Contrary to what people mean love does not idealize the other. The miracle is that you may say that you are slightly stupid, not the perfect body, whatever. But still you are the absolute for me. True love does not have to idealize. True Love is not either eternal beauty or vulgar everyday person. True love is that you see eternal beauty in the everyday person.
So the Occupy Wall Street Movement has inspired me to shake the dust off the blog and get back to work. Much work needs to be done.
I have posted some pictures from the movement. Lets share and discuss.
Edip Harabi, a Turkish Sufi-Poet of the 19th c., writes to reclaim the women’s voice in ‘man’s world’ (A Male Sufi writing from the prespective of a woman)
O’ Muhammad, they say we are inferior. Where is it men got this mistaken idea?
They disgrace the Prophet’s family with their false claims and blasphemy.
Our Mother Eve, is she not a woman? Beloved Khadija is she not a woman?
The Prophet’s daughter Fatima, is ehe not a woman? Is the Quran not full of praise of them?
These pure consorts of the pure heart can they be any less?
Whoever calls women inferior cannot reach the Truth.
You wouldn’t expect these ideas from one who knows.
Who is it that gave birth to all these Prophets of Truth?
God didn’t do anything absurd in creating us.
We don’t accept being seen as somehow less.
Women raised every saint that has walked the earth.
I dare you to accept this.
Don’t think this world can’t exist without men.
Think of Mother Mary just once: She gave birth to the glorious Christ, fatherless.
O’ mankind, we are more courageous than yourself because we show respect to you out of love.
We travel together with you on the Path, leave all these claims behind!
We may look different to you in your dresses.
In reality we are not trailing behind you.
And we warn you, we don’t consider it courageous to claim we are inferior.
Did Muhammad, the Chosen, come from a lesser being?
Did Ali, the Valiant, come from a lesser being?
Beware! Do not call your mother inferior.
What she prays at night might change your life forever.
Listen carefully to the speech of Zehra.
O’ men and knowers of Truth tell us:
Did we not give birth to all the masters who led you on God’s Way?
From Syed Ali Abbas Zaidi’s Blog which all of you should check out at http://plastictearz.wordpress.com/
Edip Harabi
Bulleh Shah (1680 – 1757) was a Punjabi Sufi poet, a humanist and philosopher from what is now considered Pakistan. As one of the leading figures in social thought and spiritualism, Bulleh Shah continually challenged the norms of society, be it materialism or hate for one’s fellow man.
While his work is expansive, the following passage was picked for a personal reason. Throughout my career as a law school student I have felt an internal stuggle between what I would call my “Universal Self” (or innate sensibility of “fairness”) and the technical nature of the law as embraced by practioners and academics. Several justices over the years, the worst of which is Justice Scalia, have treated the cases that come before the US Supreme Court as a time to showcase thier talent of rationally explaing a inhuman or heartless decision by the court.
Most law school students in the first year, before they have been indoctrinated to accept the notion that injustice can/must be done in order to maintain the court’s precedent, always raise questions of a court not deciding the “right way” even though the Justices were maintained a high level of technical legal analysis. That is because we come into law school believing in our own internal moral compass, again what I would call a relationship to the Universal Self, and the process of learning the law forces one to take actions that may violate one’s own moral code becuase it is the “technically” correct thing to do.
So I present Bulleh Shah’s verse which I will label as Love and Law. Though he presents teh argument as lambasting the laws created around religions by organizations and priests, but it easily translates to the abject focus on technical rationality in the modern legal forum. This has been a more significant and epiphany inducing peice than anything I have read in law school- so for all the young lawyers, PLEASE READ THIS!
Love and Law are struggling in the human heart.
The doubt of the heart will I settle by relating questions of Law
And the answers of Love I will describe, holy Sir;
Law says go to the Mullah (priest) and learn the rules and regulations.
Love answers, “One letter is enough, shut up and put away other books.”
Law says: Perform the five baths and worship alone in the temple (reffering to the 5x daily prayer of Muslims)
Love says: Your worship is false if you consider yourself seperate from the Universal Self.
Law says: Have shame and hide the enlightenment
Love says: What is this veil for? Let the vision be open
Law says: Go inside the mosque and perform the duty of prayer
Love says: Go to the wine-house and drinking the wine, read a prayer
Law says: Let us go to heaven; we will eat the fruits of heaven
Love says: There, we are custodians or rulers, and we ourselves will distribute the fruits of heaven
Law says: O faithful one, come perform the hajj (pilgrimage), you have to cross the bridge
Love says: The door of the Beloved (God/Allah) is in ka’baa; from there I will not stir
Law says: We placed Shah Mansur (a contraversial Sufi Saint) on the stake
Love says: You did well, you made him enter the door of the Beloved (God/Allah)
THE RANK OF LOVE IS THE HIGHEST HEAVEN, THE CROWN OF CREATION.
OUT OF LOVE, HE (Allah/ God) has created Bulleh, humble, and from dust.
Gbagbo under custody after Ouatarra forces take over home.
Published in BBC.
Ivory Coast’s UN-recognised President, Alassane Ouattara, has urged restraint after the dramatic capture of his bitter rival Laurent Gbagbo. Announcing an investigation into Mr Gbagbo, he promised him a fair trial and said a truth and reconciliation commission would be set up. Mr Gbagbo surrendered after a military assault on his residence in Abidjan.
He had provoked a crisis by refusing to cede power, insisting he had won November’s presidential election. But forces loyal to Mr Ouattara advanced on his residence on Monday, while French tanks backing the UN peacekeeping mission in the country stood by. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon welcomed the detention of Mr Gbagbo, saying it had brought to an end months of unnecessary conflict, and the UN would support the new government.
US President Barack Obama also welcomed his capture, and called on armed groups in Ivory Coast to lay down their arms to boost the chances of a democratic future. He added that victims and survivors of violence in the country deserved accountability for the crimes committed against them.
Speaking on his TV channel, a sombre Mr Ouattara appealed to Ivorians to “abstain from all reprisals and violence”. Mr Gbagbo, his wife Simone and his “collaborators” would be investigated by the judicial authorities, he promised. The personal security of Mr Gbagbo and his family would be guaranteed, he said.
The country had just turned a painful page in its history, he added, but it was entering a new era of peace and hope. There have been allegations of atrocities by both pro-Gbagbo and pro-Ouattara forces. The UN has reports of more than 1,000 people being killed and at least 100,000 fleeing the country. UN peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy confirmed that Mr Gbagbo and his wife were under UN police guard at Abidjan’s Golf Hotel, where Mr Ouattara has his headquarters.
Mr Gbagbo has been shown on pro-Ouattara TV sitting in a room, looking dazed but apparently uninjured, wearing an open shirt and white vest. The TV channel broadcast a message from the deposed leader in which he called for an end to hostilities. “I hope that we stop the fighting and get into the civilian part of the crisis, and that we end it quickly so the country can go back to normal,” he said.
Escalating conflict
Forces loyal to Mr Ouattara launched an offensive from their stronghold in the north at the end of March, after months of political deadlock. As they closed in on Mr Gbagbo’s power base in Abidjan, the country’s main city, UN and French attack helicopters targeted heavy weapons being used by his forces. Mr Ban said UN and French forces had acted strictly within the framework of a UN resolution aimed at protecting the civilian population.
He said he wanted to speak to “President Alassane Ouattara” as soon as possible. “This is an end of a chapter that should never have been,” he added. “We have to help them to restore stability, rule of law, and address all humanitarian and security issues.”
Mr Le Roy told reporters after addressing the UN Security Council that the chief of Mr Gbagbo’s forces had called the UN to say that he wanted to surrender weapons.
Philosophers are lovers of wisdom. It takes tremendous discpline, takes tremendous courage to think for yourself to examine yourself its socratic and imperative to examine yourself requires courage. William Butler Yates used to say it takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your soul than a it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield Courage to think critically, courage is denabling virtue for any philosopher or human being in the world. Courage to think Courage to love Courage to Hope.
Plato says that philosphy is a meditation on and a preparation for death. And by death what he means is not an event, but a death in life becaues there is no rebirth no change no transformation without death. So the question becomes how do you learn how to die. Of course Montaine talks about that in his famous essay, “to philosophize is to learn how to die.” You cant talk about truth without talking about learning how to die. I believe that Theodore Adorno is right when he says that the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak, that gives it an existential emphasis you see? So were really talkin about Truth as a way of life as opposed to truth as a set of propostions that correspond to a set of things in the world.
Human beings are unable to ever gain any monopoly on Truth- captial T. We might have access to truth, small t, but they are fallable claims about truth, they could be wrong they could be open to revisions and so on. So there is a certain kind of mystery that goes hand in hand with Truth. This is why so many of the existential thinkers be they religious like Meister Eckhart or Paul Tillich or be they secular like Camus and Sarte, that they are accenting our finetude and our inabilty to fully grasp the ultimate nature of reality, the truth about things.
So you talk about Truth being tied to the way to Truth. Because once you give up on the notion of fully grasping the way the world is- you are gonna talk about what are the ways in which I can sustain my quest for truth. How do you sustain a path or journety toward truth, the way to truth?
Published in Foreign Policy
Every spring, the Tax Foundation, a Washington-based advocacy group, announces Tax Freedom Day: the date by which the average employed American will have earned enough income to pay off his or her taxes for the year. This year, that day will be April 12. The Adam Smith Institute, a London-based, free-market think tank that makes a similar calculation for Britain, suggests that British taxpayers will have to work until around May 30 to pay off their own dues.
Tax Freedom Day is a clever-enough gimmick if your aim is to stir up ire over the government stealing income that rightfully belongs to the good people who have earned it through the toil of their labors. In an environment where Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher is considered an expert on fiscal policy, it might even work. But it is worth remembering that, from a global perspective, how much we earn is actually 95 percent luck and maybe 5 percent toil. And it isn’t heavy-taxing big government that affects your income — it’s bad government.
But the advantages of being born rich rather than poor in America — large though they are — pale in comparison with the advantages of being born in a wealthy country rather than a developing one. The average rural Zambian will enjoy a lifetime income of about $10,000, compared with a lifetime income of around $4.5 million for the average resident of New York City. That’s not because Zambians are all soulless and corrupt. It’s because a Zambian with the same skills, intelligence, and drive earns a lot less in Zambia than she would in the United States — as is made abundantly clear every time a Zambian moves to the United States and starts earning a lot. The same people doing exactly the same job earn much, much more if they move from a poor to a rich country to do that job. In 1995, a construction carpenter’s wage in India was $42 a month. In Mexico, it was $125 a month. A South Korean carpenter, by contrast, made almost 10 times what his Mexican counterpart did; an American one made almost 20 times more.
For those of us lucky enough to be living in a rich country, are taxes really holding us back from a life of ease? In a word, no. Over the (not very) long term, it isn’t tax rates that decide how much money you take home — it is rates of economic growth. If a British person in 1984 paid no taxes at all, receiving as manna from heaven infrastructure, health care, education, policing, pensions, welfare benefits, and all the other services that the state provides, his or her take-home income (adjusted for inflation) would still be below that of post-tax Britons today. The same would be true of an American in 1988. People in the West are lucky enough to have been born in — or nearly as lucky to have moved to — countries that have seen a lot of economic growth over the past two centuries. That’s the reason they’re rich.
Of course, an anti-tax advocate would respond that low taxes and a correspondingly small government are the secret to a country’s riches — an idea that is appealing, widespread, and very wrong. The last 100 years or so have seen the fastest rates of global economic growth in history; they’ve also seen the biggest governments of all time. From William Easterly and Sergio Rebelo writing for the National Bureau of Economic Research to Ross Levine and David Renelt in the American Economic Review (as well as numerous other analyses), economists have consistently failed to find robust cross-country evidence that a government’s size — measured by tax take or spending as a percentage of GDP — has any bearing, positive or negative, on its economic growth. Want further proof? Many developing countries see personal income tax receipts that would make a Tea Partier tip his tri-cornered hat in admiration, amounting to less than 2 percent of GDP. If a small income tax burden really was the determining factor in driving growth, those countries would all be richer than Luxembourg.
But while there isn’t a proven link between government size and economic growth, there is an important relationship between the quality of government and growth. If a government can’t ensure a basic level of security, stability, fair dealing, and public goods like infrastructure and education, whether it’s large or small is irrelevant — that country will be poor. If the government is providing those basic requirements, it doesn’t matter if it’s also blowing 10 percent of its GDP on bridges to nowhere, high-tech bombers for the last war, or corporate subsidies for ethanol production — that country will be rich. Better government equals richer people — it is as simple as that.
So why do rich people think it is all about effort rather than the luck of the draw? For one thing, there’s the oft-repeated finding from social psychology that people blame their own failures on circumstances beyond their control (“I was fired because the boss never liked me”) and the failures of others on personal flaws (“He was fired because he never did any work”). The reverse also holds: People take far more credit than they should for successful performance as part of a group, particularly if they do not know other group members personally. All of us — not only the rich — are just incredibly narcissistic by nature.
The second factor is that when we make comparisons it is usually to our peers, not the world as a whole. And our peers tend to have gone to the same type of school, work in the same field, and live in the same part of the world. Within these narrow groups, income differences — however small on a national or global scale — are more likely to be about ability and hard work. The fact that you earn more than your colleague who joined the firm at the same time as you did probably does have something to do with your different personal characteristics. The fact that you earn more than a peasant farmer in Lesotho doesn’t. At the same time, you rarely stop to care about how much a peasant farmer in Lesotho earns — despite the fact that the income gap between you and the farmer is many multiples larger than the gap between you and your colleague. However powerful our psychological foibles and narrow frames of reference may be, though, they are beside the point when it comes to public policy.
There are lots of reasons to hate current tax codes — not least because they are ridiculously complex and stuffed with loopholes for groups that can afford the best lobbyists. And governments the world over remain wasteful and spendthrift — including America’s, of course. Especially in poor countries, people ought to be focused on making government more efficient, equitable, and transparent — an effort that will entail lower government revenues in some cases and less government regulation in lots of cases. But the focus should be on better government, not smaller government. And the idea that taxation takes money that is rightfully ours alone, or that if only we managed to reduce the tax burden by a few percentage points we’d all be rich, is laughable. If you are in a wealthy country and it is tax time, be thankful you live somewhere where government works — and pay up.
A common thread to the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and protests elsewhere in the Middle East and north Africa is the soul-crushing high rate of youth unemployment. Twenty-four percent of young people in the region cannot find jobs. To be sure, protesters were also agitating for democracy, but nonexistent employment opportunities were the powerful catalyst.
Youth unemployment is similarly dire in other parts of the world. In the UK, young people aged 16 to 24 account for about 40% of all unemployed, which means almost 1 million young adults are jobless. In Spain more than 40% of young people are unemployed. In France the rate is more than 20%, and in the US it’s 21%. In country after country, many young people have given up looking for work. A recent survey in the UK revealed that more than half of the 18- to 25-year-olds questioned said they were thinking of emigrating because of the lack of job prospects.
Unemployed young people comprised a large portion of the crowd that marched in London on March 26 to protest against the economic policies of the government. Fortunately, the protest was largely peaceful. But youth unemployment will continue to stay high, and the coalition’s austerity measures are not going to help. We’re deluding ourselves if we believe the young will simply continue to be stoical and deferential to authority.
Today’s society is failing to deliver on its promise to young people. We said that if they worked hard, stayed out of trouble, and attended school, they would have a prosperous and fulfilling life. It turns out we were inaccurate, if not dishonest. And then we rub salt in the wound by saying we’re in a “jobless recovery” – an oxymoron to tens of millions of young people who are having their hopes dashed.
Widespread youth unemployment is one facet of a deeper failure. The society we are passing to today’s young people is seriously damaged. Most of the institutions that have served us well for decades – even centuries – seem frozen and unable to move forward. The global economy, our financial services industry, governments, healthcare, the media and our institutions for solving global problems like the UN are all struggling. I’m convinced that the industrial age and its institutions are finally running out of gas. It is young people who are bearing the brunt of our failures.
Full of zeal and relatively free of responsibilities, youth are traditionally the generation most inclined to question the status quo and authority. Fifty years ago, babyboomers had access to information through the new marvel of television, and as they became university-age and delayed having families, many had time to challenge government policies and social norms. Youth radicalisation swept the world, culminating in explosive protests, violence and government crackdowns across Europe, Asia and North America.
In Paris in May 1968, protests that began as student sit-ins challenging the Charles de Gaulle government and the capitalist system culminated in a two-week general strike involving more than 11 million workers. Youth played a key role in the so-called Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia that same year. In West Germany, the student movement gained momentum in the late 60s. In the US, youth radicalisation began with the civil rights movement and extended into movements for women’s rights and other issues, and culminated in the Vietnam war protests.
Young people today have a demographic clout similar to that of their once-rebellious parents. In North America, the baby boom echo is larger than the boom itself. In South America the demographic bulge is huge and even bigger in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. A majority of people in the world are under the age of 30 and a whopping 27% under the age of 15.
The 60s baby boomer radicalisation was based on youthful hope and ideology. Protesters championed the opposition to war, a celebration of youth culture, and the possibilities for a new kind of social order. Today’s simmering youth radicalisation is much different. It is rooted not only in unemployment, but personal broken hopes, mistreatment, and injustice. Young people are alienated; witness the dropping young voter turnout for elections. They are turning their backs on the system.
Most worryingly, today’s youth have at their fingertips the internet, the most powerful tool ever for finding out what’s going on, informing others and organising collective responses. Internet-based digital tools such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube were instrumental to the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions.
We need to make the creation of new jobs a top priority. We need to reinvent our institutions, everything from the financial industry to our models of education and science to kickstart a new global economy. We need to engage today’s young people, not jack up tuition fees and cut back on retraining. We need to nurture their drive, passion and expertise. We need to help them take advantage of new web-based tools and become involved in making the world more prosperous, just and sustainable.
If we don’t take such measures, we run the risk of a generational conflict that could make the radicalisation of youth in Europe and North America in the 1960s pale in comparison.
Sovereign Mind 