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Some troubling fatwas

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This selection is an example of the regressive thinking on islamic theology that is being amplified through the Internet and social media.  Such narrations are attracting the disaffected and dysfunctional from around the world to go to the crucibles of violence in Syria, Iraq, Pakistan to perpetrate Inhumane acts of intolerance towards people and their cultural and historical legacies.  It is a prolonged struggle with enormous geopolitical ramifications.
Nasik Elahi
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Begin forwarded message:
From: Salman Kureshi
Date: February 26, 2015 at 05:38:20 EST
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: Some Fatwas

The following is forwarded as received, without comment:

Fatwa, or religious edict, is an opinion or religious pronouncement delivered by a Mufti or Qadi. In modern times it is generally pronounced by Ulama (religious scholars) who claim or recognized by the Muslim community as jurists. In simple words it is a formal legal opinion of a religious scholar on a matter of Islamic law. Since Ulama claim that Islam provides a comprehensive guideline that covers all dimensions of life from birth to death, the need for Fatwa is an ever-increasing business in this rapidly changing world. However, some of the Fatwas given by Ulama are so ridiculous that it is hard to believe Muslim religious scholars delivered them. A few examples of these Fatwas are mentioned below:

  • Whoever dies in the land of infidelity could go to hell: Sheikh Abdullah al-Suwailem, part of Saudi Arabian Munasaha program which aims at the rehabilitation of imprisoned al-Qaeda expressed the fear that “whoever dies in the land of infidelity could go to hell”, al-Hayat, a London-based newspaper quoted him as saying. “Sharia forbids travelling abroad except in a case of necessity and with conditions,” he said. The first of these conditions is that a person has to be “a strong believer” and has to have religious “immunity” so as not to fall for “desires,” added al-Suwaleim. “Whoever fears that he might fall for the forbidden acts, such as consuming alcohol, should not travel abroad except when necessary,” he said. The preacher was also quoted saying that the act of Muslims living among “infidels” is “not loved by God” while it is “less undesirable” by God for Muslims to travel to other Muslim countries. The Saudi cleric went on adding that it is also forbidden to go to the “land of infidelity” even for business or education, unless it is extremely necessary.
  • Banning the right to use the word “Allah”: Malaysia’s highest court on Monday dismissed a bid by Christians for the right to use the word “Allah”, ending a years-long legal battle that has escalated religious tensions in the Muslim-majority country. Authorities say using “Allah” in non-Muslim literature could confuse Muslims and entice them to convert.

http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2014/06/23/foreign/top-malaysian-court-rules-word-allah-only-for-muslims/

  • Not to use “Rest in Peace” for non-Muslims: Any advisory from the National Fatwa Council is binding on Muslims, Datuk Seri Jamil Khir Baharom said today, referring to the council’s reminder to Muslims not to use the phrase “Rest in Peace” when condoling a non-Muslim’s death.

http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/muslims-bound-by-fatwa-councils-advice-on-rest-in-peace-says-jamil-khir

  • Mouse is “one of Satan’s soldiers”: Sheikh Muhammad Munajid, a former diplomat at the Saudi embassy in Washington DC, was asked to give Islam’s teaching on mice during a religious affairs program broadcast on al-Majd TV, an Arab television network. He said the mouse is “one of Satan’s soldiers” and makes everything it touches impure. Thus, under Sharia, both household mice and their cartoon counterparts must be killed.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/saudiarabia/2963744/Mickey-Mouse-must-die-says-Saudi-Arabian-cleric.html

  • Emoticons are forbidden: According to Muslim Internet Forum Multaqa Ahl al Hadeeth, “Emoticons are forbidden because of its imitation to Allah’s creatures whether it is original or mixture or even deformed one and since the picture is the face and the face is what makes the real picture then emoticons which represent faces that express emotions then all that add up to make them Haram.

http://ahlalhdeeth.com/vbe/showthread.php?t=1625

  • Muslims are forbidden from watching football matches in the World Cup: Vice-Chief of the Salafi Dawa Yasser Borhamy has issued a religious edict, saying that Muslims are forbidden from watching football matches in the World Cup as it could be seen as admiring disbelievers. In his edict posted on Ana Salafi, the official website of the Salafi Dawa, Borhamy said, “the World Cup matches distract Muslims from performing their [religious] duties. They include forbidden things that could break the fast in Ramadan as well as others forbidden in Islam like intolerance and wasting time. Football lovers like disbelievers of foreign teams’ players and others, which is rejected.”

http://www.egyptindependent.com//news/salafi-leader-borhamy-forbids-watching-world-cup-matches

  • To wear a tie is definitely haram: Hozoor Muftee-e-Azam Hind Aleh Rehma-tu-Rizwan [affiliated with Markaze Tarbiya Ifta of the Darul Uloom Amjadia in U.P. India] writes that to wear a tie is definitely haram (forbidden) and is a resemblance of kafir (disbelief or unbelief).

http://islamopediaonline.org/fatwa/may-muslim-men-wear-ties

  • Wearing metallic band watch is not permitted in Namaz: To wear a metallic band watch and perform Namaz in it is not allowed. Alahazrat Imam Ahmed Raza Muhaddis-e-Barelvi wrote: Watch’s band of gold and silver for man is HARAM and of other metals is prohibited. To perform Namaz or do Imamat wearing prohibited things is Makrooh-e-Tehreeni (Ahkam-e-Shariat, Part two, page 170)

http://www.islamicacademy.org/html/Fatwa/English/Namaz%20in%20Metallic%20Band%20Watch.htm

  • Women should not specialize in a field such as Chemistry, Engineering, Architecture, Astronomy and Geography: Women should not specialize in a field that is outside of her realm. She has the opportunity to pursue many fields that are suitable to her, like Islamic Studies or the Arabic Language. Fields such as Chemistry, Engineering, Architecture, Astronomy and Geography do not suit her. Women should choose what benefits her and that which benefits society. Furthermore, men need to establish institutions for women that will prepare them for those fields that they need to study, Gynecology and pre-natal care being important examples. Shaykh `Abdul-`Azeez Bin Baz
  • Protests are forbidden in Islam: Al Azhar Head of Fatwas says Protests are forbidden in Islam. Sheikh Saeed Amer, the head of the Committee on Fatwas at Al Azhar Institute, refused to consider protests a religiously acceptable method to express opinions, insisting that religious scholars are unanimously against anti-governmental protests that may turn violent, referring to Qur’an 2:27 ” and (who) make mischief in the earth: Those are they who are the losers.” He added, “It is haram.” In regards to peaceful protests, he stated that this method is also rejected in Islam

http://www.islamopediaonline.org/news/al-azhar-head-fatwas-says-protests-are-forbidden-islam

  • Women driving will cause much corruption: In a religious question asked to Abdul-Aziz Abdullah Ibn Baz on the ruling of women driving, he stated, “there is no doubt that it is not permissible, because women driving will cause much corruption, and according to Islamic law we should prevent corruption.” Muhammad Ibn Salehul Athimeen in this regard has also stated that, “It is not permissible because it will cause a lot of corruption.”

http://www.islamopediaonline.org/fatwa/are-women-allowed-drive-islam-and-if-so-then-why-muslim-country-saudi-arabia-are-they-forbidde

ISIS Burns 8000 Rare Books and Manuscripts in Mosul

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NasikElahi shared this with you

This is the ultimate sign of insanity of ISIL and its reign of terror. To burn down historical records is to deny their very humanity. No Muslim or human being can condone such actions.

“Lee Smolin And Status Of Modern Physics” Interview by Jose Boswell

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Lee Smolin argues that it is not the timeless laws of universe that controls it but the ‘current moment’ that dictates the future moment. A thought provoking interview( F. Sheikh).

Adam’s Opticks: Hi Lee, central to your thesis as outlined in Time Reborn, and in its recent follow-up The Singular Universe (co-authored with Roberto Mangabeira Unger) [5], is a rejection of the “block universe” interpretation of physics in which timeless laws of nature dictate the history of the universe from beginning to end. Instead, you argue, all that exists is “the present moment” (which is one of a flow of moments). As such, the regularities we observe in nature must emerge from the present state of the universe as opposed to following a mysterious set of laws that exist “out there.” If this is true, you also foresee the possibility that regularities in nature may be open to forms of change and evolution.

My first question is this: Does it make sense to claim that “the present moment is all that exists” if one has to qualify that statement by saying that there is also a “flow of moments?” Does the idea of a flow of time not return us to the block universe? Or at the very least to the idea that the present moment represents the frontier of an ever “growing” or “evolving” block as the cosmologist George Ellis might say?

Lee Smolin: Part of our view is that an aspect of moments, or events, is that they are generative of other moments. A moment is not a static thing, it is an aspect of a process (or visa versa) which generates new moments. The activity of time is a process by which present events bring forth or give rise to the next events.

I studied this idea together with Marina Cortes. We developed a mathematical model of causation from a thick present which we called energetic causal sets [6]. Our thought is that each moment or event may be a parent of future events. A present moment is one that has not yet exhausted or spent its capability to parent new events. There is a thick present of such events. Past events were those that exhausted their potential and so are no longer involved in the process of producing new events, they play no further role and therefore there is no reason to regard them as still existing. (So no to Ellis’s growing block universe.)

AO: Can you help me understand what you mean by a “thick present”? I’m confused because if the present moment is “thick” rather than instantaneous, and may contain events, it seems like you’re defining the present moment as a stretch of time, which looks like a contradiction in terms. Similarly, when you say that the activity of time is a process I’m left thinking that events, activities and processes are all already temporal notions, and so to account for time in those terms seems circular.

LS: I can appreciate your confusion but look, think about it this way: the world is complex. What ever it is, it contains many elements in a complicated network of relations. To say what exists is events in the present does not mean it is one thing. The present is not one simple thing, it is the whole world, therefore it contains a vast complexity and plurality. Of what? Of processes, which are dual to events.

AO: One of your main objections to the idea of eternal laws comes in the form of what you diagnose as the “Cosmological Fallacy” in physics. Your argument runs that the regularities we identify in small subsystems of the universe — laboratories mainly! — ought never to be scaled up to apply to the universe as a whole. You point out that in general we gain confidence in scientific hypotheses by running experiments again and again, and define our laws in terms of what stays the same over the course of many repetitions. But this is obviously impossible at a cosmological scale because the universe only happens once.

But what’s wrong with the idea of cautiously extrapolating from the laws we derive in the lab, and treating them as working hypotheses at the cosmological scale? If they fit the facts and find logical coherence with other parts of physics then great… if not, then they’re falsified and we can move on. As an avowed Popperian yourself, are you not committed to the idea that this is how science works?

In addition, wouldn’t the very idea of “laws that evolve and change” make science impossible? How could we ever confirm or falsify a hypothesis if, at the back of our minds, we always had to contend with the possibility that nature might be changing up on us? Don’t we achieve as much by postulating fixed laws and revising them on the basis of evidence as we might by speculating about evolving laws that would be impossible to confirm or falsify?

LS: To be clear: the Cosmological Fallacy is to scale up the methodology or paradigm of explanation, not the regularities.

Nevertheless, there are several problems with extrapolating the laws that govern small subsystems to the universe as a whole. They are discussed in great detail in the books, but in brief:

  1. Those laws require initial conditions. Normally we vary the initial conditions to test hypotheses as to the laws. But in cosmology we must test simultaneously hypotheses as to the laws and hypotheses as to the initial conditions. This weakens the adequacy of both tests, and hence weakens the falsifiability of the theory.
  2. There is no possible explanation for the choice of laws, nor for the initial conditions, within the standard framework (which we call the Newtonian paradigm).

Regarding your questions about falsifiability, one way to address them is to study specific hypotheses outlined in the books. Cosmological Natural Selection, for instance, is a hypothesis about how the laws may have changed which implies falsifiable predictions. Take the time to work out how that example works and you will have the answer to your question.

Another way to reconcile evolving laws with falsifiability is by paying attention to large hierarchies of time scales. The evolution of laws can be slow in present conditions, or only occur during extreme conditions which are infrequent. On much shorter time scales and far from extreme conditions, the laws can be assumed to be unchanging.

https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2015/02/13/lee-smolin-and-the-status-of-modern-physics/

 

Monthly Lecture For Sunday, Februrary 22, 2015

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( Please Note Below New Time And Lunch to be Served)

Thinkers’ Forum USA Affiliates!

You are cordially invited to the next monthly Lecture of TF USA.

Speaker:         Babar Mustafa

          Topic: “Animation Of Matter”

Moderator:   Dr. Fayyaz Sheikh

When:

Sunday, February 22, 2015

Duration:

Start Time:          11;00 AM

End Time:            1;00 PM

Lunch Served After Lecture

Location:

Dr. Shoeb Amin’s office

48 New Main Street

Haverstraw  NY   10927

Synopsis

Animation of Matter
 
How life originated? This question has two different answers. First one which is more popular is that God created it and that is the end of discussion for the “how” part for most people. Second one is that it evolved from one first life. The evolution part from first life onwards is well established since Darwin in mid19th century presented the theory of natural selection. I personally am convinced one hundred percent that life did evolve from rudimentary and very basic, to the present level of complexity. It is all quite understandable and not really hard to get the idea of evolution except the emergence of the very first life on its own.
It is also speculated that this very first life might have originated elsewhere and travelled through space embedded in meteorites and hit earth and with favorable conditions here thrived and evolved. If we look at certain facts about our empirical self, about the stuff that we, humans and all other life including animals and plants, it becomes quite clear that no, there is no reason to think that life originated elsewhere because the six basic elements that life is composed of existed here before life originated and these elements are all around us. These six elements are common denominator of all life, accounting for 99%of the dry weight of every living thing. Life is known to be carbon based. Carbon formed in the core of the stars, when those stars exploded it spread all over. Other five major elements are – hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, phosphorous and Sulfur.   
Life as we know now seems too complex and I agree it is hard to imagine it having emerged on its own but what about the life at the earliest stages, some three thousand five hundred million years ago i.e. 3.5 billion years ago? Was it the same as it is now? The fossil records do not confirm it and the environmental conditions that science figures out existed at the time earth was formed do not allow this life to have existed. Early atmosphere of earth didn’t have oxygen enough to sustain this life for example. So if we consider life having evolved from humble beginnings it all makes sense.
It has been scientifically determined that all this diverse life began to spread about 600 million years ago in the Cambrian era (known as the Cambrian Explosion) when single cell life became highly complex and Eukaryotic cells evolved and oxygen levels increased sufficiently. Eukaryotic cells are what animals (including humans) and plants are made of. It took two and a half billion years for this complex cell to evolve from basic Prokaryotic cells (of what bacteria are made of). And it took about one billion years for the Prokaryotic cell to emerge first. It is no easy task to figure out things that happened billions of years ago but thanks to science we have pretty good methods to figure out the past to a great degree of accuracy and hopefully will be able to understand more in the future. The evolution of life from Prokaryotic cell life onwards is understood quite well but the question of that very first life is still not known with complete understanding yet. I came across some information regarding this in a book “Microcosmos” where Carl Sagan’s son Dorion Sagan writes (co-authored with Lynn Margulis, his mother – both highly educated), how life could have originated from the basic elements that I mentioned earlier, considering the properties of those elements. I have picked out some parts of their book and tried to keep it to layman’s level for the purpose of simplicity:
Carbon atoms, being very light and with four valence electrons (i.e. electron in outer most shell available to pair with another available electron) and due to this property virtually all the molecules that we are composed of are carbon based.  Carbon atoms in their highly agitated states during the hot wet and molten Archean conditions, combined rapidly with hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and sulfur to generate a vast diversity of substances.
A hydrocarbon chain linked to a group of phosphorous and oxygen atoms manifest an electrical charge on the end bearing the phosphate group and no charge on the other end. The chemical as whole attracts water on its charged end and repels it on the non-charged end. Such chemicals, called phospholipids, tend to lineup side by side with each other, the non-charged ends pointing away from the water while the charged ends point down into it. (This is essentially what happens when a drop of oil enters water, instantly forming a film.) These and other types of lipids tend spontaneously to fold into drops, secluding materials on the inside from those on the outside. They have also been shown to form double layers when waves bring two water surfaces, filmed with lipids, together. When this happens, the charged ends of the sheet of lipid molecules point towards each other sandwiched between the non-charged ends. In this way the first membranes were formed – the first semipermeable boundaries between “inside” and “outside, the first distinction between self and non-self.
The membrane makes possible that discrete unit of the microcosm, the bacterial cell. Most scientists feel that lipids combined with proteins to make translucent packages of lifelike matter before the beginning of life itself. No life without a membrane of some kind is known.
Probably not once, but several times, amino acids, nucleotides, simple sugars, phosphates and their derivatives, formed and complexified, with energy from the sun within the protection of a lipid bubble, absorbing ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) and other carbon nitrogen compounds from the outside as “food”. Fairly complex structures have formed spontaneously from lipid mixtures in the laboratory.
Bubbles of lipids split in two at first simply from the strain of surface tension, each half carrying on its internal activity. The protocells simply broke down and disappeared, while others formed in some other tidal pool, each with a slightly different “modus operandi”. Once able to stay itself, a structure on its way to becoming living must reproduce itself. Before cells, life and non-life may have been indistinguishable. The first cell like systems were what the Belgian Nobel Prize- winning physicist Ilya Prigogine has termed “dissipative structures” – objects or processes that organize themselves and spontaneously change their form. With the influx of energy, dissipative structures may become more instead of less ordered. The sort of information theory that has been so useful in communication technology applies solely to information which consists almost entirely of confirmation. In dissipative structures, information begins to organize itself; pockets of elaboration arise. 
 It seems silly to postulate a single dramatic moment of magical lightning when DNA and RNA spontaneously formed a cell and life began. Many dissipative structures, long chains of different chemical reactions, must have evolved, reacted and broken down before the elegant double helix of our ultimate ancestor formed and replicated with high fidelity. Indeed, living forms based on totally different types of replicating molecules may have arisen and developed for a while before disappearing altogether. But because they are the common denominator of all life today, it is clear that at some point lipid membranes containing RNA and DNA began to flourish. The numbers of these tiny bacterial spheres increased and diminished in a process of ebb and flow. At some point some time before 3,500 million years ago, the evolutionary tide reached the level of life as we know it: that of the membrane-bounded, 5000-protein, RNA-messaged, DNA-governed cell.  The Earth’s microcosm, the age of bacteria, had begun. The time it took because of nature’s hit and trial or natural selection of first one billion years for Prokaryotic cell to emerge and then two and a half billion years for the Eukaryotic cells justifies the inner complexity of these cells.       
Most of the mechanism at microscopic level is a function of positive and negative charge of the matter. An atom or a molecule with unequal number of electrons and protons becomes ions – more electrons make it negatively charged and more protons make it positively charged.  The layers of lipids that make membrane of a cell separate these charge differences across the membrane and embedded ion channels and sodium pumps in the membrane open or close when charge gradient increases. The solutions inside our cells, and those of all other organisms on earth, are high in potassium ions (+ve) and low in sodium ions (-ve). These ionic differences are exploited to generate the electrical pulses in our nerve and muscle cells for, like water trapped behind a hydroelectric dam; they are an effective way of storing potential energy. Open the gates and these ions try to redistribute themselves to try and establish equal concentrations on either side of the membrane.
The origin of rapid motion in bacteria seems to be connected to a rotary device that is unknown in cells with nuclei. A flagellum, or whip like strand, is attached to the disk-shaped base of the bacterium. The round base known as the “proton motor’, actually spins around, also propelled by changes of electric charge.
This gives me an idea how cell membranes could have formed, began splitting and replicating or reproducing and moving and it is all of atomic nature, flow of currents and now we know quite precisely how nerves and muscles operate, how neuron circuits in our brain work digitally etc. There is a clear pattern of increasing complexity from simplicity.
It will be a fair question to ask that if we know how matter became alive, how come we cannot produce a living cell in a laboratory now.  A few hundred million years of molecular activity is a long, long time. Scientists have been working only a few decades to provide conditions conducive to the origin of laboratory life and have come very far. It is not inconceivable that one day a living cell will be spontaneously generated in the laboratory. We should remember that it wasn’t more than 500 years ago when Copernicus settled the matter that sun didn’t revolve around earth but it was vice versa. We are here, having started from humble beginnings, a collection of atoms and molecules and bacteria and we are conscious, have emotions and our brains capable of figuring this all out. Whatever life is, it is amazing and very precious.