Old Blog: Very Near to Get it!

My older beloved blog: Umer Toor Blog. was hacked in Jan 2010.

I'm very near recovering it from the original hacker, who despite everything didn't change a word of it!

I'll be exporting this back and redirecting it to the older blog inshaAllah! If you're following this blog, please follow Umer Toor Blog too.

Colonists Bluffed Us, the Mozlems! Still Do!

That's a euraka! post that i want to share. I would rather allow Gai Eaton to shed a new light on the Muslim perception of West and ensuing self-pity and reactionism that harms Muslims alone:

The Muslims´ lack of self-confidence may be attributed in part to the experience of colonialism, but it still endures chiefly, I think, because the West has bluffed the Muslims into accepting it at its own valuation and has succeeded in hiding its weaknesses, its vulnerability. It seems to me that this was exemplified in the early 1970s, during the so called "oil crisis." The oil producers — the Saudis in particular — had what amounted to a stranglehold on the Western world; they had very great power, which might have been put to use to their own advantage and to the advantage of the Ummah. What they lacked was the self-confidence which would have enabled them to use that power wisely and effectively. They lacked also that spirit of daring which encourages the powerful to make full use of their power. The opportunity was missed and may not come again... When I talk with my fellow Muslims about the nature of Western dominance, one of my principal aims is to persuade them that this power rests upon very shaky foundations.

These shaky foundations and bogus pshyco-propaganda has to be exposed with so much academic sources available at our disposal. All these academic sources provide logical foundations to the truths already to be found in Islam. Dr Asad Zaman is doing a seminal job by persuading his research graduate students through lectures in this regard by making us realize that we've been bluffed by self-deception (freely available online here). His analyses draw from variety of sources: Islamic reasoning, "subaltern" history, empirical evidences, economics, philosophy, etc. One such introduction to his lectures asserts:

Mostly people believed that history is objective, factual but in fact history is always biased. West claim that they feel the white man burden that’s why they attack other nations to make them civilized but its not true, in this lecture we have tried to show the true picture of why west attack other nations.

Its the game of confidence which Muslims lack at individual level and societal level vis a vis West. The point is: Muslims/easterners are not inferior in any sense to Western men; guess is that they are more advanced. The latter guess has to be induced in the minds to arrive at the former truth, because the confidence level is abysmally low.

What do i envy?

I envy:

• people who know nature of things
• people in love with Allah and his Prophet
• people who are bay-niyaz, i.e., to whom nothing matters except will of God
• non-mercenary, really patriotic and morally aware FIGHTER PILOTS! [My only janoon/extreme passion-obsession-love: a realm beyond that of love/ishq and anything else you know; pure passion: in which one personifies his target job/field/role and behaves like one everyday; only such janoonis as per psychiatrists outperform the rest and do miracles no one else can dare imagine doing]
• productive people, especially academically 
• people with expertise
• people with encyclopedic knowledge of fields that really matter, like philosophy, medicine, fiqh, history, mathematics, physics, metaphysics, etc., not fluff being taught in universities - the outliers in non-outliers
• people with indomitable courage
• with vision, wisdom, perseverance, people knowledge
• bloggers who get lot of comments
• people who can theorize and explain through essays and even books with lot of evidence (either factual or mental/logical/metaphysical/philosophical)
• people on the right track! fixated please...
• people with cute children [can i adopt one being single?] and devout wives (hoors later)

Disbelievers are mad, mad, mad

Mad not in the sense being suffering from some mental or biological disorder but not being reasonable and logical, and being contradictory. There are many living concepts, so to speak part of the world, which we recognize to be existent but we don't observe them, or know them by seeing, or, even, fully understand them. We don't know how such things as gravity, unconscious, invisible rays, etc., as work. We don't know how they make things behave, and on and on and on. We don't know their inner processes or reality through our senses, but know that these exist through their manifestations. Gravity exists because we its effects. Unconscious exists because we see its effects. Although these forces and entities are hidden and beyond our observations, their behavior, their 'products' are however observable.

Take the Freud's unconscious. Despite all criticisms made against him on purely scientific grounds (not that i believe in absolute truthiness of scientific methods), his idea of the "unconscious is intact," as per professor Bloom of Yale. Unconscious is fascinating. All the slip tongues, memory gaps, and other crazy stuff comes from unconscious of which we have no conscious trace or understanding. Still its there. A better example than this is gravity that we can feel but don't observe the way we want to observe God, which is impossible for our perceptions.

The simple logic behind believing in these unobservables is their fruits, to be poetic. Then how we deny the Creator? Dr Asad Zaman in his lecture on logical positivism [lecture # 7] shows how these atheistic scientific theories are so grounded and motivated by this urge of non-believing communities to deny the Maker of the Universe. This logically explains their consistent efforts to deny Allah despite their admission about existence of life and universe being nothing short of a miracle. Allah shows the disbelieving miracles but they deny, as their predecessors did. Allah knows best.

Sidi (late) Charles Gai Eaton shows difference between a Muslim-believer and modern agnostic/atheist western's approach towards faith:

"Formerly, this confrontation [b/w Muslims and Christians in middle ages] was between men of faith who had more in common than they could ever have acknowledged. That likeness, that shared devotion to an almighty and unseen God, no longer exists. The gulf has become infinitely wider and mutual comprehension has become far more difficult. The believer to whom the transcendent reality of God is the most compelling fact known to him cannot really understand unbelief or imagine its sterility. The unbeliever, try as he may, cannot even guess what the experience of faith is; his imagination is baffled by this strange, other-worldly phenomenon."

Sum-total of Modern Man's Efforts

i think sum-total of modern man's efforts to satisfy his "polymorphous perversity," i.e., total pursuit of pleasure, where suppression of it occurs only as a mean to get to something more pleasurable. The real disappointing part is his instance on being called being civilized, whereas as per their own modern prophets this is the animal part, the most stupid part of human being, the id. God knows best...

A Psycho-Experiment

Image source.

I'm performing a psychological experiment mentioned in a slide on Freud. It consists of two activities: writing 3 positive features of someone i love. And then: writing 10 positive features. Here it goes.

List 1: 3 features of a person a love: my mother

- caring
- hardworking
- loving

List 2: 10 positive features of my mother

- good at budgetary regulations
- perfectionist
- educated and literary
- good at social relations
- disciplined
- ethical
- helper of poor people
- emotional about positive things [where feelings are necessary]
- traditional in approach towards life; archetypal eastern
- was very obedient to her parents

___________

What was i supposed to feel: The reading asserted: Liking goes up in 3 group. Liking goes down in 10 group.

What i actually felt: Not much change. I totally disagree with the above assertion. My emotions remained same; although writing the traits was exhaustive.

1 timer: When Simple Invaders Converted Advanced People

The so-called barbarian conquest of Rome led the invaders to convert to the religions of the conquered. The Mongols, who butchered millions of people, second in Barbarity to Westerners only perhaps. There're clear proofs that Westerners cooperated so much with Mongols to destroy Muslims that Mongol leaders were expected to convert to Christianity. Unfortunately, they converted to islam and never repeated their history of  barbarity in cooperation of West.

Abdal Hakim Murad, while mentioning these two conquests, mentions how simple, unsophisticated noblemen of Arab in a blink of eye spread through most cultured and sophisticated lands of their times and instead of getting converted led the conquered to convert, although over centuries because they didn't point swords at their throats. It's nothing short of a miracle, he adds.

"Newsflash": Pakistanis are far more advanced

Image source.

In Pakistan, by grace of Allah, population of villages is still much greater than of cities, although with much less basic necessities, health-care being top priority. This or few other deficiencies don't have to be part and parcel of villages at all. Nonetheless, overall village life and even of semi-Urbanite non-cosmopolitan city-dwellers in Pakistan is liberating. People like me, younger age with cell phones and internet, are becoming slaves of technology day by day, but we're still much more advanced in our human relations, in living a meaningful life devoid of avoidance & superficiality, and in being at ease with nature. Something Westerners - those who're baby-sit by tv and other visual and auditory devices - are very backward at. In the end, it's all about freedom to be Archetypical, Primordial Human, true to our nature forged in the image of God.

The realization of this backwardness is not limited to outward observers - i.e., Asians or Africans or those few in West who still adore nature and rawness. First, the movie Mr Lorax debunked the sterility of anti-nature and artificial living style of Western capitalism. Now, a high school in America is doing something about it: taking students on a 3 month term in a country-side region with no cell-phones, no Facebook and little internet. Please watch the video [click on the link pls] to feel how precious and advanced Eastern way of life really is.

Liberty Books' Home-service: Awesome

I ordered a book online yesterday for the first time and in 24 hours, it's here all the way from Karachi with no TCS courier charges. Above all, with payment upon delivery!

Here's a book for record... Nassim Nicolas Taleb's much renowned The Black Swan.

Picture taken by yours truly

A heart-rending post: Inferiority complex vis-a-vis English

Update: It's under bold heading, end para.

I'm too shocked to read this post on a blog and want to share these sickening words and my stammering reply.Please add to it from psychological and other perspectives and the cure to this ugliest disease of self-hatred. Of course the author here doesn't seem to personally hold these views.

"It was in one of the short stories back in the O-level's syllabus that a guy tells a girl (or perhaps it was the other way round) that he loves her and the girl replies that if you had said that in Urdu, it would have sound so bazaari (vulgar) ... or something similar to that ... English does have this intellectualizing, legalizing and toning down effect over here. I have seen people happily bearing abuses hurled at them in English but usually they are not so comfortable with Urdu or Punjabi. Similarly when the Pakistani stage dramas were gaining notoriety with their abundant double entendres; English sitcoms were usually let off scot-free with their sexual innuendos."

My reply:

"I believe, with plenty of evidence, that this is merely because of inferiority complex and hatred of our own culture, and one of the greatest triumphs of our Devilish Egoism. We can ruthlessly mock our own brethren, our friends, our countrymen who can't speak English well grammatically or are too vernacular. Go out of Pakistan and these self-haters would be bootlicking Gori Chamri [whiteman's skin] with no respect from their meaning-masters (or meaningless-masters) - cause they have no self-respect of their own."

"Intellectualizing, legalizing and toning down effect" of English in Pakistan

There's nothing intellectual, "legalizing" effect inherent in this language of Anglophones. If one comes to know about the history of rise of Euro barbarians, s/he would get disenchanted to a considerable degree. Nonetheless, it is modern education that creates this sense of cultural and civilizational inferiority, although in reality this isn't the situation. Shaykh Gibril F Haddad talks about anti-tradition modernists and purists which explains at certain lower level such disastrous cultural infections "excellently" summed up in the 1st quote:

In complete contrast, today, many purportedly educated Muslims – both purists and anti-traditionists – revere bookish knowledge and non-Muslim institutions of learning over and even at the exclusion of Islamic ones. They accredit Western titles and disciplines above the Islamic offices of learning and mashyakhas. They speak, write, read, study, teach, debate after the fashion of non-Muslims just as they may also eat, dress, marry, divorce, and die as Westerners, without a second thought other than implicit or expressed hostility at the heritage of the forerunners in the Religion of Truth (although purists have managed to trumpet the art of lip service to “The Salaf” into a full-fledged ideology). Their approach to learning in our time is to orphan themselves of the principles of the learned Muslims of previous generations – their spiritual foreparents as Imam al-NawawÏ defined one’s Muslim teachers in al-TaqrÏb wal-TaysÏr ila Sunan al-BashÏr al-NadhÏr. They still have isnad – not so much to the people of the Prophetic Way and the Muslim Congregation as to the culture of the non-Muslim world and the ideas of “progressive” journalists, activists, news analysts, social scientists, and, at the other end of the spectrum, Marxist-Leninists and anarchists born-again as purists. Such are the manufactured imqms that have infiltrated the ranks of Muslim leadership and pose as the very Ulema they and their followers desert and belie. The Seal and Last of all Prophets said:  

“There will be, towards the end of time, Anti-Christs and arch-liars who shall say to you what neither you nor your foreparents ever heard before. Beware of them and keep away from them! Do not allow them to lead you astray nor sow discord among you.”

Reminds of eclipse only! of reasoning faculties.