Thanks to all who sent in this astounding report from The Guardian, which is so bizarre and devoid of evidence as to beggar belief that anyone would even attempt it. But such is the ignorance of the Western public today about both Islam and Shakespeare; check out the "echoes of Sufism" at the end of the piece and tell me if you think there is anything in those two brief phrases that could not have come from any of Shakespeare's myriad well-established Western influences. Everything that Lings says is Sufi today can be found in various Christian sects that actually were in England in Shakespeare's day -- most notably in Catholic and Anglican Christianity. From the Guardian:
The influence of William Shakespeare on western culture has made him arguably Britain's greatest export. Now it is being claimed that his work resembles the teachings of the Islamic Sufi sect.The argument will be put forward next month at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London. It comes as part of a week of events focusing on Islam to address concerns raised by the 'war on terror' and improve understanding of the links between Islam and British culture....
The respected academic Dr Martin Lings will put forward this thesis in his lecture on 23 November. 'Shakespeare would have delighted in Sufism,' said Lings, who is 96 and an adherent of Sufism. 'We can see he obviously knew a lot about some kind of equivalent sect or order.'
Lings argues that the guiding principles of Sufi thought are evident in Shakespeare's writing. The plays, he believes, depict a struggle between the dawning modernist world and the traditional, mystical value system. And, like the Sufis, the playwright is firmly on the side of tradition and spiritualism....
Lings believes that characters in some of the best known works exemplify the Sufi quest for purification, while others represent Shakespeare himself.
'I am going to say that it is wrong to say we know very little about Shakespeare because he is present in his plays to a remarkable degree,' said Lings, who was keeper of oriental manuscripts and printed books and in charge of Koranic manuscripts at the British Museum. He argues that the journey of Edgar, in King Lear , is like the Sufi's search for truth, in which the seeker is helped by angelic characters and impeded by diabolic agents.
While the magician-like figure of Prospero, orchestrating the action in The Tempest, and the manipulative Duke of Vienna in Measure for Measure are commonly seen as Shakespeare's alter egos, Lings traces the teachings of a spiritual order akin to Sufism in their words.
The famous line of Prospero's 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on' is a complete fit, he claims, adding that King Lear's words also eerily echo Sufi ideas when he tells his faithful daughter: 'Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, the gods themselves throw incense.' Lings makes the point that the Bard is 'quite at home' with 'Gods' in the plural.
The International Shakespeare Globe Fellowship Lecture will take place in the middle of the Islam Awareness Week on the 22-28 November and will be preceded by a lecture from Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, the founder of the Zaytuna Institute in California, who will look at Shakespeare's sonnets from a Sufi perspective.
Throughout the week the outside walls of the theatre on the banks of the Thames will be illuminated with scenes of Islamic culture.
On the final weekend a souk will take over the premises, with stalls selling eastern wares. The week will also form part of the 4th centenary celebrations of the first recorded performance of Othello , which will be marked by staged readings of four plays featuring Moors and Turks.
Echoes of Sufism
'Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, the gods themselves throw incense'
King Lear to his daughter, Act V, Scene III'We are such stuff as dreams are made on'
Prospero in The Tempest, Act IV, Scene I
By the pricking of my thumbs something wicked this way comes (Macbeth)
Or, to slightly misquote Macbeth:
"... dhimmi, or not Dhimmi, that is the question ..."
At last!
People will recognise that Shakespeare was really Sheikh Zubayrr and that his name was re-written by the English!
some of my best friends are shakespeares. i have forwarded this to them with the riposte "time to start praying to mecca" (nyuk! nyuk!)
Unadulterated bovine fecal material.
BTW, AndyB, that's Hamlet you are slightly misquoting, not Macbeth.
Actually, the slight misquote of Hamlet could be morphed into a pretty good statement.
Dhimmi, or not Dhimmi, that is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous Muslims,
or to take arms against a sea of Islamofascists, and by opposing END THEM...
Absurd, but worrisome. The 96-year-old Lings, who needs to brush up his Shakespeare, can be dismissed for the nonsensical remarks. And so too can those who seem to be under the impression that Othello is supposed to be a Muslim, when it is absolutely clear that he is a Christian, in the service of a Christian power against the Turks -- remember how in Aleppo once, where a malignant and a turbaned Turk, beat a Venetian and traduced the state/I took by the throat the circumcised dog and smote him thus? [Borges chose to single out the phrase "malignant and turbaned Turk" for a discussion of the two epithets, one physical, the other a moral judgement; Nabokov titled a story about a tragically frivolous woman "That in Aleppo Once"; no one can claim this passage is obscure or unknown].
But what is Sam Wanamaker's Globe Theatre doing celebrating "Islam Awareness Week" at all? Why should it? Who has put them up to it? Who? What business is that of the Globe Theatre at all? Do they do this for Buddhists or Hindus? What is going on? What enormous efforts, all over the Western world, to bamboozle us, to trifle with history, culture, everything, in order to placate Muslim demands and Muslim problems of self-esteem, and to tamp down, even suppress, well-justified Infidel fears.
This Globe Theatre travesty is of a piece with the now demented and discredited British Council (google "Ian Robinson" and "British Council" and you should locate some sense coming out of Swansea). Remember how the British Council promptly discharged Will Cummins a few months ago? Remember that Uriah Heepish (with the Muslims the masters his ‘umbleness was eager to please) Rod Pryde of the British Council?
Here is a bit from a previous posting about this:
Among the things you may thank the British Council for is its "Representing Islam seminar in June 2003 at Hunton Park" and its "Keeping In Touch Project" (20 young Muslim journalists, keeping an online diary for Counterpoint Online, etc.) and "Building Turst in the Middle East" and the "Quarter-yearly round table meetins with Muslim professional and journalists" and, of course, "A Handbook on Islam for journalists" which "is an attempt to provide journalists with an accessible, informative and impartial resource on Islam and Muslim communities in Britain, to prevent ignorant comments about Muslimgs being made in the national press." Oh, you bet. And of course, "The articles by Will Cummins are the antithesis of everything that we stand for and have worked to achieve over 70 years. We are determined to get to the bottom of this matter."
What has the British Council "worked to achieve over 70 years"? The suppression of a coherent, articulate and fully justified argument, claiming that a belief-system, just because it includes belief in a god, is therefore permanently immune to criticism? The suppression of all free speech? The need to make Great Britain into a Muslim-friendly environment no matter what Islam teaches? The prevention of free inquiry into what Islam teaches? The spreading of fear among journalists so that they will get with the program -- through this deliberate provision of an "informative and impartial resource" designed "to prevent ignorant comments about Muslims being made in the national press"?
This is as bad as anything Orwell or anyone else has ever dreamed up. And here it is, part of that new television series we have heard so much about, which stars everyone in the whole wide world, the show we call “Reality World.”
But it is not a whit different from what is going on all over Europe, where people of sense keep coming up against the Official Line of Occupied Europe. And that line includes denying Europe's own history, and completely rewriting parts of it to accommodate a specious and exaggerated Islamic dimension.
Only a madman, or a fool, could say, as Chirac did, that "Europe owes as much to Islam as it does to Christianity." What can he be talking about? That same handful of names -- less than a dozen, Avicenna, Averroes, etc., -- that keep being trotted out, names from a thousand years ago, names of people who, if they were any good, had almost no influence in Islam itself, but were regarded as near-heretics. And for how long are we expected to applaud the fact that algebra and the zero were "transmitted" from India, and papermaking from China, and some Greek texts translated, often by Christian and Jewish translators?
But there are plenty of madmen and fools all over the EU bureaucracy. What is it they think is going to happen? Do they think that Islam will change? Do they think, by rewriting history, by actually encouraging the claim that Shakespeare, or Columbus, or Senor Fulano de Tal, was a Muslim, that this will improve matters?
Surely the reverse is necessary. Surely the way to get Muslims to constrain their own practice, or for some to fall away, is to expose, here there and everywhere, the political, economic, moral, and intellectual failures of Islam. If that offends some, too bad.
Ataturk managed to constrain Islam because he was convinced that modern Turkey could not survive, much less thrive, unless Islam was so constrained. We need not do anything. We need only let the Muslim countries not be propped up by Western aid, access to Western education and medical care. Leave them to their own devices. End migration of Muslims to the Lands of the Infidels. Deport, promptly, and with the same determination that Germans were deported from the Sudetenland, Poland, and elsewhere after World War II, all Muslim non-citizens. Make clear that the oath of fealty to the Infidel nation-states must have been meant -- and that any sign of another loyalty, to the umma al-islamiyya, will be grounds enough for stripping people of citizenship, whehter native-born or foreign-born. This can only be accomplished, however, if people understand what this belief-system is all about. If they persist in refusing to study it -- and by the way, has the word "dhimmi" appeared even once in The New York Times? -- even once? ---they are engagted in suicidal denial. And they have no right to take the rest of us, not quite as stupid or as fearful as they are, with them.
Sheer laziness compels me to paste part of a previous posting (“Apt alliteration’s artful aid,” as cheerful Charles Churchill put it), the whole thread of which can be found by the curious at
http://www.nojihad.com/contributors/hugh/jihadwatch/fightingjihad/rumsfeld.htm
The important thing is the bit at the end about Shakespeare:
“Now wait a minute. Mammon-serving ("I am not an antisemite") Kirk can engage in his pitiful "Jugh-boy" pun -- ah, ca en dit long, monsieur -- but really, Shakespeare must be treated with delicacy by one and all.
Othello is a Moor, but the whole point is that he is NOT a Muslim; he is in the service of the Venetians against the Ottoman Muslims. Remember how he puts it: "Say, that in Aleppo once/Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk/Beat a Venetian and traduced the state/I took by the throat the circumcised dog/And smote him thus." That's from memory; would you, Phil, or the antisemitic punster like some more from the Shakespeare Amateur Theatrical Society here at Red Cow Farms?
Othello was in the employ of the Christians of Venice (who, admittedly, didn't do much in 1453, during the Fall of Constantinople, for complicated reasons), and he falls heavily for that Venetian girl Desdemona, tupping his white ewe, she of the handkerchief, and the putting-out of the light, and all the immortal rest of it. "The time, the place, the torture." It is Othello who, having decided in his grief to give up his commission, declares: "Farewell, the tranquil mind! Farewell content! Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars/That make ambition virtue!" Note, please, prosodists that you may be when not worshipping Mammon, the unusual scansion, a pyrrhic followed by a spondee in the four syllables under discussion: "and the big wars."
If, Phil, you don't know what Ataturk achieved, fine. Mr. Carson has kindly agreed to set you straight. If you, Kirk, want to continue the absurd pretense that you remain open to the claims of logic and evidence -- and I offered you that chance, sportingly -- you who are now going off to "one by one" meet Muslims, and change their minds -- buona notte, buster. Write if it works.
But for god's sake, tutti quanti, brush up your Shakespeare. And here's a little question to consider: could Shakespeare, or anyone remotely like Shakespeare, with his wit and intelligence and humor and flair and superhuman understanding and sympathy and pity, conceivably have been produced by, or allowed to flourish under, any civilisation where Islam ruled the roost? Eh?
This is absurd on the face of it. Shakespeare's strongest influences are clearly those of our common Western civilization: Greco-Roman Classical, Judeo-Christianity, and Celtic-Germanic pagan myths and legends.
Islam's attempts to horn in on this most Western of Western masters of literature are truly disgusting -- so disgusting that it nearly renders the observer speechless.
But speak we must, or they will steal it all out from under us. If experience teaches us anything, it's that Islam will take all it is allowed, and then some. Next it will be Beethoven or Mozart who was "a secret Muslim" -- even though Islam forbids music -- and Leonardo or Michaelangelo who was "a secret Muslim" -- even though Islam forbids painting and statuary of the human form.
Equally absurb of Southwark Council where the Globe is situated is that in the Cummin Museum there is a cartoon film portraying Charles Dickens as making an unprovoked attack on young Muslim women with his umbrella.
This is one of the things that has prompted me to move out of London completely.
Lings (and others like him) is living proof that PHd = piled higher and deeper.
So much for the notion that lots of formal education are any guarantee as to wisdom and insight.
Martin Lings, of the Laughing Academy and the Liberty of the Clink, wrote a book on Shakespeare that was not to be taken seriously, except by at least one person who wrote an introduction to his study, someone whomhas expressed a great and sympathetic interest in Islam (though he knows very little about it); Ibn Warraq has predicted that this particular person might even become a "revert"; one more of those Truth-Seekers Fed Up with the Horror and Decadence of Western Life To Which Islam Provides the Comfort and the One-Stop Solution.
And who might that potential "revert" be, you ask. See below.
Foreword by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales.
"Through his study of such plays as Hamlet, Othello, MacBeth, and King Lear, Lings supplies expert and inspiring guidance to the beautifully wrought words and worlds of William Shakespeare. Lings's particular genius lies in his ability to convey, as perhaps no one else has ever done, the theatrical renderings of these texts, leaving readers with deep and lasting impressions not only of these masterpieces of dramatic artistry, but of the extraordinary man behind them as well."
Nothing to do with the Bonnie Prince Charlie of Flora Macdonald fame. But in Charles' case, and perhaps that of Lings in his dotage, one can at least excuse them -- neither one of them really has the faintest conception of what "dar al-harb" means, or "dhimmi," and neither one knows a thing about the 1400-year-old history of Jihad-conquests and subsequent subjugation of non-Muslims as dhimmis (where they were not massacred outright). So they are just ignorant, and stupid. But unfortunately, they are not alone, and together with others who know exactly what they are doing, they have captured many organizations, newspapers, television programs.
Will Cummins gets fired from the British Council for stating the obvious. Robert Kirby-Smith gets fired from the BBC for stating the obvious. George Galloway, on Saddam's payroll, and diverting money from the Mariam Fund for his own use, is running for office. Robert Fisk is still spilling his poison, soon to be in book form. John Simpson is still running the BBC World Service. Jack Straw is still refusing to learn any history at the Foreign Office, where the ghost of Sir Reader Bullard is long gone, replaced by hirelings of the rich Arabs. At the LSE, we have the marxisant Fred Halliday, who somehow managed, despite the outraged protests of Elie Kedourie and Donald Watt and Kenneth Minogue, to slither in as a professor. At the TLS, Robert Irwin assigns the reviews of books on Islam to Francis Robinson, sweet singer of Mughal rule in India, and Barnaby Rogerson, recent hagiographer of Muhammad, and Tim Winter (I forget his Muslim name, which he leaves outside when he enters the pages of the TLS). Mr. Ahmad, the millionaire Muslim, brings Parliament up to speed on the "peace" and "tolerance" of Islam, and who wants to be impolite?
Well, for all those who used to get nostalgic about a lost past, you Scots-wha-hae-wi'-Wallace-bled, you memorizers of the Mabinogion, you lamenters for the Dukes of Tyrone and Tyrconel, you are about to lose everything -- not this year, and not next, but slowly, slowly, so that within 20-30 years life in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, will be even more unpleasant, difficult, and expensive (because of security costs), because of the growing numbers of Muslims who subscribe, or do not publicly defend against, tenets that encourage murderous hostlity to Infidles, and disloyalty to the Infidel nation-state. Right now, the British Council, The Globe, the educational bureaucracy, are all determined to make sure that "war between civilisations" goes away, by propagandizing for Islam. Your own children and grandchildren are even now being effected (and if they go to private schools, no doubt the heavy representation of rich Arab schoolmates, so presentable, so affable, and potentially so very useful later on in the making of money, are sure to affect the atmospherics of those schools, and the atttitude taken, in a thousand little ways, toward Islam). Do you care? Do you see anything in Islam that might not permit co-existence with the shades of Bacon, or Bracton, or Locke, or Shakespeare, or Newton, or Henry Purcell, or Harry Langton, or Al Bowlly or Dennis Potter or The Goon Show? Take a look at those crowds in Cairo, Ramallah, Baghdad, Karachi? Is there anything about them, their faces, their gestures, what their minds are stocked with? Would you mind, terribly, if we borrowed your grandchildren, and gave them a fine Muslim upbringing? You would? Why? Isn't it a religion just like any other, a religion of peace and tolerance where science and art and all sorts of good things flourish? Surely you subscribe to that, don't you?
Oh, and if you don't, the efforts of the government, of NGO's, of Michael Foot and Anthony Wedgwood Benn and all their heirs and assigns (not quite as well-spoken as the leftists of yore), are here to collaborate in the massive Da'wa effort. Yes, they will all pitch in and turn the country into one vast salon of Vidal Sassoon, all bending their efforts to apply layers of maquillage to the Muslim image.
Protect yourselves. NO need to tramp around with rifles as the Home Army. Simply go to to the books, or the Internet. Study the tenets of Islam. Study the history of how all non-Muslims fared under Muslim rule. Spread that knowledge about, to everyone you know. Make a spectacle of yourself at dinner parties. Write letters to the editor. Harass those who are the collaborators; fight against Occupied Europe. Do not collaborate in the disappearance or destruction of your own civilization. After all, it hasn't done that badly, now has it?
A few years ago some academic in the ME was claiming - apparently seriously - that the Bard's plays were actually written by an Arab called something like 'Sheikh Spear' and that his work had been stolen by the English!
Wonder how the Sheikh got his knowledge of European history and customs, and why he didn't write instead about his own troubled culture?
Lovers of old movies may remember running gags in WW2 comedies ('To Be or Not to Be', 'Pimpernel Smith', 'The Goose Steps Out') where pompous Nazi officials insist that "Shakespeare, of course, was Cherman!"
Personally, I'm half-convinced by the theory that the Qur'an was written by the teenage Abdul Alhazred.
Shakespeare was a Muslim? How can I respond to that idiotic presumption? Although not erudite, or eloquent, barfing comes to mind. What could be more appropriate?
How would one state the purpose of the Koran in one word? How about, compliance.
How would one state the purpose of Shakespeare in one word? How?
I don't know how, but, however one choses to look at it, 'compliance' states precisely, in one word, what Shakespeare is not about.
"Personally, I'm half-convinced by the theory that the Qur'an was written by the teenage Abdul Alhazred."
I think it was written by one of the Dukes of Hazzard.
Hi Hugh
I bet you anything that Prince Charles is a muslim.
I used to like him, even when he was cheating on Diana. But no more. I bet you anything that as soon as he becomes king, he will announce that he is a muslim.
And by the way, of all people to be complaining about the decadence of society after living in palaces all his life. HYPOCRITE!
Suzan, not one of the Duke boys in Hazard, but possibly Boss Hogg, played by the bookish, well-educated Sorrell Brooke, who was neither corrupt nor dumb, and was said to know well a number of languages. Still, there remains that little matter of chronology.
Believers can have only one theory of where the Qur'an came from. Infidels can entertain a wide variety of possibilities as to the origins of the Qur'an. An attempt by Christians to offer a version of Christianity to the pagan Arabs. A Jewish sect, doing the same with Jewish texts. Either effort could have led to an admixture of, in the first case, Jewish and pre-Islamic Arab lore; in the second, Christian and pre-Islamic Arab lore. And was the first text in Arabic, not a written language in the seventh century, or in Syriac? Was it like the Homeric epithet, originally recited orally, and then written down much later, in Arabic, and in that writing down, confusion, admixtures of other half-remembered material, the squeezing out of most but not all the Syriac (see Christoph Luxenberg), perhaps Arabs inserting more pre-Islamic lore (the djinn) from the time of the Jahiliyya -- with the result that Carlyle famously described.
I don't know anything about research on the history of authorship of the Koran; Hugh talked about this a while back and gave some suggestions for study, but I didn't pay attention. Sorry...
But, I have some ideas I want to share. Whoever wrote the Koran knew very well extremely sophisticated techniques for compliance. The constant, undulating waves of positive and negative reenforcement, the lofty heights of the rewards and the horrors of punishment, the swings from escasty to dread: these are clever methods for not only making people comply with orders, but the internalizing of a belief-system that allows for maximal control; the Koran is brimming with powerful brainwashing.
And, there are very sly military strategies explained and suggested here and there: these things lead me to believe that the folks who wrote this stuff were very skilled in military training, the effective management of war spoils, especially prisoners and conquered people (by getting them to comply with orders, or even internalize a new belief-system, or face the consequences), as well as in the torture of prisoners. The entire purpose of the work is to make people follow orders on their own, so that one can expand one's power base and produce for leaders maximal advantages. Hence, the bloody conflict over who were the rightful successors to Muhammed, which goes on to this very day.
(Intelligent folks with military training saw the light: one can invent a religious ideology that will appeal in some way to all groups and use that ideology to dominate militarily and politically.)
Anyway, those are my thoughts.
I Googled "Is Prince Charles a Muslim?" and got a page full of sites. The one I had seen before was one called "Charles of Arabia"
http://www.meforum.org/article/356
Interesting, so maybe there existed proto-Koranic stories in an oral tradition that were hijacked by Arab warriors for their own purposes.
My goodness, could Islam be a religion hijacked by a few extremists after all?
Hi there guys. You mentioned you wanted more about early Islam and it's Koran. A reprint of John Wansbrough's "Quranic Studies" (with an intro, and notes, and translation) has appeared in August. Go to Amazon and look for it under 'John Wansbrough', it is the only one of 2 (the other is the original, out of print study). Get the book but it is heavy slogging.
Also have on hand, Yehudah Nevo and Judith Koren's "Crossroads to Islam" helped to press by Ibn Warraq (he said he recommended Prometheus - the publisher - to accept it). It looks at the history of academic scholarship on early Islam and examines the literary and archaeological remains. Something never done before. These are relatively cheap, so money is not the issue. These are easy to get, so I hope you have fun reading it.
PS Also of value, in "Crossroads to Islam", there is about 80 pages of inscriptions with translations, so that you can follow their argument and evidence. Easy way to learn Arabic, authentic documents!
Danke Rushd. I will promptly get to reading, and, following the lead of great Islamic scholars, like John Esposito and Karen Armstrong, I will selectively pick out just the texts and evidence that support my conclusions, uh, I mean hypotheses, and throw out the rest a-prior, uh, I mean, after consideration, as unauthentic, corrupt, not representative, or otherwise, uh, not worth dealing with.
And then, I will get back to you about what I have confirmed, uh, I mean, learned.
Thanks!
One of the Queen of England's titles is the 'Defender of the Faith'. I have heard it said that when Charles becomes king he wants it changed to the 'Defender of Faiths' thus making Islam an official state religion of Britain.
I'm not sure whether he ia a Muslim or just likes to suck up to everyone to make himself more popular.
Apparently he spends a lot of time visiting synagogues too.
Kindly correct the phrase "Homeric epithet"; "Homeric epic" was meant.
We are muslims and we don´t know yet, what a joke, greetings
JTF,
Were you making fun of me, or them? If it was them, then whew. You said thanks though, so I gues you're good.
Catch you later. :)
Genuine thanks Rushd...it was late in the day and a little mockery of our Islamic 'super-scholars' just couldn't be contained...
I am grateful for the references.
Thanks again.
I thought this, borrowed from a Muslim website, might help to further enlighten:
Author: Abdul Lateef (203.126.118.---)
Date: 14-11-02 04:55
Assalaamualaikum...
Just allow me to inform that Dr. Martin Lings has been a Muslim for more than 50 years. His Muslim name is Abu Bakr Siraj Ad-Din. He is also a Muslim scholar and has written various books. He is also an expert in the fields of Sufism and tasawwuf.
Anyway, Allah knows best. Spending time in Dhizkrullah is best rather than arguing to no end. Forgive me in this intrusion.
Wassalaam...
I trust what is quoted above, telling us a bit more about Martin Lings, described by The Guardian as a "respected academic," [but in what area? Qur'anic manuscripts, or Shakespeare?]helps explain things. For those interested, simply google "Martin Lings" and "Muslim" and you will come up with some fascinating discussions -- see in particular the thread where various people have their say on Lings' "seerah" or biography of Muhammad.
Should Muslims who write or lecture be referred to by their proud Muslim names, or should the fact that they are Muslims be delibeately withheld from the public? Would it not have made a difference if The Guardian had written, for example, that one "Abu Bakr Siraj Ad-Din" was going to give a lecture on Shakespeare as an unacknowledged adherent of Sufism, rather than good gray "Martin Lings"?
And similarly, when the TLS (Times Literary Supplement) chooses to permit an ill-informed hatchet job on a book written by the distinguished scholar F. E. Peters, and that nasty little review is signed by one "Tim Winter," would it not behoove the TLS, and Robert Irwin, the man who assigned the review and knows perfectly well who Tim Winter is, and also knows that very few of the TLS readers will know that Tim Winter is not only a Muslim, but a tireless propagandist for Islam, as well as being the "Lecturer in Divinity" (i.e. Islam), that he is demurely described as in the TLS notes, nor would those readers suspect that his name, his Muslim name, his most important name as a Believer, is Abdul Hakim Murad.
If the reviewer of Professor F. E. Peters' book were identified as "Abdul Hakim Murad," that might vitiate his effectiveness -- or at least make readers a bit more wary, wouldn't it? But why should not readers be informed that the reviewer in question is a "revert" to Islam; it might well effect the wariness of their response, and shouldn't it, given that the predominant mode in scholarship by Muslims is apologetics and defensiveness? Why do editors, at The Guardian or the TLS, promote the deception?
Just one more example of what, world-wide, one faces. And of course, for still deeper cover, think of those converts or "reversts" who may, for quite disturbing reasons, never reveal their "reversion" and hence their unswerving loyalty tot he umma al-islamiyyah and the cause of Islam. And meanwhile, under their Infidel name and outward and visible form, they can rise higher and higher in all sorts of places, in the military, in the security services, in the defense and foreign policy establishements all over the Bilad al-kufr, the Lands of the Infidels. A ridiculous fear? Why?
And while, in the early years, the Soviet Union could command the ideological loyalties of Westerners, for at least the past 40 years those Westerners who passed secrets to the Soviets were almost entirely motivated by the desire for money. No doubt the Saudis have been quite good at creating a network of hirelings who parrot their views, often cloaking them, not too successfully, in the language of "American national interest" which is supposed to stand in sharp contrast to all those "neo-conservative" supporters of Israel.
But more worrisome are those who are not Arab hirelings, but True Believers, and who, having gotten Islam into their heads, will be motivated by a loyalty to the umma al-islamiyya -- but since no one will know of their secret "reversion," it will be difficult to uncover them. This is a problem for the entire Western world. Surely some of the Muslims in France will join the army and the security services. Some will rise, higher and higher. What will assure the French that such people owe their loyalty to the Infidel nation-state? And the same problem will arise in the United Kingdom, in Germany, indeed all over Europe. No one wants to talk about this -- indeed, no one has talked about it -- but surely the state security services have to ponder exactly what the nature, and strength, of the loyalty -- the only loyalty -- that Islam permits its adherents, that to fellow Muslims. No Muslim can deny this, though various kinds of taqiyya will be thrown up as a smokescreen. Is this being talked or thought about, or will we all march forward prating about "peace" and "tolerance" and a "handful of extremists"? Any plans for the quick removal of that Force de Frappe to these shores, in ten or twenty or thirty years? Shouldn't there be a little long-term planning? Hmmm?
But why worry? Islam, we are assured by one and all, including Tony Blair, is a religion "of peace and tolerance" [actually, Blair's exact words were, to borrow the epithet used so well by the former "revert" Ibn Rawandi -- do google him, for Ibn Rawandi is very funny -- those of a "nincompoop"]. And didn't the estimable Jacques Chirac, once a summer soda jerk at Howard Johnson's off Route 128 and now, we are told, the leader of France, tell the world last fall that "Europe owes as much to Islam as it does to Christianity"? Is not Jacques Chirac a Frenchman? A European? A former Mayor of Paris, Lutece, whatever you want to call it? Would Jacques Chirac lie? Would he mislead? Could he be ignorant of the history of his own country and his own civilzation?
Well, Cherchez le fric in Chirac's case, as the world-weary detective said. But what about the True Believers, who are not doing it for the money?
I thought this, borrowed from a Muslim website, might help to further enlighten:
Author: Abdul Lateef (203.126.118.---)
Date: 14-11-02 04:55
Assalaamualaikum...
Just allow me to inform that Dr. Martin Lings has been a Muslim for more than 50 years. His Muslim name is Abu Bakr Siraj Ad-Din. He is also a Muslim scholar and has written various books. He is also an expert in the fields of Sufism and tasawwuf.
Anyway, Allah knows best. Spending time in Dhizkrullah is best rather than arguing to no end. Forgive me in this intrusion.
Wassalaam...
I trust what is quoted above, telling us a bit more about Martin Lings, described by The Guardian as a "respected academic," [but in what area? Qur'anic manuscripts, or Shakespeare?]helps explain things. For those interested, simply google "Martin Lings" and "Muslim" and you will come up with some fascinating discussions -- see in particular the thread where various people have their say on Lings' "seerah" or biography of Muhammad.
Should Muslims who write or lecture be referred to by their proud Muslim names, or should the fact that they are Muslims be delibeately withheld from the public? Would it not have made a difference if The Guardian had written, for example, that one "Abu Bakr Siraj Ad-Din" was going to give a lecture on Shakespeare as an unacknowledged adherent of Sufism, rather than good gray "Martin Lings"?
And similarly, when the TLS (Times Literary Supplement) chooses to permit an ill-informed hatchet job on a book written by the distinguished scholar F. E. Peters, and that nasty little review is signed by one "Tim Winter," would it not behoove the TLS, and Robert Irwin, the man who assigned the review and knows perfectly well who Tim Winter is, and also knows that very few of the TLS readers will know that Tim Winter is not only a Muslim, but a tireless propagandist for Islam, as well as being the "Lecturer in Divinity" (i.e. Islam), that he is demurely described as in the TLS notes, nor would those readers suspect that his name, his Muslim name, his most important name as a Believer, is Abdul Hakim Murad.
If the reviewer of Professor F. E. Peters' book were identified as "Abdul Hakim Murad," that might vitiate his effectiveness -- or at least make readers a bit more wary, wouldn't it? But why should not readers be informed that the reviewer in question is a "revert" to Islam; it might well effect the wariness of their response, and shouldn't it, given that the predominant mode in scholarship by Muslims is apologetics and defensiveness? Why do editors, at The Guardian or the TLS, promote the deception?
Just one more example of what, world-wide, one faces. And of course, for still deeper cover, think of those converts or "reversts" who may, for quite disturbing reasons, never reveal their "reversion" and hence their unswerving loyalty tot he umma al-islamiyyah and the cause of Islam. And meanwhile, under their Infidel name and outward and visible form, they can rise higher and higher in all sorts of places, in the military, in the security services, in the defense and foreign policy establishements all over the Bilad al-kufr, the Lands of the Infidels. A ridiculous fear? Why?
And while, in the early years, the Soviet Union could command the ideological loyalties of Westerners, for at least the past 40 years those Westerners who passed secrets to the Soviets were almost entirely motivated by the desire for money. No doubt the Saudis have been quite good at creating a network of hirelings who parrot their views, often cloaking them, not too successfully, in the language of "American national interest" which is supposed to stand in sharp contrast to all those "neo-conservative" supporters of Israel.
But more worrisome are those who are not Arab hirelings, but True Believers, and who, having gotten Islam into their heads, will be motivated by a loyalty to the umma al-islamiyya -- but since no one will know of their secret "reversion," it will be difficult to uncover them. This is a problem for the entire Western world. Surely some of the Muslims in France will join the army and the security services. Some will rise, higher and higher. What will assure the French that such people owe their loyalty to the Infidel nation-state? And the same problem will arise in the United Kingdom, in Germany, indeed all over Europe. No one wants to talk about this -- indeed, no one has talked about it -- but surely the state security services have to ponder exactly what the nature, and strength, of the loyalty -- the only loyalty -- that Islam permits its adherents, that to fellow Muslims. No Muslim can deny this, though various kinds of taqiyya will be thrown up as a smokescreen. Is this being talked or thought about, or will we all march forward prating about "peace" and "tolerance" and a "handful of extremists"? Any plans for the quick removal of that Force de Frappe to these shores, in ten or twenty or thirty years? Shouldn't there be a little long-term planning? Hmmm?
But why worry? Islam, we are assured by one and all, including Tony Blair, is a religion "of peace and tolerance" [actually, Blair's exact words were, to borrow the epithet used so well by the former "revert" Ibn Rawandi -- do google him, for Ibn Rawandi can be very funny -- those of a "nincompoop"]. And didn't the estimable Jacques Chirac, once a summer soda jerk at Howard Johnson's off Route 128 and now, we are told, the leader of France, tell the world last fall that "Europe owes as much to Islam as it does to Christianity"? Is not Jacques Chirac a Frenchman? A European? A former Mayor of Paris, Lutece, whatever you want to call it? Would Jacques Chirac lie? Would he mislead? Could he be ignorant of the history of his own country and his own civilzation?
Well, Cherchez le fric in Chirac's case, as the world-weary detective said. But what about the True Believers, who are not doing it for the money?
Hello to everyone,
Benelux, “Wonder how the Sheikh got his knowledge of European history and customs” Your question shows that you don’t know too much about medieval world history.
Wow, Hugh, it’s been months since I’ve been on the site let alone having posted anything and you still remember me enough to mention my name. I must have really gotten under your skin.
Now Hugh let’s get something straight here about Othello the Moor. First of all the title of Shakespeare’s work is, The Tragedy of Othello the Moor of Venice, and it was first published in 1622. He was a black man from North Africa who was converted to Christianity and in spite of all of that and his service to fight against the Ottoman Muslim Turks, at the end of the day he is still nothing more than a black man who is driven mad because of his “race”
Suzan, “This is absurd on the face of it. Shakespeare's strongest influences are clearly those of our common Western civilization: Greco-Roman Classical, Judeo-Christianity, and Celtic-Germanic pagan myths and legends.”
I like how you put what you said about strongest influences, that’s the key word influence, because it’s a fact that even if minimal, Shakespeare was influenced by the interactions of Christians and Muslims in the Mediterranean.
Elephant, “I think he says that there is no record of the Koran being written down with 150 years of the death of Mohammed who was illiterate.” This is incorrect. In terms of a codified book as in canonized (an Arabic word by the way) yes it wasn’t until long after Mohammed died, however parts of it had been written down on bones and pieces of parchment. Now the reason why it wasn’t written down as a book in his time is because Mohammed asked that it not be written down. Now if you want to talk about the Bible and when it was written down that is open to all kinds of debates. In my eyes both of these religions are religions of a jealous God along with Judaism and that’s the problem because everyone wants to be right.
Yes you are right Hugh, Europe is in trouble, the Empire is striking back and it’s not pretty.