An Islamist radical whose teaching role at a leading university was exposed yesterday by The Times led a secretive "Brothers' Circle" at which he espoused his hardline views.Reza Pankhurst, a senior figure in the hardline group Hizb ut-Tahrir, gathered a group of male members of the London School of Economics (LSE) Islamic Society for private talks.
Mr Pankhurst, whose party advocates the creation of an Islamic state governed by Sharia, is a research student employed as a teacher in the LSE's government department.
He is due to teach undergraduate classes this term in three topics covering nationalism and revolution in the Arab world.
Mr Pankhurst retained his position in the Islamic Society and the college despite a number of students raising concerns last year about the overt political content of his sermons at Friday prayers.
The Students' Union confirmed that it had reported those concerns to the Islamic Society and raised them "informally" with academics.
Hizb ut-Tahrir is banned in Germany for anti-Semitism and covered by the National Union of Students' policy of "no platform" for racist and fascist views...." - from a story in the Times of London, January 16, 2010, here
There's a well-known poem by Philip Larkin that takes to mocking task the "anti-war activists" who apparently thought that the Soviet threat could be fended off without military force. At the University of Essex, Chancellor Albert Sloman presiding, and at the London School of Economics, the student protests were particularly virulent:
When the Russian tanks roll westward, What defence for you and me? Colonel Sloman's Essex Rifles? The Light Horse of L.S.E.?
Larkin was rightly contemptuous of those who would put their faith not in the West's maintaining its military strength, but rather in "Colonel Sloman's Essex Rifles/And the Light Horse of L.S.E." They infuriated Larkin, the commonsensical realist when it came to politics (he was a friend of Robert Conquest). When he dismissed the "Light Horse of L.S.E.," he was referring only to the students. For those were the glory days for the L.S.E., when control was still held by the sensible -- to wit, Donald Watt and Kenneth Minogue and Elie Kedourie, before its takeover and makeover by a tiers-mondisant (himself third-world -- doing the subcontinental -- in origin) head determined to make the school safe for the unscholarly leftist likes of Fred Halliday, and so it was. Fred Halliday himself was plucked from some Trotskyite think-tank in Amsterdam (had it been the Herzen Foundation of Karel van het Reve, that would have been quite another matter). It is amusing that nowadays this Marxist still prefers Marxism to Islam, and at least has had the wit to worry about the latter.
Larkin did not live to see that when he wrote, in 1971, of the "Light Horse of L.S.E." At least those "Light Horse" would have been charging, however ineffectually (and Watt, Minogue, and Kedourie were worth their weight in well-armed brigades), against the enemy, and not against England itself. The transformation of the LSE has been not the only declension of an academic institution in recent years, but it has been one of the most spectacular in its speed.
LSE is where Donald Watt, Elie Kedourie, Kenneth Minogue, all once taught, wrote their books, and guided the students. They kept things sane. Even before they retired, or died, things had started to degenerate, standards to be lowered, the representatives of mass madness allowed in on the wings of attacks on "hegemonic postcolonial discourse." And now comes the final act in the general degringolade at LSE, with a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir being allowed to teach courses on the Arabs and Islam.
And it is not just the LSE. The SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) is a hotbed of anti-Israel (antisemitic) activity. At Oxford, it was bad enough that for years at the Middle East part of St. Antony's (a graduate college), the late Albert Hourani turned the place into a diploma mill (the diploma in question being the D.Phil.) for Arabs young and old, many of whom specialized in such fascinating topics as "The Construction of Palestinian Identity." The former propagandist for the PLO, Rashid Khalidi, got his D.Phil. under Hourani at St. Antony's, and today he is that appetizing thing, a full professor at Columbia, where he continues to act as the propagandist he was back in Beirut, or for that matter, in southside Chicago.
But, though he was a lowly lecturer for a while at St. Antony's (while billing himself as a professor), Tariq Ramadan could never have imagined - who could have? - that he, a sinister propagandist for Islam, holding out for the gullible Infidels hope of the development of a "European Islam" (that will somehow be based, one must assume, on a different Qur'an, different Hadith, different Sira, from that read by Muslims everywhere in present-day Dar al-Islam), really has had a professorship bought and paid for, with the promise (perhaps some already delivered) made to Oxford of Arab financial favors. This happened not long after Tariq Ramadan's appointment to a Professorship at the University of Leiden (paid for by an Arab government) had been announced. Apparently Ramadan realized that the University of Leiden would not be the place for him - Afshin Ellian, the brilliant apostate, teaches law there, and Professor Hans Jansen, though recently retired still carries weight in Dutch academic circles - and besides, Great Britain is the prize, the place that the Muslims want first to undermine from within, sensing its weakness. When his appointment was announced, the most disgusting part of the whole mercenary affair was the reaction of a professor at Oxford, who delightedly hailed the arrival of his new colleague, Frere Tariq, Tariq Ramadan.
At the time of the announcement of Ramadan's appointment, Melanie Phillips gave some useful information about the source of funding:
Tariq Ramadan, the darling of the British political and security establishment which foolishly and ignorantly believes his aim is to modernise Islam whereas his actual agenda is to Islamise modernity, has for some years been referred to as an Oxford professor. This was not actually true; he was not a professor at Oxford University but a mere research fellow of St Anthony's College, Oxford. But now the wish has become father to the deed. In the depths of the long vacation, the Oxford University Gazette announced that Ramadan had been appointed His Highness Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Oriental Studies with effect from 1 October 2009.Gratified as I'm sure everyone will be to hear that Tariq Ramadan (who was barred from the USA in 2004 and again in 2006 for allegedly giving money to a charity supporting Hamas, a ruling revoked by a federal court in July) can now really call himself an Oxford professor, there are disturbing implications for academic integrity when an Oxford University chair can be purchased in this fashion by an interest group - the Islamic world - which does not share the western understanding of academic objectivity. The chair is funded by a benefaction from Qatar, of which the Sheikh is the Emir. (The Sheikh is also one of the Arab associates of the "Oxford College for Research and PhD Studies" -- which, since it poses with heraldry and Oxford blue logo, might be thought by the unwary to be a real Oxford University college when it is not.)
The Al-Thani of Qatar have distinguished themselves for a few things.
First, a member of the Al Thani ruling family alerted a known Al Qaeda operative that the F.B.I. was about to arrest him, and that warning allowed the wanted terrorist to escape.
Second, Qatar is the home of the Muslim cleric who has been ranting against the West, and providing a justification for suicide bombers, Yousef Al- Qaradawi.
Third, Qatar allows the propaganda outlet Al-Jazeera to keep its headquarters in Doha, and supports through generous subventions a television channel that the American government and military claim has broadcast falsehoods that resulted in attacks on, and the deaths of, American soldiers in Iraq.
Fourth, Qatar has repeatedly made overtures to the Islamic Republic of Iran, and has been attacked in the London Arab paper Al-Asharq Al-Awsat, financed by the Saudis, for doing so.
At Cambridge, there is the man formerly known as Tim Winter , a convert (or as he would have it, revert) to Islam, who shows up now and again under his Muslim name. He was, for example, one of the twenty-four Muslims who wrote an angry letter to Pope Benedict after the Pope did not show the deep respect they believe he should show, to Islam:
In response to the anger prompted by the Pope's Regensburg address, 138 Muslim scholars and religious leaders last year wrote him a letter warning that the future of the planet depended on Muslims and Christians making peace with each other.The delegation of 24 Muslim leaders is led by the Grand Mufti of Bosnia, Mustafa Ceric, and includes an Iranian ayatollah and an American woman academic specialising in Islamic studies.
British members of the delegation include Dr Anas Al-Shaikh-Ali, chairman of the UK Association of Muslim Social Scientists, and Sheikh Dr Abdal Hakim Murad Winter, lecturer in Islamic studies at Cambridge University.
That last one - "Sheikh Dr. Abdal Hakim Murad Winter," a "lecturer in Islamic studies at Cambridge University," turns out to be none other than plain old Tim Winter, the name he carefully uses when he writes reviews in the TLS or articles in the British press. He wants to be a true-blue Englishman for the purposes of deceiving his audiences, but on the other hand, among Muslims, doing Muslim things, he of course wants to be known by the name that really means something to him, "Dr. Abdal [Abdul?] Hakim Murad Winter." One wonders who else he has managed to get hired, or promoted, at Cambridge, while the non-Muslim (and non-collaborating faculty members) chose not to make or take a stand, or were otherwise distracted.
And then there are the places where Saudi money has bought, has indeed paid for, whole centers for the study of Islam. Centers, for example, set up by the Saudis at the Universities of Exeter and Durham. At such places, those who prove unwilling to meet the ideological requirements of the Saudis are let go. For more on this, see the case, and the testimony, of Denis MacEoin.
Melanie Phillips, in the same article from which I took the information above about the naming of, and funding for, Tariq Ramadan's all-expenses-paid-by-Qatar chair at Oxford, also quotes Robin Simcox, a researcher for the Centre for Social Cohesion, on the influence of Arab money on its academic recipients:
...an academic chairing a public event on terrorist networks in Europe at St Antony's College, Oxford, stifled discussion on the sources of funding for these networks after a fellow academic raised the subject. The Brunei Gallery at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) was also forced to take down a photograph taken by a Saudi artist at their gallery after it was deemed to be insulting to Muslims and Islam...The way in which universities are being run has been altered to match the wishes of donors. For example, the management committee at Islamic Studies centres at the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh contain appointees picked by Prince Alwaleed, their principal donors. Furthermore, a variety of universities have altered their fields of study in line with the interests and wishes of donors.
Specialist teaching and research centres have been set up with a specific political agenda. For example, the Al-Maktoum Institute, an independent institution which has its degrees validated by the University of Aberdeen, was established in order to disseminate the "vision" of its primary donor and namesake. Furthermore, when British universities establish Confucius Institutes, an arm of the Chinese government, the curriculum and teaching standard is decided by the regime, with the university required to accept "operational guidance" from this regime....
The MEC [Oxford University's Middle East Centre at St Anthony's College] has received substantial sums of money from sources in the Middle East. The way in which this money has been used means there is a clear risk that donors will seek to influence the output and activities of the MEC. In addition, many large donations to the MEC have been anonymous, creating a lack of transparency. In many cases Oxford has knowingly accepted money from undemocratic states with poor human rights records...Several agreements made between the MEC and donors appear to indicate that funders have sought to influence the centre's output and activities.
But it's not just the capture of British academic centers, and departments, and individual chairs (well-upholstered with Arab money), that should alarm. It is also the fact that the terminally naïve or craven in the British government now pay for, and rely on, those in phony "moderate Muslim" think tanks, such as the Quilliam Foundation, who remain apologists for Islam even as they ostentatiously attack the most outrageous carriers of Islam, such as Anjem Choudary. Don't be fooled by such denunciations; the test is whether those who are labeled as "moderate Muslims," at such places as the Quilliam Foundation, are willing to tell the unhappy truth about the texts and tenets of Islam, the attitudes and atmospherics of Islam - not a "fanatical few," not the "handful of violent extremists," but of perfectly mainstream Muslims, who share the same goal as Al Qaeda or any other Muslim terrorist group, but differ only on the efficacy and wisdom, at this point, of the terrorist groups' timing and tactics. No, if the test is truth-telling, it's a test these government-paid "Muslim moderates" consistently fail.
The problem is far more, alas, then this or that identifiable and discrete agent of Islam preaching the Islamic gospel according to Hizb ut-Tahrir. It's the agents of Islam, bought and paid for, all over the academic archipelago that exists in Great Britain. Come to think of it, all over the academic archipelago that exists all over the Western world. Some departments of history or Islamic studies have managed to resist; some are even fighting back. But there has to be greater awareness, by university administrators, by alumni, by students (the hapless victims, in many cases, of these Muslim propagandists, both of the crude and, as in the case of Tariq Ramadan, the slithering hissing colubrine variety), and by faculty in other fields, who should not be hesitant to identify, and seek to undo, those who seek to undo us, intellectually as in all other ways.
For Muslims the war against any Infidels who resist the spread and dominance of Islam is a religious duty. It is also guerre à outrance, a war without end and without any scruples. For the goal justifies all means.
That is something that needs to be explained to their intended victims; in other words, taught to poor naïve innocent unwary Infidel us.
"British universities: seats of learning – and loathing:
"Many British universities are breeding grounds for Muslim extremism. Islamic specialist Ruth Dudley Edwards explains why financial need and government interference have rendered academics oblivious to this threat to democratic society "
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/6917777/British-universities-seats-of-learning---and-loathing.html
Ouch
You can't separate violence from the quran
Very brief summary of:
"PROFESSOR ANTHONY GLEES' INAUGURAL LECTURE"
http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/news/newsarchive2008/glees.html
It is with increasing concern that I write on a subject very much related to the article written by Mr. Fitzgerald. More attention should be paid to a political development in the state of Texas. It is here that I believe that we are being subject to the troubling entry of one Farouk Shami into the governor’s campaign for the upcoming election. Mr. Shami is a very rich businessman and an immigrant from the Palestinian controlled West Bank many years ago. He willingly claims to have Palestinian heritage, but has protested that he is NOT Muslim although his parents were very much adherents to the teachings of Islam.
Well, actually, he has claimed many things. One claim is that he is “not very religious” but prays every day. Another claim is that he was educated in Quaker schools and is, therefore, a Quaker . . . or a combination Quaker/Muslim. Yet another claim is that, where he grew up, everybody was, in some way, a combination Muslim/Christian/Jew. I am detecting a growing impression of slippery rhetoric.
Of course, the media is screaming about “anti-Muslim prejudice,” “racism,” and “can’t we all just get along.”
I fear that this may be a very subtle example of the kind of “Jihad of the tongue” about which Hugh is writing here.
I believe it would be interesting to see what Mr. Shami’s response would be to the following question:
Will you promise that you will never, now or in the future, do or say anything to advance or allow the advancement by others of any form of Islamic law (Sharia) at any level of government in the United States and will you fully and actively defend against any assault on the constitutional freedom of speech, non-establishment of religion, equal standing under the law without respect to race, religion, or gender even if doing so goes against the teachings and practice of Islam and Islamic law?
I wonder how truthful and how clear his answer would be. (Not holding my breath)
djrz,
For those who take religion seriously, God comes first. No government has the right to contravene natural law absolutes that are to observed and discharged by all men and socieites without excuse. As a Catholic, I recognize no right to bludgeon and butcher the unborn, and my church requires me to recognize no such right. No court decision can establish this, just as no court decision can lend its imprimatur to the chattel-like enslavement of any human being. Insofar as it does this, I can, should, and will discard such nonsense for the garbage it is.
As a Catholic, I am also called upon to strive within licit means to convert people to Catholicism and facilitate where possible the establishment of Catholic confessional states as the ideal form of government. That is what I'm called upon to do and do I shall. Every American has the perfectly proper legal peaceful right to seek amendment of the Constitution as they see fit. No freedom is absolute and to be worshipped as some modern-day Golden Calf, but is a good only where it upholds human diginity and facilitates the natural and divine truths of religion to be properly recognized, respected, and honored. As numerous popes have exhorted, and as Second Vatican Council's Dignitatis Humanae reminds us, these are sacred obligations not just for individuals but for governments as well.
So-called separation of church and state is not some sacred absolute. In the early days of the Republic a few states had officially established religions in accordance with their rights under the Constitution, rights they in principle still retain to this day, irresponsible court meddling aside. And the federal prohibition on establishment, perhaps humanly understandable to a degree given the Founders wariness of what had been wracking Europe for two centuries, is not sacrosanct, and lends itself to perfectly sound and legal abolition.
Those are my rights. And while I do not wish to live under a sharia state, the fact remains that those are the rights of American Muslims as well. Neither they nor I am under any obligation to renounce them.
So-called separation of church and state is not some sacred absolute. In the early days of the Republic a few states had officially established religions in accordance with their rights under the Constitution,...
This line of reasoning leads to a theocracy conundrum: Whose "sacred" religion is to dominate the state? Once you go down that slippery slope you involuntarily enter the realm of religious "sacred" wars of dominance, something we of the *secularized* West have left behind. Muslims, or less virulent (right-wing) Christian fundamentalists, who call for a return to religious wars are retro groups going backwards, to which your support you may want to seriously rethink. We who understand the "separation of church and state" do not wish to abrogate our natural human freedoms to religious theocracy. The penalties are too great. Verbal and pen Islamic Jihad must be put down on principle, it is not some "sacred" absolute. Neither is Sharia, which should be banned.
Which departments of history or Islamic studies have resisted the preaching of the Islamic gospel?
I had a brush with the 'moderates' at the Quilliam Foundation, when I tried to get them to back up their claims. After reading about the falling out between Melanie Phillips and Ed Hussain I tried to challenge their position by sending an email inquiry to their Communications Officer, George Readings:
"9th December 2009.
Dear George,
I hope you can help me. You don't know me but I am just a regular guy who happens to take an interest in Islam; particularly in Jihad.
Since the furore over 'The Satanic Verses' and the many subsequent conflicts between the Islamic world and various others, I have struggled to understand the source of those conflicts.
When I read Ed Husain's book 'The Islamist' I was elated at first to follow the inspirational story of his journey.
Later, though, I was left with troubling unanswered questions.
This is what I hope you can help me with.
In broad terms, I understand that there is a distinction between Islam and Islamism.
The former was exemplified by Ed as the traditional faith of his parents and ancestors, is non-political, tolerant of non-Muslims, peaceable and modelled on the example of Mohammed.
Islamism, however, is politically activist, inclined to fight or subjugate non-Muslims, supremacist in that it wishes to dominate rather than co-exist peacefully with others on equal terms, and is generally oppressive of women.
My difficulty is that in my reading of the subject (ie Koran, Ibn Ishaq, Hadiths, Bernard Lewis, Ibn Warraq and others), I can find nothing that is used by Islamists to justify their stance that does not come straight out of the Islamic scriptures. In other words it seems to be impossible to de-legitimise Islamism on Islamic grounds at all.
In fact they appear to be more mainstream than any other Muslims.
Do you see the problem? and do you not find it most discouraging, as I do?
Why do we never see public acknowledgement or discussion of this by anyone from Quilliam? Perhaps we have and I missed it?
Can you please point me to any literature or other information which explains motivation for Islamism or Jihadist activity that is not from mainstream Islamic sources?
I will be grateful for any help you can offer.
With many thanks in advance,
Sincerely yours,"
This was his reply:
"Dear Steve,
Thank you for your communciation of 9th December. In relation to the question you asked in your original email, may I suggest that you read an article written by my colleague, Ishtiaq Hussain, which explores the differences between Islamism and Islam. It is entitled ‘What is Islamism?’ and is available at Religion Compass Exchanges - http://religioncompass.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/what-is-islamism/ . I believe it will answer your question more fully than I could in a brief email.
Kind regards,
George Readings"
The article he linked to completely fails to make the case he claims for it in my view.
You can click on the link to see it.
I have had no further word from the Quilliam Foundation since my second message, which was more or less what I posted at the Religion Compass Exchange (as above).
If this is the best they can do then it seems clear that they are no more than a scam for extracting funds from an ever-gullible Government, with hardly an attempt to justify their noble claims.
But then we all knew that already.
Not a single "moderate Muslim" has yet been able to come with any texts that the "immoderate Muslims" rely on that are not the very same texts, in the Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, on which all the "moderates" rely.
Not a single "moderate Muslim" has been able to tell us the precise textual basis for the actions and attitudes of a "handful of extremists" or those "violent extremists" or those "violent extremist Muslims" that is not identical to what "moderate Muslims" read. The real difference is that some Muslims are willing to take Islam fully to heart, and to act on it, and have made the decision that violence is the best or most effective instrument of Jihad, while other Muslims, though some lend considerable financial and diplomatic and moral and other kinds of support to those directly participating in violent Jihad, choose themselves to participate only indirectly, out of self-interest, or in some cases, choose other methods to pursue the identical goals that the "violent extremists" pursue: that is, a steady weakening of Infidels, that will lead, it is hoped, to their removing, under Muslim pressure (and as a result in some cases of their own naivete and confusion), all remaining obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam, everywhere in the world.
Nor do we find, in the Western world, a single government official able to find any convincing evidence, any textual authority, to support what is called "moderate Muslims" but those "moderates" may not be "moderate" at all, simply cleverer and more subtle in their choice of weapons. These Western civilian and military leaders, including those in the FBI and CIA, are often not used to thinking things through, but well-used to following orders and a politically-acceptable party line, and the party line today, in official Washington as in Official Elsewhere In The West, is simply to assume, to keep on assuming despite the mounting evidence to the contrary, that there must be a counter-argument, a counter-narrative, within Islam itself, there must be texts within Islam itself, that successfully refute everything those "violent extremists" do.nor a single credulous member of any Western government who believes deeply in this notion of "violent extremists" and will not, can not, come to grips with the ideology, not of something made up called "Islamism" (a phrase that Muslims themselves find comical, but are happy to use it for their own purposes if it keeps the Infidels sufficiently unwary, and allows Muslims time to establish themselves more firmly, so they think, in the West) but rather with plain old, unadorned, unepitheted, Islam, Islam, Islam.
Hugh, you mention Fred Halliday. As well as studying at Oxford and SOAS (in its defence, I note it still has a fine oil of Richard Burton in the gallery across from a very fine library), Halliday has had a long and close involvement with The Transnational Institute.
A very recent Halliday essay posted there indicates he is still, like his Muslim friends, searching for utopia on earth:
"Joseph Stalin and Gosplan may have discredited a particular form of "planning", but the general application of rational scientific, managerial and political thinking to human affairs, the better to manage the future, is an entirely legitimate and necessary aspiration..."
http://www.tni.org/article/what-was-communism
As for your outrageous pun on "doing the subcontinental", the other Fred must be turning (albeit gracefully) in his grave.
"The Transnational Institute"?
Isn't that Institute merely an old bunch of Trotskyites, or should it be described -- I feel a hypallage coming on -- as a bunch of old Trotskyites?
By the way, I'm glad you caught me doing the subcontinental, but I do not agree that had he heard it, Fred Astaire would turn over in his grave. I insist that he would side with Shakespeare as against Dryden on the subject of the clench. Puns are not bad. Puns are good. They are a high form of paronomasia.
And come to think of it, you know which Astaire would likely like it even more? Fred's sister Adele, who was once his partner, and who married the second son of the Duke of Cavendish -- gosh darn it, she must have said to herself, there goes the Kniphausen Hawk (repeatedly mentioned at this website) -- because she was known to be fond of playing with words. Say, do you know about her game of Scrabble....?
Sorry, Hugh, I can't bat in your league, I was raised amongst the grasshoppers, I'm strictly from corn.
But I really do appreciate your commentaries - please keep them coming.
For all the other grasshoppers out there, here is real beauty and grace, matching Hugh's skill with words. This is precisely the sort of infidel jahiliya I will fight to the death to preserve:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYXHeP9PydQ
That is just the kind of answer that I would expect from Mr. Shami.
In fact, there is no conflict between the beliefs of Quakers or Catholics and the specific rights and freedoms I listed. It is only Islam that has a problem with them.
You claim that there were "officially established religions" in certain states. Only at first as a legacy (Connecticut, Massachusets), and this faded away and was quashed entirely based on the fourteenth ammendment. What is important, however, is that, at the federal level, there was absolutely NO establishment allowed from the beginning and Islamic law, Sharia, would mandate the establishment of Islam as a "state religion" in contradiction to the constitution.
Only a Muslim would be ill at ease with that fact.
Why would a "Quaker" have a problem with contradicting Islamic law?
Why would someone who is "not a Muslim" have a problem with contradicting Islamic law?
The most important theme of constitutional law is freedom where that freedom does not take away the freedoms of others. Sharia cannot tolerate the divergent beliefs or practices of anyone else without penalty.
No! Under the United States Constitution, Muslims DO NOT have the right to establish Islam as a state religion since it would threaten the rights of others based on religion and gender at the very least.
Now you've got me started. Here are three more in the same vein:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYHZh-xnqhE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnUfY-URXzA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYHZh-xnqhE&feature=related
In the early 1980s, a friend of mine was at the Santa Anita Racetrack, climbing the stairs at a normal rate, when a man suddenly rushed past him up, taking those stairs three at a time. My friend had a chance to get a good look at the man when he turned the corner continuing upward. There was no mistaking: it was Fred Astaire, then in his 80s, still faster than anyone else.
Thanks, Hugh. Ginger, Rita - both superb dancers, and shown to best advantage by Fred Astaire.
But we are going to require much more than Fred's fast footwork to stay ahead of those who hate song and dance and the female form.
Truly, as the kill-joy killer from Qom maintained, there is no fun in Islam.
Right. But we have ways to encourage the whisperings of Shaytan.
So, Ayatolloh Khomeini, if you are listening, take this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-HNZLg6ntI
No fun in Islam?
Maybe not for us kufars, but in France, for example, they have the joy of taking over whole streets for their rituals and watching as the kufar cops tiptoe around them and the French folk are driven mad with impotent frustration. They must laugh for hours afterwards.
Then if they get bored with needling the French they can go and set some cars on fire, and on the way home, maybe enjoy some 'uncovered meat' (nudge, nudge).
What do you mean no fun in Islam?
Ohmigosh MBR!!! I just watched Rita Hayworth and Fred Astaire in I'm Old Fashioned...What an absolute treat!!
I've never seen that film..I wonder if it's still available somewhere?
Thanks so much for treating us with, like you said, beauty and grace, worth fighting for to the death. AMEN!