Monthly Archives: August 2013

Some Ramadan Thoughts on the ‘Americanness’ of some American Muslim Organizations

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By  in Alim

“Our organizations only cry out for alliance with others over our own personal issues – Egypt, Syria and Turkey or shari’ah bans, not that which affects this society, our society at its core – justice, prejudice, voting rights, healthcare. Yet all of the apologists among us want other Americans to consider Muslims, American.”

Throughout the year, American Muslims have been asked to write to their legislative representatives over a host of issues – mostly relating to US involvement with Muslim governments, shari’ah law bans and incidents of masajid vandalism. American Muslims have protested in the streets of various cities over US involvement or lack of it in the Muslim world. All major organizations such as ISNA, ICNA, CAIR, CIOGC, MPAC and so on have all weighed in from their various perspectives. We of course have not gotten together to pray for Nelson Mandela, the killing in Senegal or the plight of the disappeared in Brazil or Argentina. We are silent.

Saturday evening, all day Sunday and all day Monday, I waited for some response to the verdict in the Trayvon Martin trial. I really did not care which side that response was on. I cared about a response, any response from these organizations that, claim Americanness regularly when their own self-interest are involved. Only CAIR voiced a feeble, ‘we will support an investigation…’ We did not discuss the case as it was unfolding on live TV. Even conversations about justice, evidence or lack of it, prejudice or lack of it were nowhere in our media.

The beginning of Ramadan did not quell listserve debates on the latest from Egypt, Syria or Turkey. We debated the ousting of Morsi, the continuing debacle in Syria and the ‘too little help, too late’ policy of the US. We even had prolonged, spirited debates on the meaning of the protests in Turkey. Most other Americans however, were busy with healthcare, immigration, voting rights and lastly, Trayvon Martin.

As Americans of various ethnicities and ages poured into the streets either to support or decry the verdict, Muslim Americans remain focused on Egypt, Syria and Turkey while living in America. Ramadan is a time for reflection and I am terribly sad to report that many American Muslims are not either Muslim in their sensibilities or American in their understandings of the need to stand up for justice or against injustice. There is little that has to do with this place of our sustenance that even moves us unless the issue is us. Our organizations only cry out for alliance with others over our own personal issues – Egypt, Syria and Turkey or shari’ah bans, not that which affects this society, our society at its core – justice, prejudice, voting rights, healthcare. Yet all of the apologists among us want other Americans to consider Muslims, American.

We could have vigorously discussed the merits of the case, the potential slippery slopes of either verdict. We could have discussed what this case means for the history of race relations in this country. We could have discussed the potential outcome of ‘stand your ground,’ what constitutes a ‘threat’ to which the response is lethal force, or the refusal of a police department to arrest a user of lethal force until facts could be obtained.

What are our various positions now that we have missed every opportunity to lead a discussion? Do we feel that in light of the facts, that there were prosecutors and defense attorneys, a judge, jury displays of evidence and a ruling that the system worked? Could the prosecutor have been more able? Was the defense convincing that Trayvon Martin caused his own death? How can we lead society in a rational discussion of ‘maslaha?’ Click link for full article;

http://www.alimprogram.com/articles/some-ramadan-thoughts-on-the-americanness-of-some-american-muslim-organizations/

Posted By F. Sheikh

philosophy from the preposterous universe

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Sean Carroll interviewed by Richard Marshal in 3 A.M. Magazine.

A worth reading discussion about Philosophy and Physics.

“Science has data in addition to reason, which is the best cure for sloppy thinking. So in principle it might be possible for a very rigorous metaphysician to be so careful that everything they say is both true and useful; in practice, we human beings are not so smart, and a wise philosopher will always be willing to learn things from the discoveries of science.”

“Sean Carroll is the uber-chillin’ philosophical physicist who investigates how the preposterous universe works at a deep level, who thinks spats between physics and philosophy are silly, who thinks a wise philosopher will always be willing to learn from discoveries of science, who asks how we are to live if there is no God, who is comfortable with naturalism and physicalism, who thinks emergentism central, that freewill is a crucial part of our best higher-level vocabulary, that there aren’t multiple levels of reality, which is quantum based not relativity based, is a cheerful realist, disagrees with Tim Maudlin about wave functions and Craig Callender about multiverses, worries about pseudo-scientific ideas and that the notion of ‘domains of applicability’ is lamentably under-appreciated. Stellar!”

“There’s an important point here worth emphasizing. Science has an enormous advantage over other disciplines when it comes to making progress: namely, the direct confrontation with data forces scientists to be more imaginative (and flexible) than they might otherwise bother to be. As a result, scientists often end up with theories that are extremely surprising from the point of view of everyday intuition. A philosopher might come up with a seemingly valid a priori argument for some conclusion, only to have that conclusion overthrown by later scientific advances. In retrospect, we will see that there was something wrong about the original argument. But the point is that seeing such wrongness can be really hard if all we have to lean on is our ability to reason. Science has data in addition to reason, which is the best cure for sloppy thinking. So in principle it might be possible for a very rigorous metaphysician to be so careful that everything they say is both true and useful; in practice, we human beings are not so smart, and a wise philosopher will always be willing to learn things from the discoveries of science.”

”

3:AM: I was interested to see ‘mad dog naturalist’ Alex Rosenberg’s position being regarded as provocative by most of the assembled where perhaps I might have expected his austere brand of naturalism to have been acceptable. Were you surprised by this?

SC: Not at all surprised. Alex is a fantastic person to have a meeting like that, because he is absolutely committed to an unflinching acceptance of the consequences of his worldview, which in this case means tossing out all sorts of common-sense everyday phenomena as “illusions.” That gets right to the heart of the challenge to the modern naturalist: given that the world really is just a quantum state evolving in Hilbert space (or whatever physics ends up telling us that it is), what is the status of tables and chairs, baseball and democracy, beauty and moral responsibility? Everyone in the room agreed that the fundamental-physics picture gives a correct way of talking about the world; but is it the only way, and if not, what are the relationships between the different ways of talking?”

3:AM: Finally, are there any new ideas or facts coming out of physics now that will leave us all here at 3ammagazine in a state of mind boggled shock that will require us to revolutionize previously held views?

SC: Taking seriously this idea of “domains of applicability” of scientific theories, I think it is dramatically under-appreciated that we already have a theory (the Standard Model of particle physics plus general relativity) whose domain of applicability includes all of everyday experience. We will not be discovering any new fundamental forces or particles that are relevant to ordinary human life; we have the basic rules of that realm figured out. (Which isn’t to say we’re anywhere close to understanding how those basic rules are manifested in complicated real-world situations.)

But reality is much larger than the realm of our everyday experience, and we’re very far from having the whole world figured out. Obviously we don’t understand dark matter, dark energy, the Big Bang, quantum gravity, etc. We don’t even have a consensus on what really happens during the process of a quantum measurement. My own guess is that the most dramatic potential for new ideas lies at the intersection of quantum theory and cosmology. I previously confessed to having fondness for the multiverse, but we honestly don’t have a compelling model of it as yet. It’s absolutely conceivable that the whole multiverse idea is dramatically on the wrong track, and the truth is going to look completely different once we understand how space and time emerge from quantum mechanics. Even better and more exciting would be if we find that our current view of quantum mechanics is completely wrong and has to be replaced by something deeply different – I should only be so lucky. Click below for full interview;

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-philosopher-physicist/

Posted By F. Sheikh

Daeth Of A Literary Giant-Farman Fatehpuri

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Prof Dr Farman Fatehpuri passed away here( Karachi) on Saturday and was buried on Sunday. He was one of the most celebrated critics, linguists, lexicographers and researchers of our times. But above all, he was a person who epitomised certain social, academic and literary values.

Born in a village near Fatehpur Hasva, UP, British India, on Jan 26, 1926, into a middle-class family of small landowners, Farman Sahib rose to the eminence that many in his hometown could only dream of. The village boy who was named Syed Dildar Ali, orphaned at the age of seven, once fell so ill that he almost died of an undiagnosed disease and was, on another occasion, almost swept away with the gushing waters of torrential rains, was to adopt the penname of Farman Fatehpuri to write, compile and edit over 60 books. He was to become the head of Urdu department at the University of Karachi, the chief editor and president of Urdu Dictionary Board (UDB), member of public service commission, to travel to many countries and was to earn many other honours his humble beginning hardly offered any clue to.

To make both ends meet, Farman Sahib had to join a school as teacher immediately after passing his matriculation in 1946. Inspired by Maulana Hasrat Mohani’s anti-British ideas and being a zealous supporter of the Muslim League, Farman Sahib migrated to Pakistan in 1950 in the wake of communal tension in his hometown. For him, life was not a bed of roses in the nascent country either. First, he had to be content with a lower-cadre clerical job at the Civil Aviation and then another clerical job at the audit department of the office of the Accountant General of Pakistan. But with a degree from Agra University, and a command of Urdu, Persian, Arabic, English and Hindi, he was keen to resume his teaching career. In 1955, he as teacher joined Karachi’s Kotwal Building School, known for its quality education and learned faculty. With a penchant for literature and a critical mind, Farman Sahib was not the kind of souls that sit idle and wait for things to happen to them. He had much earlier started writing critical essays that appeared in prestigious literary journals of the day. In fact, he had been composing poetry since school days and contributing to some well-known newspapers and journals even in the 1940s.

Making ends meet was quite a task and with the proverbial candle that he had to burn, Farman Sahib did part-time jobs and compiled students’ guides for Urdu Bazar publishers just to earn a few hundred rupees. Once he confided with this writer that in the 1950s and early 1960s, many guides for the students of some subjects as diverse as economics and mathematics were penned by one S. D. Ali. And it was none other than Syed Dildar Ali, who by that time had established himself as a critic and researcher with the penname of Farman Fatehpuri and was assisting Allama Niaz Fatehpuri in bringing out his celebrated literary magazine ‘Nigar’, a magazine which Farman Sahib began editing after the death of Niaz Fatehpuri in 1966. Its latest issue has appeared a couple of weeks ago. Click link below for full article.

http://dawn.com/news/1034068/farman-fatehpuri-an-era-comes-to-an-end

( Farman Fatehpuri was the grandfather of Mrs. Aziz Amin. Dr. Aziz Amin is TFUSA affiliate. Condolences to Mrs. Aziz Amin and entire family on behalf of TFUSA )

Posted By F.Sheikh