On Thursday, House Republican leaders announced that Representative Ron Paul of Texas, the outspoken Republican libertarian who ran for president in 2008, will become the chairman of the subcommittee that oversees the Fed. His position on the central bank is captured in the title of his 2009 book, “End the Fed” (Grand Central Publishing).http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/weekinreview/12chan.html
Saturday, December 11, 2010
The Fed? Ron Paul’s Not a Fan.
Kambiz GhaneaBassiri: For God or for Fame? The Making of a Teenage Bomber
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/3869/for_god_or_for_fame_the_making_of_a_teenage_bomber/
Kambiz GhaneaBassiri teaches religion at Reed College and is the author of A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order
(Cambridge University Press 2010).
Kambiz GhaneaBassiri teaches religion at Reed College and is the author of A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order
(Cambridge University Press 2010).
Knowing a Terrorist When You See One By Scott Horton
Over the last decade the world has witnessed an explosion of cases in which the term “terrorist” has been applied to domestic political adversaries, journalists, lawyers, and others who present governments and hyperventilating politicians with unpleasant facts. Today the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights has published a book entitled Blacklisted that meticulously documents this process, with a focus on abuse of the “terrorist” label in Europe. In the post 9/11 period, governments around the world increasingly used the term “terrorist” to muzzle people—insuring that they are denied access to the media, are not allowed to present challenges in court, and effectively disappear from the political stage. The worst abusers by far are authoritarian governments (Zimbabwe and Burma are good examples) that try to pin this label on democracy and human rights advocates. But this study also lays much blame at the feet of the United Nations, which has often allowed individual nations to call “terrorists” whomever they please.http://harpers.org/archive/2010/12/hbc-90007849
As U.N. rapporteur Martin Scheinen points out in his foreword to the book, “There is a fundamental need for a broader public debate concerning the future of terrorist listings.” Listing foreign terrorist organizations is a powerful tool in the arsenal against terrorism, but it is also the subject of a great deal of official chicanery. If it is to be used effectively, then the international community, with the United States at the lead, has to focus more attention on the sort of conduct which will qualify a group as “terrorist.” Violence, particularly targeting innocent civilians indiscriminately, is an essential element of the definition. A government’s determination that its critics or political adversaries are “terrorists” must be subject to review by courts on the facts involving objective criteria. And the media and the public must be on the guard against political rhetoric that seeks to turn the concept of “terrorist organization” into a weapon against democracy itself.
Biographical Notes on Taqi al-Din Subki
(Imam) Taqi al-Din Subki [...] is 'Ali ibn 'Abd al-Kafi ibn 'Ali ibn Tamam, Abu al-Hasan Taqi al-Din al-Subki, born in Subk, Egypt, in 683/1284. The Shafi'i scholar and Imam of his time, he was a brilliant intellectual, hadith master (hafiz), Koranic exegete, and Islamic judge who was described by Ibn Hajar Haytami as "the mujtahid Imam whose imamate, greatness, and having reached the level of ijtihad are agreed upon," and by Dhahabi as "the most learned, eloquent, and wisest in judgement of all the sheikhs of the age." Educated in Cairo by such scholars as Ibn Rif'a in Sacred Law, 'Alam al-Din Iraqi in Koranic exegesis, and Sharaf al-Din al-Dimyati in hadith, he also travelled to acquire knowledge of hadith from the sheikhs of Syria, Alexandria, and the Hijaz after which, as Suyuti records, "he devoted himself to writing and giving legal opinion, authoring more than 150 works, his writings displaying his profound knowledge of hadith and other fields and his magisterial command of the Islamic sciences. He educated the foremost scholars of his time, was a painstaking, accurate, and penetrating researcher, and a brilliant debater in the disciplines. No previous scholar attained to his achievements in Sacred Law, of masterful inferences, subtleties in detail, and carefully worked-out methodological principles."
Salah al-Din Safadi said of him, "People say that no one like him had appeared since Ghazali, though in my opinion they thereby do him an injustice, for to my mind he does not resemble anyone less than Sufyan al-Thawri." With his vast erudition, he was at the same time a godfearing ascetic in his personal life who was devoted to worship and mysticism, though vigilant and uncompromising in matters of religion and ready to assail any innovation (bid'a) or departure from the tenets of faith of Ahl al-Sunna. In addition to al-Takmila [The completion], his eleven-volume supplement to Nawawi's Sharh al-Muhadhdhab [The exegesis of "The rarefaction"], he also authored the widely quoted Fatawa al-Subki [The legal opinions of Sukbi] in two volumes, as well as a number of other works on tenets of faith, Koranic exegesis, and fundamentals of Islamic law, in the latter of which his three-volume al-Ibhaj fi sharh al-Minhaj [The gladdening: an exegesis of "The road"], an exposition of Baydawi's Al-Minhaj on the methodological bases of legal ijtihad, has won lasting recognition among scholars. In A.H. 739 he moved from Cairo to Damascus, where he was appointed to the judiciary and presided for seventeen years, at the end of which he became ill, was replaced by his son Taj al-Din, and returned to Cairo, where he died twenty days later in 756/1355 (ibid., 4.302; al-Fatawa al-hadithiyya (y48), 114; al-Rasa'il al-Subkiyya (y52), 9-13; Sheikh Hasan Saqqad; and n).-Nuh Ha Mim Keller, Reliance of the Traveller: The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law Umdat Al-Salik
, x345, pg. 1102Friday, December 10, 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)