Prophet Muhammad (S) to worship their gods in return for them worshiping Allah. In response came a small chapter of the Qur’an completely rejecting any bartering of the faith:

“Say: O disbelievers, I worship not what you worship,
Nor will you worship what I worship,
Nor will you worship whom I worship,
And I shall not worship that you are worshipping,
Nor will you worship whom I worship,
To you, your religion, to me, mine.” Sura 109, verses 1-6

In another famous incident, some of the nobles of Makkah offered the Prophet Muhammad (S) the kingship and wealth of the Quraysh if he renounced his faith in one God. The Prophet response: I will not do that even if you gave me sun in one hand and moon in the other.

Islam acknowledges the existence of other faiths and encourages cooperation with them for the common good. The Prophet Muhammad (S) worked with the pagans of Makkah before his prophethood to maintain a treaty of common goodwill, known as Hilf ul Fudhul. Many years later as a Prophet he said that if he were to be invited to join such an endeavor again he would gladly do so.

While Muslims are encouraged to have good relations with people of other faiths, they are forbidden to worship anyone other than Allah. In Islam, there is no sin greater than associating partners with God. The Qur’an categorically states that while Allah can forgive all sins, there is no forgiveness for those who die on polytheism, called shirk in Arabic.

In all fairness, the celebrity world is a study in contrast. On the one hand we have seen some Muslim celebrities engaging in unislamic practices, at the same time we have witnessed several high-profile non-Muslim figures embracing Islam. Cases in point: Kamala Das, Maulana Umar Gautam, Malcolm X, Yvonne Ridley, Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), Imam Jamil Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown) and Kareem Abdul Jabbar. In fact, there are far more examples of the second kind. These celebrities found Islam to be the self-evident truth and liberator.

So for the Muslim celebrities who have worshipped in temples or taken spouses that Islamically are not allowed to them, it is time to take a fresh look at their priorities. It is possible that some celebrities and Muslim individuals in general may be put in a situation by the non-Muslim friends where they are expected to participate in their rituals. These Muslims may oblige with the intention to not hurt their sentiments. Instead, these celebrities should use wisdom and convey politely to their non-Muslim friends that they cannot participate in any ritual that is contradictory to their Islamic faith. They will not only earn the respect from their non-Muslim friends for adhering to his/her religious belief but also avoid such situations in the future.

These celebrities should learn from the great example of Caliph Umar (R). He was invited by the Christian leaders to directly negotiate the handover of Jerusalem to which he had agreed and entered Jerusalem in 637 AD on foot without any bloodshed or massacre. When it was time for prayer, the priests offered him the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to perform the prayer. Umar refused to pray in the Church, Had he done so, he explained, the Muslims would have wanted to build a mosque there to commemorate the first Islamic prayer in Jerusalem. So, he made it clear to the Christian priests without hurting their sentiments.

In conclusion, life and its pleasure are short-lived and temporary – for everyone. Someday, entertainment careers will end and sports prowess will wither away. The fans they care so much about will desert them. The only companion and helper that will remain with them is a faith they had not contaminated with disbelief.

Source: Two Circles.

'Alaykum Salam.