[New Word] Envornamentalism

Well its a reprise of an old one that was just too clunky. 

Envornamentalism is about the superficiality with which we may have thought of the world in the past. Maybe we still see planting a few trees as doing our bit, or conservation as the critical value for politics and ethics of the environment.

It is an abdication of painful truth that humanity, bani al insan, needs to start seeing and being in the world differently so as to accord everyone and everything their right. For example, in line with the People's Aggreement of Cochabamba  we might give all species the rights of genetic integrity.

There is another technocratic form that bureaucracies are guilty of, and that is the ticking of boxes for awards, organisational leverage or simply legislative compliance. This is second generation envornamentalism.

This second generation has caused climate change to be split in two insulated chunks, Mitigation and Adaptation.  Insulated that is unless you want to pay sombody off...

[New Word] Fartwa

An unscholarly, yet socially castrating ruling on an aspect of life in an Islamic legalistic tone. Purists decry the social upscaling of fartwas and their miscontextualisation. which is why we call them fa(r)twas.

Related term: Fartwar

Fartwars are those unscholarly dialectics which enhance ummahtic spastication all over the internet and in real life. Waged over relatively minor issues, but propelled to the foreground by bad politics, they are revealing of the schisms and degradation of religion that we have to deal with.

Anti-NATO Protest video Chicago 2012

NATO is the biggest killing machine going. Something needs to be done about it. Here's what happened last week.

Bleadership and Mistakeholding: Yet another lesson about rentboys

A few years ago I wrote about an organisation called the Quilliam Foundation, when it was a freshly dumped turd on the face of this ummah. I still hold those values even if it gets harder to summon the language as we grow older and as the fools get socially closer and more embarrassing.


Bleadership and Mistakeholding

Bleadership and mistakeholding are damaging phenomena that are quite pronounced around here. Who do they think they are? Who do we think we are? Are we safe from eachother's tongues?

Quilliam-talk is a powerful way of accessing this dysfunction in the evolving Ummahstructure and Jamarchitecture. Through it we see how some Muslim people totally mess up and are captured in the face of power.

Their tales of capture vary, some faced difficulty and suffering, others saw opportunity, but to be charitable to them, the delusion of positive impact is common. Like the development worker regurgitating contrivances for his imperial (mi)stakeholders in the air conditioned breeze of a five star hotel. Or the crop scientist genetically mutilating wheat in Middle England in the belief he is enabling food security.

Conference of the Fools: From Majid to Usama

Majid came from the HT quadrant, Ed Husain from pretty much nowhere, Tariq Wilkinson from the posh white convert section and Usama Hasan from Salafistan, that is the community of many vowels and heavy exclusivist self identification with the Prophet's companion. Salafi's are under the most pressure now and that sufi's and others are exploiting and endangering them is a deep shame. To be fair, pro status quo salafis are doing their bit to sell the more political down the river too.

It is not that their arguments are thick, 'problematic', neoconfeed, or that they are 'native informants' or  fools of the highest degree, its the betrayal that I want to dwell on here, how it is jointly produced and how it might be reduced. After all, its hard to be loyal to a social, political ummah that's quite badly led, suffocating and unimaginative. It takes some belief and spine!

Perhaps we are happy to simply append Usama to the Quilliam cussathon. Fair enough but I want more, to reflect on how we help produce these characters, in unwitting partnership with forces, events and fiddlers we cannot see.

I remember when Majid returned from prison in Egypt, he was having an isolating time and appealing internally for Hizbut Tahrir to change. Clearly this was a badly negotiated interaction and he took his nasty methods and ego elsewhere. If HT (UK) devoted half as much time to the secrets of the heart as they did to the secrets of the Islamic state...

Ed Husain was of east London and talked to some of the people he mentioned in his dreadful book. If you were lucky he'd change your name. Most tried to dissuade him, none have tried to sue him yet. He has moved from Quilliam to the Council of Foreign Relations (or something) in the USA.

Though not Quilliam, Tariq Wilkinson's contribution touches a similar spot. His knees went weak when the CPS wanted him to bear witness against a salafi sector bookseller. Most Sufi types I know cringed, though one of the more imperial ones tried to use it launch a broadside against 'Qutbism'. What a waste of resources.

With Usama (who joined the Quilliam Foundation most recently) its been  a more gradual alienation/capture. Majid tried early on to capture him to his cause, but officially this didn't work as Usama would distance himself even as he drew towards an analysis that ummahtic spastication and terrorism were the same thing.

Bollywood Musalmelodrama

But white power had him in a bind, he didn't have the wit/skill/will to get out and we didn't really help. They had him by his roots, his father and the mosque they used to help run. Shayk Suhaib Hassan is the kind of scholar who would run a tafsir class that ran across decades. He would not pansy up at the first mention of #creepingshariah either.
 
I recall Usama's discomfort at being dropped in it amongst white liberal guardianship early on by an apa who shares my initials of the Sufi sector, which started the post 9/11 era with a similar position to The State.

He didn't really help matters by using ibn Arabi to talk evolution to a crowd including many psychosalafis baying for takfir. I'll call it Epistemic Autism. His community estrangement following the Evolution Imam car crash was probably a determining factor, determined by himself, ourselves, white structures of power and Shaytan.


Now what

These empowered actants of imperialism make new relationships in spaces unfamiliar to us. They do not operate by very many rules and are themselves acted on by powerful market forces. Look where bad decision making got them and look where nondecision creating gets us!

As well as meming on facebook with the wit of a dull four year old and making dignified political options possible we must investigate the resistability of capture/betrayal. As a dirty mirror, I figure that the salafi sector really needs to buck up its ideas and stop being dejected. That screechy scholar is not fit to guide my loves and you preserve and hold onto mistakes too firmly. Islam is huge, and the virtues of courage fellowship, spine and fealty can be awesome all over it. No one expects you to become a Sufi fashionista.

Ummahtic Technique is more than management consultancy-speak and NGOism. It is the collective craft that enables us to resist capture and co option, imagine and deliver. Please promote technique and people with technique: through your Isoc elections, organisational AGMs, Umbrella group interactions and most crucially in your every day judgement.

The production of Bleadership is social, every time we promote something stupid in the name of jamat-logic we shoot ourselves. The irresponsibility of mistakeholders is clear as we assign value to the wrong qualities and yet are shocked when we are found in the situation of leadership capture and cooption.

The Case of Talha Ahsan: What is going on and what can I do?

Imagine that your child, sibling, relative or friend is taken from you and detained for years without trial.  They are accused of 'terrorism-related' crimes by a superpower waging war on its enemies.  Would you turn away from them or take notice?

Justice, dignity, humanity and mercy are crucial principles in our lives, which is why we must know what we can and do what we can for Talha Ahsan. 

Talha  is a 31 year old poet from Tooting who has been imprisoned for coming onto 6 years, without evidence or trial, pending extradition to the USA. Born and bred in London, Talha comes from a Muslim Bangladeshi background and is diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism.  A shy bookish young man, with a first class honours degree in Arabic from SOAS, he continues to write poetry from prison. At the time of his arrest in July 2006 he was due to be interviewed for a job as a librarian, we are poorer without him.

The USA government requested his extradition from the UK under dubious 'terrorism' related charges and the compliant British authorities did not even scrutinise the evidence against him properly.  Talha, his family and supporters are campaigning for a fair UK trial, which we believe is not possible in the USA.  Achieving justice whilst Muslim is hard, and we must exercise courage, skill and unity of purpose to get it. It is not a ready-made meal.

We must act immediately to build momentum in our communities. From July, as the Olympics capture public attention, Talha may be extradited to the rapturous applause of much of the media, who will drown out the injustice with dehumanising images of men with beards, hooks for hands and loathsome angry preachers.  We know that the story is different, but we need to share this story amongst our families, friends and neighbours and do it justice. 

Muslims in the UK are blessed with many favours but also endangered. Like the Irish throughout the Troubles in Northern Ireland, we are proving easy to accuse, lock up and ignore. We request your support for Talha and others in similar situations help us establish a justice-making, supportive community of principles. There is no shortage of things to do.

• Become informed, organised and mobilised about the issues
• Attend the Public Meeting in Central London on 23^rd May*
• Speak to our close ones about and promote the Free Talha campaign
• Remember Talha in our prayers
• Champion the cause in our organisations
• Write to Talha (who can still receive correspondence so long as he is on these shores)
• Write to the media
• Write to your MP, make it relevant to them, it is surprising how little they know.

To learn more about the case visit www.freetalha.org

 

You can also get involved through social media: find the FreeTalha Ahsan page on Facebook, follow the @freetalha Twitter account and tweet #freetalha

*The Public Meeting will feature Salma Yaqoob, Gareth Pierce, Riz Ahmed and Bruce Kent and take place from 6pm - 8pm at Hend House, 233 Shaftesbury Avenue, London WC2H 8EE. Nearest tube: Tottenham Court Road  http://www.facebook.com/events/283339501756605/

Interesting blog on Bangladesh and future climate change

from Zeeshan Hasan

http://goodbyebangladesh.blogspot.co.uk/

engage, i say engage.

Welfare, Warfare and Hellfare

Sometimes at an antiwar demonstration, I used to hear the binarising cry 'We want Welfare no more Warfare'.

Yet internals and externals are inseparable, despite the miles of insulation tape and sands. Jody MacCintyre understood this, and the need to weave sense through Imperial Austerity's twin headed injustice-making.

Looking at the mothballing of that state around me. Housing, education and pretty mush everything else. I wonder how much of the historical infrastructure of welfare is built with the bones of colonial others? What is just to expect and work toward?

[New Word] Ecolity

Environmental Justice where creatures have rights.

[New Word] Bro-ocracy

Is a term to describe a characteristic of social organisation that is dominates the ummah around here.

At university it used to be expressed by the old classic 'I'll mention it to the shura (committee)'. Now some of the same characters working in the islamdustry.

Solution:
Direct action, stop abdicating responsibility to symbols of superficialities.
Dialogical disobedience, if you have the time be sharp and nasihic.Else they'll get worse.

Sami Shah: Intelligent Comedy for our 15th Century

Saw Sami Shah perform a stand up set through Skpe to an audience in London from a hotel room in Thailand and pretty much outdo the uk asian talent. HT radioshak.
When I see deshis and desi's doing their thing, so comfortable in their skins and not in the category of ethnic mediocrity its good.

Enter the Developmentia Generator

Click on the button below to generate developmentia priorities. Then click again, and again, and again, and again...

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