Mombasa, a poem

Mombasa.
What can I say,
Your beaches golden as hay.

Corny.

Brazen by equatorial sun,
Unspoilt by the mess of the world.
Desolate from the Faranjee that come.

Who stay holed up by the pool bar.
Missive of the best of the World.
Golden beaches, palm shade, sun.

Warm Indian Ocean waters,
drenching your shores,
quenching our desire for more.

Sated, peaceful and calm.
Ready for the mess of the world.
But stay you aloof from it all.

Stay you, unspoilt.
Till I once again come.

Hustle, bustle.
Mombasa Town.
Kahwa on a street stall.

Narrow lanes,
Hidden industry.
Red sweet sticky halwa.

Birazee, mandazi too.
What can I say.
O Mombasa, I love you xxx.

Stay you, unspoilt.
Till I once again come.

END.
Written in the departures lounge of Mombasa's International Airport.
On request by my brother in law, Osman Varvani, for a poem about us.

We are Mombasa,
Mombasa is us.


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Location:Bamburi

Why the Greeks didn't do Science

The Greeks, for all their mental acumen and veritable gymnastics, never did Science!

Theirs was confined to a philosophical appreciation of the World. For whilst the story of Science, in the Western Hemisphere, nearly always starts with Galileo gazing up at the Heavens and finding there something that just neatly fit with his mathematical theory. 

The Greeks had looked there long before that and even formulated ideas that related to the World at large, and not just the Heavens above.

Their elemental philosophy was extremely powerful at explaining things. But the difference between our Science and theirs is not in explanatory power, but in ours being generative of still more questions and frontiers of endeavour.

Some may argue that Archimedes with his Eureka moment was the birth of Science as we know it. But the Archimedial principle of buoyancy was based upon the original four element theory. And more importantly whilst it explained, it did not generate.

For the Greeks held that the elements were four, with each seeking its natural place: AIR. FIRE. WATER. EARTH.

Earth sought earth, and things fell to the ground.
Water sought water, with rivers flowing into the sea.
Air sought air, with bubbles rising through fluids.
Fire sought the ephemeral fire of the Heavens, both causing devastation here on Earth and dissipating above.

And Archimedes's EUREKA was borne of his realisation that that seeking could also be a negative force of rejection. That the buoyancy that you experienced in a bath was a nett result of the water trying to reject you from its medium.
A perfect explanation if there ever was one.

Was it the power of this explanatory idea that held them back from further investigation?

Or was it that they lacked some other basic fundamental conception of the World?

Some have argued that they were too comfortable to do Science, too rich and too fat, but that belies the truth of their fragmentary states and politics, and does no justice to their brilliance.

Their explanatorily powerful elemental idea did fail them in one respect. For they held that a flying arrow, flew straight and then fell vertically once out of sight.

Indeed the Science of warfare should have been a pressing concern of theirs given their continually fluxing political situation. And even the Archimedean principle would have been employed to great effect in their construction of sea-faring vessels.

So what gave?
They would have noticed the imperfect parabolas of slower arrows. Then why not extrapolate from known to unknown as is the normal basis for all rational thought? From the parabolas that they saw to the parabolas that were out of sight?

But instead they resorted to their elemental theory and furthermore claimed a special case: that the slower arrows were imperfect, and the faster arrows perfect and so flew till their flying power was expended and then fell vertically.

The erroneousity of this may be easily apparent to us here and now, but imagining yourself within the powerful explanatory world view of the Greek elements and it is not so.

It would take something far stronger than the minds of brilliant men to give us Modern Science.

It took a conviction of a belief in the Universality of GOD given laws and their consistency.
And then an insistence that there are things worth researching and looking in to.

A revelation from GOD, the most High,

"and NO change will you find in the Sunnat-Ullah (Ways of GOD)".

"He Who created the seven heavens one above another: No want of proportion wilt thou see in the Creation of (Allah) Most Gracious. So turn thy vision again: seest thou any flaw?

Again turn thy vision a second time: (thy) vision will come back to thee dull and discomfited, in a state worn out."

From an Arabic Qu'ran that launched the whole of mankind on a path towards self betterment.
A fact little known.
Of a people now disdained.

END

Written on the flight out of Gatwick, over Africa onward to Mombasa.
Thank you Thompson Airlines for your hospitality.
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Location:Mombasa

Does Belief Dumb Down?

Does BELIEF dumb down?

This questions hangs on two others.

On the one hand, belief at its most basic is about discernment, and the classification of the World on the basis of arbitrary terminology such as good and bad, right and wrong. But it is that judgement call, however arbitrary, that forces the Believer to think.

Furthermore morality, which is the prime concern of Believers, is often framed as judgements based on consequence. Consequence is a distant subject for thought, dealing both with far reaching ramifications and futures. These are not easy subjects to converse on, let alone present arguments about.

Which after all is what the Believer has to do both for himself and for his fellows. For when you make that judgment call, you invite the contrary both in thought and deed, both in yourself and others. For that is the nature of man, who after all is but a child of Adam. And then once invited, you must muster argument to justify yourself.

And on the other hand belief at its most basic is opposed to ignorance. For a believer "knows" and trusts his belief. Whilst the admittance of ignorance is certainly a motor for the pursuit of knowledge, belief does not readily lend itself to that pursuit there.

But it is the field within which belief operates there that explains the dynamic between these two poles.

For belief as regards the Muslim nation is clearly defined as being of six parts, collected into three themes. These are GOD, His Oneness and attributes, the communication of knowledge of Him, and His Ways, from Himself to ourselves and then our ultimate return back to Him. They relate to things which are invisible, and hence immune to reasonable question.

And so whilst these are taken as a given, by the believer, they leave open the question of how those beliefs impact on our everyday concerns. And whilst a believer might muster arguments in regard to the moral consequence of action using his or her beliefs, these as a rule do not preclude him/her from further examination of those questions. And in some cases they only provide the bedrock for the further examination of consequence.

So for example for a materialist person all research using embryos might be just Science doing what Science does, but for the believer such questions might hinge on the cases where such research is desirable, permissible and then plain wrong.

The thought processes of such a believer are therefore the more complex than the equivalent materialist.

And since the believer might elucidate cases, in those cases each would need their own justification. A more complex process and definitely not a dumbing down.

Isn't this a far superior version of rational behaviour that what masquerades as such in our time: the championship of freedom of expression when it is just plain stupid. Much of that that masquerades as rational is just that, the lack of discernment and the championship of the plain. Even down to the plain silly notion that there is no division between life and non-life, consciousness and dumbness.


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Location:Bromley

Why I choose ISLAM

It is a daily choice to be a Submitter. Not least because of the daily vilification that we have to bear courtesy of our main stream media.

But possibly most when we are faced with justifying our belief, to ourselves, when we come into contact with our own who have forsaken theirs. These call themselves Muslims in a cultural tome mimicking our cousin-brothers; the People of the Book; being the Yuhood and the Nasara.

Well today my belief was shaken in that way and not by the hardship of Ramadhan's long London fasts; lasting a full eighteen plus hours in searing 27 degrees without hydrating fluids; nor by some arrogant rationalist that could not see past the end of his nose, but by a young man who claimed to be Muslim and yet paradoxically did not know, and even shied away, from the defining words of our Shahadah.

But then I remembered that this Islam of mine is a choice; a choice I choose to make. A choice that my religion emphasises to me at the two corners of each day, with the Sunnahs of Fajr and Maghrib where by convention we recite individually Kafiroon followed by Ikhlas in the two circuits of prayer.

And I make that choice with good reason, for I believe in the ascendency and primacy of hope.
That there is MORE.

And that such a belief can have a profound effect on the behaviour of men.

For when men allow fear to reign their psyche look what happens; "They ended up focusing on just those last few seconds and minutes of the struggle, and did George Zimmerman fear for his life? And that's really what it boiled down to for them".

The jury in their negatively fuelled stupidity focused on FEAR. Whether or not Tray Martin was to be feared never entered into their deliberations. A travesty of a judgement that did no truth to the facts and yielded justice to injustice.

And this is one solitary example of what effect fear, or the lack of hope, can have on mans behaviour.

It is the hope that there is MORE that makes me a better person;
More trusting
More generous
More truthful and kind and in the end
More Happy.

And so I choose Islam.
And I believe.
And I submit to GOD in the hope of His grace and mercy.

And I choose Islam because it provides me with a codex of rituals that are abundantly graceful and accessible. That give structure to my daily life and enable me to find both solace and meaning. And I am not ashamed of that.

And I choose Islam because it is not hidden nor shrouded in mystery, so much so that those who make it their duty to destroy it have full access to its sources. But they cannot because they fail to see its heart.

And I choose Islam because no matter what, there can be no denying Muhammed (saw). That he changed the history of the World in the most marvellous of ways, may he (saw) forever be blessed.

And so by God's abundant grace I am Muslim, may He deign to keep me so. Ameen.

Location:Sulaymaniyah

The Miraculous Eyebrow

The Miraculous Eyebrow

I, for one, have never attempted this experiment. Nevertheless it is telling.

"Shave your eyebrow, just the one. And watch it grow right back."

Obviously the trick is not in the timescale, since it would take a few weeks.

The real trick is in the contemplation of the regrowth of the eyebrow. So complete is its enaction of what it was, that the pair would never ever seem to have been parted at all.

Contemplate.
Can evolutionary genetics account for this complete fulfilment of what was?

We know that hair in different parts of the body behave differently, and that their fineness in one part might be coded for separately from their coarseness in another part of your body.

We know that DNA, the very stuff of our genetic code, provides a template for protein expression and the relative abundance of one protein, over another, in one type of hair follicle, over another in another part of the body, might account for different tensile strengths and different grades of brittleness.
And that this might account for there being short hair and long hair in different parts of your body, and even different thicknesses of hair types.

But the eyebrow is miraculous.

It grew back and then stopped growing. Or it grew at a moderate pace and then it's pace of growth slowed to the imperceptible.

Either way it's hair grew until it had formed completely the shape of your previous eyebrow and then stopped or slowed.

How did it know when to slow or stop growth?

How did each individual hair follicle in your eyebrow know when it's desired length had been reached?

Although I don't generally like to labour a point, I feel that I need to here for the devil is in the detail.

For if we take the materialist point, and the genetic point, then each individual hair follicle in your eyebrow would have coded within it it's particular protein composition.

And if its matter of growth was given by the brittleness of its composition then wouldn't it be a probabilistic expression of that particular nature. Might not one overgrow, and another undergrow.

Still more incredible is its growing at a moderate rate, and then slowing the rate of growth when a particular length had been achieved.

The materialist will say that it doesn't know when to stop, and that it is just our projection of ourselves on to it.

That we know, and that it can't and so doesn't. Sounds a bit dogmatic doesn't it?

The funny thing is that that is not how rationality works.
Rationality moves from known to unknown and not in the reverse direction.

And whilst we know that we know, perhaps the very definition of consciousness, to impart ignorance to other things without proof of such is a movement in a reverse direction. It is an assault on the very essence of rationality itself.

The foundation of Modern Science ASSUMES that objects that are non-living, and even some that might be living, do not and cannot know.

Modern Science tells us that "genes" are not living and do not know.
That the hair follicles in an eyebrow are governed by such not-knowing genes.

Then how so the EYE-BROW?

Of course another explanation might be that the eyebrow has purpose and knows its purpose and seeks to fulfil its purpose.

Crazy as it may seem, it explains the thing in a language which is more readily rational, in that we can relate to it more easily than dead robotics, than current Science.

In fact this current of thought was at the very foundations of Scientific thinking, being known as Aristotlian. For the Greeks held that stones, and all matter, fell not because of seeking decreasing potentials within a gravitational field, but because that was what they did in seeking their nature. A purposive understanding of a purposive World.

That this view of reality held sway for long is no surprise, but what is surprising is that Science developed in the way that it did.
But that is a subject of another blog.


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Location:Athens

2nd blog in the series: 

https://shafeesthoughts.blogspot.com/2013/08/why-greeks-didn-do-science.html?m=1

How Can Islam claim to be a Religion of Peace, and yet talk about War?

The Revelations in regards to War; 
"How can Islam claim to be a religion of Peace and yet talk about War?" (Part 1)


Have you never thought to put things in their proper context?

Fact 1: Islam was revealed to the Arab Nation, whilst the two superpowers of the day (Rome and Persia) allowed the Arabian peninsula autonomy.

Persia, a mighty civilization, stretching over today's Iran, and Iraq, was at continual loggerheads with Rome stretching over Turkey, Syria and Palestine. For either of them to have garrisoned Arabia would surely have been advantageous to them, since Arabia straddled both Iraq and greater Syria. It would have opened up another front for either of them in their long conflict with one another.

But neither did.

From the secondary fact that "it never did" it follows that there must have been even stronger reasons for it not happening.

The first possible reason relates to the inhospitable nature of the land.
But would that really explain the non-occurrence? Rome and Persia were both militarized societies that well understood the need for sacrifice in order to secure gain. They would have willing paid such a price if mere inconvenience were all that stood in their way.

The second possibility was that they had evaluated the option and both decided that only rudimentary gain could be had in it's annexation.

A second fact explains that loss- consider the fact that the Arab people were a warrior nation who above all else loved freedom from control. To garrison Arabia would have been both costly and of questionable benefit. That is fact.

Instead Rome and Persia both sought to placate the Arab conundrum by enlisting differing Arab tribes to their cause and then gave them autonomy. That is telling when you consider the Arab.

And so Islam was sent to work on that polytheist Nation and made it the ultimate monotheistic Nation.

From a Nation that buried their new born infant girls it changed it to a Nation that allowed women the right to possess and own.

From a nation that was tribalistic to the point of injustice bring ingrained and rife, Islam changed this to a Nation that made Law greater that all tribes and even greater than the best of their chiefs.

All of these things and more did the message of Islam achieve.

And yet when the Prophet (saw) died the Arabian peninsula was wracked with rebellion, as if attempting to revert to its original state.

For every Arab wanted freedom from a universal law, and freedom from a universal justice.

The three places.
Just three places remained true to the ideal of Islam; Taif, Mecca and Medina; from the whole of the Arabian peninsula.

A complete message?
Tell me now, in such a region and in such a place, to have left out instruction on how to carry out War, would it have been a complete message?

In fact it taught the rules of War, making them both comprehensive and limited, and even I might add honourable.

Unlike today's enacted concepts of limitless war, Islam teaches by way of a GODLY command and in reference to your enemies "If they incline to peace, then you too incline to peace." A rule of behaviour that even when it is known to be used to the Muslims' disadvantage, throughout history it is the Muslims that have honourable done so.

An unusual message.
What is unusual is not that it talked about War but that in such a place; in the dessert far from everything, to it's coming down to an insular Nation;  it is the Islamic message that is truly international.

For the Prophet (saw) said on his farewell sermon that "No Arab is superior to a non-Arab!" And to whom was he speaking? To the hundred thousands of Arabs that were before him and in Arabic. And by this he implied that this message of God is for all Nations, and meant to be delivered to all Nations:
That all men are equal in the sight of God, and that what elevates them one above the other is nothing less than godliness, piety and doing good to one another.

A message of Peace and Hope, not a message of War and Despair.

Part 2- to follow, God willing.
Find it here: http://shafeesthoughts.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/the-development-of-jihad_9.html

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A Short History of Progress

A History of Progress.

When the NHS was conceived off as an idea, it was assumed that one day it would fulfil all the needs of the people with regard to healthcare.

Historically that day never came, and looks more distant today than it did at it's very creation.

This is relevant because it shows a very real example of an occurrence where the needs of the people were thought to be finite and meet-able.

Utility is a measure of meeting a need and proving to be useful. Modernity can claim to have exponentially grown the needs of the people.

Why? Because the fulfilment of needs appears to be generative of still other needs. In the case of the NHS generative of further expectation. In simplistic terms as our lifespan lengthened, because of our fight against disease, so new diseases became prevalent and our expectation that they be fought with equal vigour grew. This is why the NHS focus has shifted significantly to both health inequalities and managing expectations.

And thus maybe fulfilling needs is the very kernel of progress: to seek to fulfil needs, is generative of still further needs.

For when we started to bring our specialities to the market-place the resultant efficiency in cost, and work saved, created more freedom for people to do other things that were not necessary. Before that time we lived, and still live in some parts of the World, in a hand to mouth existence.

And so unlike our other prior existence the marketplace and our increased efficiency savings allowed us both superfluous wealth and the time to spend it on recreation, on things other than were necessary. And this in turn generated still further industries on which that wealth could be spent, and then other needs that could then be met. A generative cycle that does not look like it can be sated.

And this is the conundrum of Heaven, an impossible place of satiety.

That maybe all of these needs that we fill ourselves with are superfluous; being as it were in addition to ourselves; and therefore can in fact cause us to loose ourselves.

The moral quandaries are two, individually they are the loss of ourselves, subsumed in the consumerism of the market-place.
The solution is not to deny the market place, but "to live in this life as if you are a traveller"(1) and are only passing through.

The second moral quandary is more insidious, and bodes of our collective responsibility one to another. For when the marketplace becomes King and efficiencies met reach a point of equanimity, the market is not moral. In the name of further efficiency savings, and further progress, exploitation becomes rife. And the people exploit the earth, its resources, and then still other people. And that exploitation of others is just slavery by another name; market efficiency and progress.
This is what is seen in the market factories of the developing World; Slavery by another name.

Shafeesthoughts
(1) a saying of the best of all men, Muhammad (saw), the Messenger from GOD, may he forever be blessed.


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Location:NHS