Arabic Death Quotes

But eyes couldn’t stay closed forever, unless one was dead. And the dead never dreamed.

...But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since, its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness. In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside. The more emotional Pathans are powerless to resist. All rational considerations are forgotten. Seizing their weapons, they become Ghazis—as dangerous and as sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such. While the more generous spirits among the tribesmen become convulsed in an ecstasy of religious bloodthirstiness, poorer and more material souls derive additional impulses from the influence of others, the hopes of plunder and the joy of fighting. Thus whole nations are roused to arms. Thus the Turks repel their enemies, the Arabs of the Soudan break the British squares, and the rising on the Indian frontier spreads far and wide. In each case civilisation is confronted with militant Mahommedanism. The forces of progress clash with those of reaction. The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace.

أليست النفس تموتُ مَرَّهْ فخذْ عليها أن تموتَ حُــرَّهْ

The beauty of the sea is that it never shows any weakness and never tires of the countless souls that unleash their broken voices into its secret depths.

أنا عالِقٌ بَينَ حَياةٍ وَمَوتٍ I’m stuck between life and death

This book is about the melancholic direction, which I call the “bittersweet”: a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world. The bittersweet is also about the recognition that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired. “Days of honey, days of onion,” as an Arabic proverb puts it.

I wish I had lost an arm or a leg. It would have been much easier than losing a part of my heart, which lives on, but now beats to a different rhythm.

It's as though you had lost an arm or leg but still instinctively reach out to feel your missing limb or try to walk again, placing your entire weight on something that no longer is there.

I feel like my life is made up of tiny puzzle parts that no longer fit together. Imagine working on a puzzle only to find that the final picture can never be complete because one of its pieces is missing. This is exactly what's happened to my life; it has become impossible to put it back together.

...British appeasement of the Palestinian Arabs led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews [in the Holocaust] who might otherwise have found refuge in Palestine.

Our dead become the photographs and words we hang on the walls, but they also hang on the walls of our hearts, the windows of our lips, and the sobs in our voices.

There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome. The alm, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia. The arifi, also christened aref or rifi, which scorches with numerous tongues. These are permanent winds that live in the present tense. There are other, less constant winds that change direction, that can knock down horse and rider and realign themselves anticlockwise. The bist roz leaps into Afghanistan for 170 days--burying villages. There is the hot, dry ghibli from Tunis, which rolls and rolls and produces a nervous condition. The haboob--a Sudan dust storm that dresses in bright yellow walls a thousand metres high and is followed by rain. The harmattan, which blows and eventually drowns itself into the Atlantic. Imbat, a sea breeze in North Africa. Some winds that just sigh towards the sky. Night dust storms that come with the cold. The khamsin, a dust in Egypt from March to May, named after the Arabic word for 'fifty,' blooming for fifty days--the ninth plague of Egypt. The datoo out of Gibraltar, which carries fragrance. There is also the ------, the secret wind of the desert, whose name was erased by a king after his son died within it. And the nafhat--a blast out of Arabia. The mezzar-ifoullousen--a violent and cold southwesterly known to Berbers as 'that which plucks the fowls.' The beshabar, a black and dry northeasterly out of the Caucasus, 'black wind.' The Samiel from Turkey, 'poison and wind,' used often in battle. As well as the other 'poison winds,' the simoom, of North Africa, and the solano, whose dust plucks off rare petals, causing giddiness. Other, private winds. Travelling along the ground like a flood. Blasting off paint, throwing down telephone poles, transporting stones and statue heads. The harmattan blows across the Sahara filled with red dust, dust as fire, as flour, entering and coagulating in the locks of rifles. Mariners called this red wind the 'sea of darkness.' Red sand fogs out of the Sahara were deposited as far north as Cornwall and Devon, producing showers of mud so great this was also mistaken for blood. 'Blood rains were widely reported in Portugal and Spain in 1901.' There are always millions of tons of dust in the air, just as there are millions of cubes of air in the earth and more living flesh in the soil (worms, beetles, underground creatures) than there is grazing and existing on it. Herodotus records the death of various armies engulfed in the simoom who were never seen again. One nation was 'so enraged by this evil wind that they declared war on it and marched out in full battle array, only to be rapidly and completely interred.

The old man might have been drunk, but he was right. Outsiders have robbed and exploited the people of the Congo ever since the days of the first European and Arab slavers. The territory that Stanley staked in the name of Leopold witnessed what many regard as the first genocide of the modern era, when millions of Congolese were effectively worked to death trying to meet the colonialists’ almost insatiable demand for resources, most notably rubber. And since independence, foreign powers have toyed with the Congo, stripping its mineral assets and exploiting its strategic position, never mindful of the suffering inflicted on its people. And that really was the point. At every stage of its bloody history, outsiders have tended to treat Congolese as somehow sub-human, not worthy of the consideration they would expect for themselves. For progress to be made, outsiders must treat Congolese as equals and they could do worse than follow the example of an amazing white woman I discovered after we got back to Kalemie.

Your life is a sum of counted breaths. With each breath that passes a part of life is lost. That which gives life brings death every moment nearer, and your caravan is led by one who will not jest with you.

THERE FOR YOU When it all went down And the pain came through I get it now I was there for you Don’t ask me how I know it’s true I get it now I was there for you I make my plans Like I always do But when I look back I was there for you I walk the streets Like I used to do And I freeze with fear But I’m there for you I see my life In full review It was never me It was always you You sent me here You sent me there Breaking things I can’t repair Making objects Out of thoughts making more By thinking not Eating food And drinking wine A body that I thought was mine Dressed as Arab Dressed as Jew O mask of iron I was there for you Moods of glory Moods so foul The world comes through A bloody towel And death is old But it’s always new I freeze with fear And I’m there for you I see it clear I always knew It was never me I was there for you I was there for you My darling one And by your law It all was done Don’t ask me how I know it’s true I get it now I was there for you

Grief is shameless; it refuses to be ignored. If you let it have its way, it becomes fatal. If you try to remove it piece by piece, it only multiplies like a tumor. And if you try to fight it, it becomes like quicksand; you try to claw your way back to the surface, and for a second you feel the fresh air against your face, thinking you've survived, only to be pulled fiercely back down again, swallowed whole, nothing left.

Oh, but once my memories had pulsed with the blood-heat of life. In desperation, I forced myself to recall that once, I had walked with kings and conversed in languages never heard in this land. Once I had stood at the prow of a Sea Wolf ship and sailed oceans unknown to seamen here. I had ridden horses through desert lands, and dined on exotic foods in Arab tents. I had roamed Constantinople’s fabled streets, and bowed before the Holy Roman Emperor’s throne. I had been a slave, a spy, a sailor. Advisor and confidant of lords, I had served Arabs, Byzantines, and barbarians. I had worn captive’s rags, and the silken robes of a Sarazen prince. Once I had held a jeweled knife and taken a life with my own hand. Yes, and once I had held a loving woman in my arms and kissed her warm and willing lips...Death would have been far, far better than the gnawing, aching emptiness that was now my life.

That's when it hit me; my sunglasses were buried in the grave where my Talal lay. Yes, my sunglasses were buried with him. But oh, how I wish my eyes had gone with him instead.

In the Arab world, at any rate, to doubt the traditional account of Islam’s origins has been to risk death threats, prosecution for apostasy, or even defenestration.61

Arab and Druze population of Israel makes up around 20 percent of the country’s population and they have equal health care, housing, and voting rights as anyone else.

(On WWI:) A man of importance had been shot at a place I could not pronounce in Swahili or in English, and, because of this shooting, whole countries were at war. It seemed a laborious method of retribution, but that was the way it was being done. ... A messenger came to the farm with a story to tell. It was not a story that meant much as stories went in those days. It was about how the war progressed in German East Africa and about a tall young man who was killed in it. ... It was an ordinary story, but Kibii and I, who knew him well, thought there was no story like it, or one as sad, and we think so now. The young man tied his shuka on his shoulder one day and took his shield and his spear and went to war. He thought war was made of spears and shields and courage, and he brought them all. But they gave him a gun, so he left the spear and the shield behind him and took the courage, and went where they sent him because they said this was his duty and he believed in duty. ... He took the gun and held it the way they had told him to hold it, and walked where they told him to walk, smiling a little and looking for another man to fight. He was shot and killed by the other man, who also believed in duty, and he was buried where he fell. It was so simple and so unimportant. But of course it meant something to Kibii and me, because the tall young man was Kibii's father and my most special friend. Arab Maina died on the field of action in the service of the King. But some said it was because he had forsaken his spear.

No one has expressed what is needed better than Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of the London-based al-Arabiya news channel. One of the best-known and most respected Arab journalists working today, he wrote the following, in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (September 6, 2004), after a series of violent incidents involving Muslim extremist groups from Chechnya to Saudi Arabia to Iraq: "Self-cure starts with self-realization and confession. We should then run after our terrorist sons, in the full knowledge that they are the sour grapes of a deformed culture... The mosque used to be a haven, and the voice of religion used to be that of peace and reconciliation. Religious sermons were warm behests for a moral order and an ethical life. Then came the neo-Muslims. An innocent and benevolent religion, whose verses prohibit the felling of trees in the absence of urgent necessity, that calls murder the most heinous of crimes, that says explicitly that if you kill one person you have killed humanity as a whole, has been turned into a global message of hate and a universal war cry... We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women. We cannot redeem our extremist youth, who commit all these heinous crimes, without confronting the Sheikhs who thought it ennobling to reinvent themselves as revolutionary ideologues, sending other people's sons and daughters to certain death, while sending their own children to European and American schools and colleges.

In the early part of the ninth century, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, a mathematician working in Baghdad, wrote a seminal textbook in which he highlighted the usefulness of restoring a quantity being subtracted (like 2, above) by adding it to the other side of an equation. He called this process al-jabr (Arabic for “restoring”), which later morphed into “algebra.” Then, long after his death, he hit the etymological jackpot again. His own name, al-Khwarizmi, lives on today in the word “algorithm.

What many people do not know is that being a non-Muslim reporter did not complicate those poor victims situation. It does not matter whether you are Muslim, Arab or civilian; as long as you disagree with ISIS, your “rightful” punishment would be death!

I don't think I ever fully understood before now the old saying that goes: "A mother's heart loves her young one until he grows; her ill one until he heals; and her traveler until he returns." I have experienced all kinds of waiting; I've waited for my young to grow and the sick to heal, but I am still waiting on my little traveler and I do not know how long it will be until I see him again.

On the Samael Qlipha, the magician makes a pact with the dark forces and realizes the invitation of Friedrich Neitzsche to re-evaluate old values. Insanity becomes wisdom; death becomes life. Samael is the 'Poison of God.' Here is where illusions are poisoned, and all categories and conceptions are deconstructed until nothing is left. The dark side of the astral plane could be compared to a chalice filled with poison or an intoxicating fluid. While Gamaliel is the chalice, Samael is the elixir and the following lower Qlipha, A'arab Zaraq, is where the magician experiences the effect.

We had deluded ourselves that perhaps peace might find the Arabs able, unhelped and untaught, to defend themselves with paper tools. Meanwhile we glozed our fraud by conducting their necessary war purely and cheaply. But now this gloss had gone from me. Chargeable against my conceit were the causeless, ineffectual deaths of Hesa. My will had gone and I feared to be alone, lest the winds of circumstance, or power, or lust, blow my empty soul away.

From cradle to grave, Talal sprinted through life. I never did see a life extinguished so abruptly.

Do our dreams carry messages from the great beyond, sent by the people we have lost, or are they a reflection of our desperation and wishful thinking?

I watched life and death unfold like a dance on the side of that road. My son was born with a bloodstained face and he died with blood from the accident covering that same face.

Life is a dream interpreted by death.

Dude," said Hassan softly. "Khanzeer." (Arabic:Pig) "Matha, al-khanazeer la yatakalamoon araby?" Colin asked. (Arabic: What, pigs don't speak Arabic?" "That's no pig," answered Hassan in Enlgish. "That's a goddamned monster." The pig stopped its rotting and looked up at them. "I mean. Wilbur is a fugging pig. Babe is a fugging pig. That thing was birthed from the loins of Iblis." (Arabic: Satan) It was clear now the pig could see them. Colin could see the black in its eyes. "Stop cursing. The feral hog shows a remarkable understanding of human speech, especially profane speech," he mumbled, quoting from the book. "That's a bunch of bullshit," Hassan said, and then the pig took two lumbering steps towards them, and Hassan said, "Okay. Or not. Fine. No cursing. Listen. Satan Pig. We're cool. We don't want to shoot you. The guns are for show, dude." "Stand up so he knows we're bigger than he is," Colin said. "Did you read that in the book?" Hassan asked as he stood. "No, I read it in a book about grizzly bears." "We're gonna get gored to death by a feral fugging hog and your best strategy is to pretend it's a grizzly bear?

There is an old Arabic story about a man who hears Death is coming for him, so he sneaks away to Samarra. And when he gets there, he finds Death in the market, and Death says, "You know, I just felt like going on vacation to Samarra. I was going to skip you today, but how lucky you showed up to find me!" And the man is taken after all. Arthur Less has traveled halfway around the world in a cat's cradle of junkets, changing flights and fleeing from a sandstorm into into the Atlas Mountains like someone erasing his trail or outfoxing a hunter—and yet Time has been waiting here all along. In a snowy alpine resort. With cuckoos. Of course Time would turn out to be Swiss. He tosses back the champagne. He thinks: Hard to feel bad for a middle-aged white man.

Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide—one hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave—of demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers.

تراتيل على جسد فراشة اغسلوه.. مدّدوه.. اغمضوه.. شيّعوه.. ودّعوه.. ودَعوني. ممسكة تلك اليد الباردة.. أسرق ما تبقّى من حرارة هذا الكفّ. دعوني. أحتضن هذا الجسد الهامد.. أسرق من الموت تنهيدة. فراشتي البيضاء سقطت، أمام عتبة الدار وأنا.. ما عاد بوسعي اكمال القصيدة.. ما عاد بوسعي اكمال القصيدة.. نوافذ الحيّ تركتها جميعها مشرّعة.. حتّى بوّابة الحديد تركتها مفتوحة.. اعتقدت انها قد تعود.. تلك الفراشة البيضاء.. فراشتي الوحيدة. اعتقدت انني قد استيقظ مجدداً على رفرفتها.. واطفأ لها الشمعة كي لا تحترق في العشيّة.. ولكن فراشتي البيضاء سقطت، امام عتبة الدار وأنا.. أحرقت يومها، حداداً عليها، كلّ قصائدي الزهرية.. كلّ قصائدي الزهرية.

People differ to such a degree they agree on nothing, Except death that is, and even on that they disagree. Some say the soul goes on after the death of the body While others claim the soul, with the body, dies too.

Have you not considered those who went forth from their homes, for fear of death, and they were thousands, then Allah said to them, Die; again He gave them life; most surely Allah is Gracious to people, but most people are not grateful.

Someone muttered something in Arabic. Paul asked a young man who spoke some English to translate. “He says things must be serious in Syria: first they send young journalists, but now they send us a woman, a pensioner, and an idiot who wants to go back.

What is it the Arab sages call death?” Pendergast went on. “The destroyer of all earthly pleasures. And how true it is: old age, sickness, and at last death comes to us all. Some console themselves with religion, others through denial, others through philosophy or mere stoicism.

5 Broken Cameras, the Oscar-nominated film about the Bil’in protests, “shows life in one Palestinian village,” the New York Times writes in a glorifying review of this film. If you sit in New York and watch a docu-film you may believe that what you see is real. When you are here in Bil’in, and if you understand Arabic, you know better. “The Bil’in protests” is a show, a show of “Allah is with you. Kill them!” Personally, I don’t believe in “Death to the Arabs” and I don’t believe in “Death to the Jews,” even if the latter has been nominated for an Oscar.

Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet: That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.

I watch footage of people bringing their kids to a party of sorts. Only it’s not a party, it’s a blockade. The people are here to stop aid trucks from entering Gaza. But the atmosphere is festive. Someone on the other side of these walls is going to starve to death or be operated on without proper medical equipment because this aid won’t pass, but there is something festive here. Ten years earlier, when I watch footage of settlers with folding chairs up on the hillside, viewing the bombing of Gaza as one would view a summer blockbuster, again there is a celebratory air. I am reminded of what the actor Helen Mirren said of her time in Israel in 1967: “I saw Arabs being thrown out of their houses in Jerusalem. But it was just the extraordinary magical energy of a country just beginning to put its roots in the ground. It was an amazing time to be here.

They were mostly French, a few Arabs, and despite their uniforms they didn't look very important any more. Later I learned that if you watch men die, especially if you've known them at all, they still look important afterward no matter what you have to do with them, but I was inexperienced then.

As politicians weigh courses of action against their political agendas the death toll weighs heavy on the conscience of the world. The once vibrant Syrian streets are now haunted by the souls of the innocent and the historic monuments that told of an unrivalled Arab civilisation no longer stand tall.

I have always found it difficult not to be moved by Jerusalem, even when I hated it—and God knows I have hated it for the sheer human cost of it. But the sight of it, from afar or inside the labyrinth of its walls, softens me. Every inch of it holds the confidence of ancient civilizations, their deaths and their birthmarks pressed deep into the city's viscera and onto the rubble of its edges. The deified and the condemned have set their footprints in its sand. It has been conqured, razed and, rebuilt so many times that its stones seem to possess life, bestowed by the audit trail of prayer and blood. Yet somehow, it exhales humility. It sparks an inherent sense of familiary in me—that doubtless, irrefutable Palestinian certainty that I belong to this land. It possesses me, no matter who conquers it, because its soil is the keeper of my roots, of the bones of my ancestors. Because it knows the private lust that flamed the beds of all my foremothers. Because I am the natural seed of its passionate, tempestuous past. I am a daughter of the land, and Jerusalem reassures me of this inalienable right, far more than the yellowed property deeds, the Ottoman land registries, the iron keys to our stolen homes, or UN resolutions and decrees of superpowers could ever do.

Only once did I make Shireen sit down with me for a formal interview. She talked about the need to rebuild what she called "the culture of resistance" that she remembered experiencing during the Second Intifada, but which had since evaporated, replaced by a dull consumerist individualism, by "this illusion that if I forget about Palestine, build a career, take a loan, buy a car, build a house, watch Arab Idol on TV, it's all be okay; that if they're not raiding *your* house, you're okay." In a culture constructed around a shared goal of liberation, she said, "my house is your house and your son is my son and if they kill me today they will kill you tomorrow." (103)

There is an old Arabic story about a man who hears Death is coming for him, so he sneaks away to Samarra. And when he gets there, he finds Death in the market, and Death says, “You know, I just felt like going on vacation to Samarra. I was going to skip you today, but how lucky you showed up to find me!” And the man is taken after all.

No, he would never know his father, who would continue to sleep over there, his face for ever lost in the ashes. There was a mystery about that man, a mystery he had wanted to penetrate. But after all there was only the mystery of poverty that creates beings without names and without a past, that sends them into the vast throng of the nameless dead who made the world while they themselves were destroyed for ever. For it was just that that his father had in common with the men of the Labrador. The Mahon people of the Sahel, the Alsatians on the high plateaus, with this immense island between sand and sea, which the enormous silence was now beginning to envelop: the silence of anonymity; it enveloped blood and courage and work and instinct, it was at once cruel and compassionate. And he who had wanted to escape from the country without name, from the crowd and from a family without a name, but in whom something had gone on craving darkness and anonymity - he too was a member of the tribe, marching blindly into the night near the old doctor who was panting at his right, listening to the gusts of music coming from the square, seeing once more the hard inscrutable faces of the Arabs around the bandstands, Veillard's laughter and his stubborn face - also seeing with a sweetness and a sorrow that wrung his heart the deathly look on his mother's face at the time of the bombing - wandering though the night of the years in the land of oblivion where each one is the first man, where he had to bring himself up, without a father, having never known those moments when a father would call his son, after waiting for him to reach the age of listening, to tell him the family's secret, or a sorrow of long ago, or the experience of his life, those moments when even the ridiculous and hateful Polonius all of a sudden becomes great when he is speaking to Laertes; and he was sixteen, then he was twenty, and no one had spoken to him, and he had to learn by himself, to grow alone, in fortitude, in strength, find his own morality and truth, at last to be born as a man and then to be born in a harder childbirth, which consists of being born in relation to others, to women, like all the men born in this country who, one by one, try to learn without roots and without faith, and today all of them are threatened with eternal anonymity and the loss of the only consecrated traces of their passage on this earth, the illegible slabs in the cemetery that the night has now covered over; they had to learn how to live in relation to others, to the immense host of the conquerors, now dispossessed, who had preceded them on this land and in whom they now had to recognise the brotherhood of race and destiny.

bittersweet”: a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world. The bittersweet is also about the recognition that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired. “Days of honey, days of onion,” as an Arabic proverb puts it.

are starting to lock them up inside the death camps. This is beyond imagining. “My uncle is right,” Aliza said. “Quotas and blockades will not stop us. And the truth is, the English have always preferred the Arabs to the Jews. In fact, they are anti-Semites, though there are exceptions, of course,” she said. “Like our little commandant here in Atlit. “But enough politics for today,” she said, getting to her feet. “I’m going over to the kitchen and see if I can get a lemon or an orange so I can show you how to give an injection.” She put her hand under Leonie’s chin and smiled. “I suppose you’ll get married right away. But it’s always good to have a trade, just in case.” Leonie watched her go, overwhelmed by affection. Aliza seemed happiest when she was taking care of others, or telling them what to do. She never complained and seemed content with her life. Leonie wondered about the heavy gold earrings that she wore every day—her only adornment. Maybe they were a gift from her husband, or perhaps they had belonged to her mother. Aliza never mentioned

It's not the cold that makes you sleep yourself to death in the Arctic, it's the smooth pallor of the landscape, and the desert has that same smooth pallor, though Arabic. It's the whiteness, the sameness of everything, that makes you fall asleep out of life, parched or frozen and so so comfortable when you finally let it roll over your mind, like a rolling-pin over dough.

Obama was the most powerful man in the world, but that didn’t mean he could control the forces at play in the Middle East. There was no Nelson Mandela who could lead a country to absolution for its sins and ours. Extremist forces were exploiting the Arab Spring. Reactionary forces—with deep reservoirs of political support in the United States—were intent on clinging to power. Bashar al-Assad was going to fight to the death, backed by his Russian and Iranian sponsors. Factions were going to fight it out in the streets of Libya. The Saudis and Emiratis were going to stamp out political dissent in Egypt before it could come to their kingdoms. A Likud prime minister was going to mouth words about peace while building settlements that made peace impossible. Meanwhile, innocent people were going to suffer, some of them were going to be killed, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it. Obama had reached that conclusion before I had. History had opened up a doorway in 2011 that, by the middle of 2013, had been slammed shut. There would be more war, more conflict, and more suffering, until—someday—old men would make peace.

The theme of tonight’s dinner is apotheosis. What does it mean to become God? If Father Francis has no problem with lesser mortals like ourselves bursting into kaleidoscopic rainbows after decades of intense meditation, then why not simply drink the sacred potion and cut to the chase? At the end of the day, aren’t we both talking about that cryptic promise from Eleusis: overcoming the limitations of the physical body and cheating death? That “moment of intense rapture” sought by the maenads of Dionysus, until they “became identified with the god himself.” And aren’t he and Ruck both committing the same arch-heresy by suggesting that the original, obscured truth of Christianity has nothing to do with worshipping Jesus, and everything to do with becoming Jesus? Aren’t we all just gods and goddesses in the making? Maybe the concept of apotheosis doesn’t sound particularly heretical today. But a few hundred years ago, it got the likes of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola into a load of trouble. In 1484 the upstart Italian was only twenty-one years old when he met Lorenzo de’ Medici, who promptly invited him into the Florentine Academy that was about to punch the Renaissance into high gear. Already a student of Greek, as well as Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic, the newest Florentine got to work writing Oratio de hominis dignitate (Oration on the Dignity of Man): the so-called Manifesto of the Renaissance. He wanted to publicly debut the Oratio, together with his 900 Theses, in Rome on the Epiphany of 1487, the God’s Gift Day. But Pope Innocent VIII was not impressed. He put a halt to the spectacle and condemned every one of Pico della Mirandola’s theses for “renovating the errors of pagan philosophers.

According to the dictionary, “Islam” means “submission” in Arabic. A Muslim is someone who is submissive to God. Why does he submit? Because his God is the best, the brawniest, the nattiest, but most of all because, if he says anything to the contrary, he will burn in hell until well after the end of the world. The believer is thus encouraged not to screw around with God under penalty of something worse than death for all eternity.

Most surely in the creation of the heavens and the earth and the alternation of the night and the day, and the ships that run in the sea with that which profits men, and the water that Allah sends down from the cloud, then gives life with it to the earth after its death and spreads in it all (kinds of) animals, and the changing of the winds and the clouds made subservient between the heaven and the earth, there are signs for a people who understand.

Words are philosophies. We have to assume that each is purposeful about its contradictions, that each word means what it says. The English word “demonstration” has at least two meanings: one refers to the public act of protest—to march, rally, declare or express an opinion—and the other is to do with showing, with making something manifest or apparent in order to instruct or display. The Arabic muthahara, the Persian tathaharat, the French manifestation, the Italian manifestazione and the Spanish manifestación—all, regardless of their variant linguistic roots, agree that in a demonstration there are at least these two sides: one concerned with making something apparent and the other with objection. Several other languages have come to the same conclusion. This seems to make perfect sense: one could argue that in order to protest one needs to make something clear. By the same token the need to exhibit is an act against oblivion, a resistance to emptiness; that art and death exist at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Beware of Strangers As children, they teach us To beware of strangers, To refrain from approaching them. As we grow older we learn That no one is stranger than those We thought we’d known all our lives. As we grow older we learn That a stranger may carry more empathy, And may understand us more deeply. Even feelings of affection from a stranger May be more sincere. And so I ask: can humanity and the strangeness be synonymous? Could we say: I am a stranger; therefore I am? Can we truly feel alive Without strange things Strange encounters without strangers reminding us that our hearts and minds are still beating? They teach us to avoid strangers, And life teaches us that human awareness can only be borne out Of the dagger of strangeness… That life is tasteless When we don’t mix it with strangers… That familiarity is opposed to life! And thus, I loudly declare: A stranger I was born. A stranger I wish to remain! And I ask that you issue my death certificate The day I become familiar. [Original poem published in Arabic on October 29 at ahewar.org]

Are you Afraid of Sadness?" In an old interview with a famous and talented Iraqi actress, the interviewer asked her: “Why are you afraid of sadness?” The actress responded: “I am afraid of it because it quickly takes you to a place from which you can never return.” And exactly as she was answering, an insightful viewer could notice a sadness on her face indicating that the famous and talented actress herself wasn’t really present in the interview for sadness had long taken her with no return… [Original poem published in Arabic on November 19, 2023 at ahewar.org]

Within twenty-five years of the prophet Muhammad's death in 632, they had conquered all of the Fertile Crescent and Persia, and thrust into Armenia and Azerbaijan. Their lightning advance was even more penetrating towards the west: Egypt fell in 641 and the rest of North Africa as far as Tunisia in the next decade. Two generations later, by 712, the Arabic language had become the medium of worship and government in a continuous band of conquered territories from Toledo and Tangier in the west to Samarkand and Sind in the east. No one has ever explained clearly how or why the Arabs could do this.

Muslim fundamentalists have toppled governments and either assassinated or threatened the enemies of Islam with the death penalty. Similarly, Jewish fundamentalists have settled in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with the avowed intention of driving out the Arab inhabitants, using force if necessary. Thus they believe that they are paving a way for the advent of the Messiah, which is at hand. In all its forms, fundamentalism is a fiercely reductive faith. Thus Rabbi Meir Kahane, the most extreme member of Israel’s Far Right until his assassination in New York in 1990: There

They say the world will end soon. They say that the nuclear weapons made, Due to fearing 'the other', Has become a curse, a plague, a scourge On those who made them Even more than those they were made to scare... And I wonder: Will the nuclear weapons be the cause of world’s end? Or will world’s end be caused by humanity’s fear, complicity, and submission? And if what they say is true, Before the world ends and before I die, I wish to drink one last cup of cardamom-flavored tea Taste one last fig, peach, or apricot, Smell a quince, Dip one last piece of bread In Palestinian thyme and olive oil… Before the world ends, I wish to smell a few pine needles, To breathe the smell of the first rain shower After a long, hot, and dry summer… Before the world ends and before I die, I wish to read one more book Out of the thousands of books that I still want to read… Before the world ends and before I die, I ask for one more spring To smell bunches of Iraqi narcissus flowers. I want to live one more autumn, To enjoy the magical colors Of the dying leaves on the trees As they challenge death with beauty Right before falling on the grounds of indifference… But my biggest wish before I die is For my death not to be the end of the world… [Original poem published in Arabic on October 13 at ahewar.org]

Like the Khawarij, Wahhab declared all Muslims who disagreed with him to be unbelievers who could be lawfully killed as heretics and apostates. In 1744 Wahhab entered into an alliance with an Arab chieftain, Muhammad ibn Saud, and together they set out on jihad against those enemies, fighting against the Ottoman authorities, who Wahhab believed had lost all legitimacy by departing from the tenets of Islam. Not long after Wahhab’s death in 1792, the Wahhabis captured the Two Holy Places of Mecca and Medina and after that gradually expanded their domains until finally, in 1932, the Wahhabi sheikh ibn Saud captured Riyadh and established the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The years between Roger Bacon’s birth, in 1220, and Uthred’s death, in 1370, are considered the final flowering of the Middle Ages. They were followed by a longer, grimmer period in Europe, during which the machinery for rooting out heresy defeated enlightened discourse almost completely. The early condemnation of works by William Ockham, Johannes Eckehart, the spiritual Franciscans, and Dante signaled the start of a breakdown in the integrity of Western thought. During this Great Interruption, xenophobia replaced curiosity, interest in Islam and the classics withered, and Muslim thought was anathematized or ignored. Fifty years later, it was no longer wise to learn Arabic, Hebrew, or even Greek.

The evangelist must not depend on foreign support other than an occasional supply of beads and calico; coffee is indigenous, and so is sugar-cane. When detained by ulcerated feet in Manyuema I made sugar by pounding the cane in the common wooden mortar of the country, squeezing out the juice very hard and boiling it till thick; the defect it had was a latent acidity, for which I had no lime, and it soon all fermented. I saw sugar afterwards at Ujiji made in the same way, and that kept for months. Wheat and rice are cultivated by the Arabs in all this upland region; the only thing a missionary needs in order to secure an abundant supply is to follow the Arab advice as to the proper season for sowing. Pomegranates,

There is an old Arabic story about a man who hears Death is coming for him, so he sneaks away to Samarra. And when he gets there, he finds Death in the market, and Death says, “You know, I just felt like going on vacation to Samarra. I was going to skip you today, but how lucky you showed up to find me!” And the man is taken after all. Arthur Less has traveled halfway around the world in a cat’s cradle of junkets, changing flights and fleeing from a sandstorm into the Atlas Mountains like someone erasing his trail or outfoxing a hunter—and yet Time has been waiting here all along. In a snowy alpine resort. With cuckoos. Of course Time would turn out to be Swiss. He tosses back the champagne. He thinks: Hard to feel bad for a middle-aged white man.

Imam al-Qarāfī differentiates between the hope inherent in the Arabic word rajā’ and the hope implied by taṭwīl al-’amal. The Qur’an praises one who hopes for God and meeting Him in the Hereafter: “Say [O Muḥammad], ‘I am but a man like yourselves, but to whom it is revealed that your God is but one God. So whoever hopes to meet his Lord, let him do righteous deeds and never associate anyone with the worship of his Lord’” (QUR’AN , 18:110). A famous hadith narrated from ʿĀ’ishah relates that the Prophet said, “Whoever loves to meet God is one whom God also loves to meet.” And ʿĀ’ishah asked, “O Messenger of God, what about disliking death?” He replied, “It is natural to dislike death, but ultimately meeting God is something the believer seeks and looks forward to.” This kind of hope is known as rajā’. It is hope coupled with sincere effort to achieve what one hopes for.

America is a place of opportunity. It’s people-friendly! Very much so, compared to the Muslim countries in the world. People looking for better lives flock to America because we as a society do not mutilate young girls' genitals, do not cut off people’s hands for stealing. We do not stone people to death for committing adultery. We do not rape women and men for speaking up against our government. We do not forbid people to go to school and to learn because of their gender. We assume people are innocent until proven guilty. We give people the freedom to criticize our government and even burn our flag as an expression of speech. This is but a partial list of why America is superior in culture and values to many other countries in the world. This type of culture also thrives in Israel, the only Western-style nation in the Middle East, one that Arabs despise, feel threatened by, and vow to destroy.

There are many turning points in the Middle East’s modern history that could explain how we ended up in these depths of despair. Some people will identify the end of the Ottoman Empire and the fall of the last Islamic caliphate after World War I as the moment when the Muslim world lost its way; or they will see the creation of Israel in 1948 and the defeat of the Arabs in the subsequent Six-Day War of 1967 as the first fissure in the collective Arab psyche. Others will skip directly to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and point to the aftermath as the final paroxysm of conflicts dating back millennia: Sunnis and Shias killing each other, Saudi Arabia and Iran locked in a fight to the death. They will insist that both the killings and the rivalry are inevitable and eternal. Except for the “inevitable and eternal” part, none of these explanations is wrong, but none, on its own, paints a complete picture.

Looking at a situation like the Israel-Palestine conflict, Americans are likely to react with puzzlement when they see ever more violent and provocative acts that target innocent civilians. We are tempted to ask: do the terrorists not realize that they will enrage the Israelis, and drive them to new acts of repression? The answer of course is that they know this very well, and this is exactly what they want. From our normal point of view, this seems incomprehensible. If we are doing something wrong, we do not want to invite the police to come in and try and stop us, especially if repression will result in the deaths or imprisonment of many of our followers. In a terrorist war, however, repression is often valuable because it escalates the growing war, and forces people to choose between the government and the terrorists. The terror/repression cycle makes it virtually impossible for anyone to remain a moderate. By increasing polarization within a society, terrorism makes the continuation of the existing order impossible. Once again, let us take the suicide bombing example. After each new incident, Israeli authorities tightened restrictions on Palestinian communities, arrested new suspects, and undertook retaliatory strikes. As the crisis escalated, they occupied or reoccupied Palestinian cities, destroying Palestinian infrastructure. The result, naturally, was massive Palestinian hostility and anger, which made further attacks more likely in the future. The violence made it more difficult for moderate leaders on both sides to negotiate. In the long term, the continuing confrontation makes it more likely that ever more extreme leaders will be chosen on each side, pledged not to negotiate with the enemy. The process of polarization is all the more probably when terrorists deliberately choose targets that they know will cause outrage and revulsion, such as attacks on cherished national symbols, on civilians, and even children. We can also think of this in individual terms. Imagine an ordinary Palestinian Arab who has little interest in politics and who disapproves of terrorist violence. However, after a suicide bombing, he finds that he is subject to all kinds of official repression, as the police and army hold him for long periods at security checkpoints, search his home for weapons, and perhaps arrest or interrogate him as a possible suspect. That process has the effect of making him see himself in more nationalistic (or Islamic) terms, stirs his hostility to the Israeli regime, and gives him a new sympathy for the militant or terrorist cause. The Israeli response to terrorism is also valuable for the terrorists in global publicity terms, since the international media attack Israel for its repression of civilians. Hamas military commander Salah Sh’hadeh, quoted earlier, was killed in an Israeli raid on Gaza in 2002, an act which by any normal standards of warfare would represent a major Israeli victory. In this case though, the killing provoked ferocious criticism of Israel by the U.S. and western Europe, and made Israel’s diplomatic situation much more difficult. In short, a terrorist attack itself may or may not attract widespread publicity, but the official response to it very likely will. In saying this, I am not suggesting that governments should not respond to terrorism, or that retaliation is in any sense morally comparable to the original attacks. Many historical examples show that terrorism can be uprooted and defeated, and military action is often an essential part of the official response. But terrorism operates on a logic quite different from that of most conventional politics and law enforcement, and concepts like defeat and victory must be understood quite differently from in a regular war.

What we have here is a war—the war of matter and spirit. In the classical era, spirit was in harmony with matter. Matter used to condense spirit. What was unseen—the ghost of Hamlet’s father—was seen—in the conscience of the king. The spirit was trapped in the matter of theater. The theater made the unseen, seen. In the Romantic era, spirit overwhelms matter. The glass of champagne can’t contain the bubbles. But never in the history of humanity has spirit been at war with matter. And that is what we have today. The war of banks and religion. It’s what I wrote in Prayers of the Dawn, that in New York City, banks tower over cathedrals. Banks are the temples of America. This is a holy war. Our economy is our religion. When I came back to midtown a week after the attack—I mourned—but not in a personal way—it was a cosmic mourning—something that I could not specify because I didn’t know any of the dead. I felt grief without knowing its origin. Maybe it was the grief of being an immigrant and of not having roots. Not being able to participate in the whole affair as a family member but as a foreigner, as a stranger—estranged in myself and confused—I saw the windows of Bergdorf and Saks—what a theater of the unexpected—my mother would have cried—there were only black curtains, black drapes—showing the mourning of the stores—no mannequins, just veils—black veils. When the mannequins appeared again weeks later—none of them had blond hair. I don’t know if it was because of the mourning rituals or whether the mannequins were afraid to be blond—targets of terrorists. Even they didn’t want to look American. They were out of fashion after the Twin Towers fell. To the point, that even though I had just dyed my hair blond because I was writing Hamlet and Hamlet is blond, I went back to my coiffeur immediately and told him—dye my hair black. It was a matter of life and death, why look like an American. When naturally I look like an Arab and walk like an Egyptian.

Indeed, ridiculously and violently, Trump administration of the United States has blown down all the rules and principles of the United Nations Security Council and its incredibility, which nations of the world had established and decided unanimously and consistently on the failure of the League of Nations for the world peace and security in a fair, and equal way. Trump's Middle East Plan, executes only the humiliation of itself; whereas, self-determination of the Palestinian nation will stay definitely with its all dimensions regardless of some Ali Babas' betrayal and treachery of slavery-minded Arabs to the Palestinian cause. One may consider such a plan as a Bare Political Mafia-ism that will result in a collapse of civilized-morality, equality, honesty, and transparent justice in the context and concept of Western and American own perspectives and values. Palestinians boldly speak; however, civilized societies cowardly stay silent. It is a sensitive and shameful matter, tragedy, and the death of humanity and human rights.

For instance, there's a college in northern California called Chico State, which is where guys like Reagan and Shultz [Reagan's Secretary of State] send their kids so they won't be infected by "lefties" at Berkeley. The place is right in the middle of four hundred miles of cornfields, or whatever it is they grow out there, a million miles from nowhere, and when you fly in you land at an airport that's about half the size of a house. Well, when I landed there, a student and a faculty member who were like the two local radicals at the school came out to meet me. And as we were walking to the car, I noticed we had to go a pretty long distance, because the airport was all surrounded with yellow police tape. So I asked these guys, "What's going on, are they rebuilding the landing strip or something?" You know what they said? "No, that's to protect the airport from Arab terrorists." I said, "Arab terrorists in northern California?" But they thought so. And when I got into the town, everybody was walking around in army fatigues and wearing yellow ribbons, saying "If Saddam comes, we're going to fight to the death," and so on.

Statement on Hamas (October 10th, 2023) When Israel strikes, it's "national security" - when Palestine strikes back, it's "terrorism". Just like over two hundred years ago when native americans resisted their homeland being stolen, it was called "Indian Attack". Or like over a hundred years ago when Indian soldiers in the British Army revolted against the empire, in defense of their homeland, it was called "Sepoy Mutiny". The narrative never changes - when the colonizer terrorizes the world, it's given glorious sounding names like "exploration" and "conquest", but if the oppressed so much as utters a word in resistance, it is branded as attack, mutiny and terrorism - so that, the real terrorists can keep on colonizing as the self-appointed ruler of land, life and morality, without ever being held accountable for violating the rights of what they deem second rate lifeforms, such as the arabs, indians, latinos and so on. After all this, some apes will still only be interested in one stupid question. Do I support Hamas? To which I say this. Until you've spent a lifetime under an oppressive regime, you are not qualified to ask that question. An ape can ask anything its puny brain fancies, but it's up to the human to decide whether the ape is worthy of a response. What do you think, by the way - colonizers can just keep coming as they please, to wipe their filthy feet on us like doormat, and we should do nothing - just stay quiet! For creatures who call themselves civilized, you guys have a weird sense of morality. Yet all these might not get through your thick binary skull, so let me put it to you bluntly. I don't stand with Hamas, I am Hamas, just like, I don't stand with Ukraine, I am Ukraine. Russia stops fighting, war ends - Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends. Israel ends invasion, war ends - Palestine ends resistance, Palestine ends. However, I do have one problem here. Why do civilians have to die, if that is indeed the case - which I have no way of confirming, because news reports are not like reputed scientific data, that a scientist can naively trust. During humankind's gravest conflicts news outlets have always peddled a narrative benefiting the occupier and demonizing the resistance, either consciously or subconsciously. So never go by news reports, particularly on exception circumstances like this. No matter the cause, no civilian must die, that is my one unimpeachable law. But the hard and horrific fact of the matter is, only the occupier can put an end to the death and destruction peacefully - the resistance does not have that luxury.

They say the world will end soon. They say that the nuclear weapons made, Due to fearing ‘the other’, Have become a curse, a plague, a scourge On those who made them Even more than those they were made to scare... And I wonder: Will the nuclear weapons be the cause of the world’s end? Or will the world’s end be caused by humanity’s fear, complicity, and submission? And if what they say is true, Before the world ends and before I die, I wish to drink one last cup of cardamom-flavored tea Taste one last fig, peach, or apricot, Smell a quince, Dip one last piece of bread In Palestinian thyme and olive oil… Before the world ends, I wish to smell a few pine needles, To breathe the smell of the first rain shower After a long, hot, and dry summer… Before the world ends and before I die, I wish to read one more book Out of the thousands of books that I still want to read… Before the world ends and before I die, I ask for one more spring To smell bunches of Iraqi narcissus flowers. I want to live one more autumn, To enjoy the magical colors Of the dying leaves on the trees As they challenge death with beauty Right before falling on the grounds of indifference… But my biggest wish before I die is For my death not to be the end of the world… [Original poem published in Arabic by ahewar.org on October 13, 2022]

Constantine soon began to renege on the promise of religious freedom as far as Jews were concerned. In 315, he issued a new edict, forbidding Jews—and only Jews—from proselytizing. Much later in the fourth century, however, Judaism demonstrated its continuing appeal for outsiders by attracting large numbers of Arabs, with whom the Jews had generally lived in amity throughout the early Diaspora, in Himyar (now Yemen). The Arab converts to Judaism proved just as intolerant of Christians as Christians were proving to be of Jews in late antiquity, and expended a fair amount of effort in the fifth century trying to wipe out the Christians among them. In the end, around 525, the Arab Jews of Himyar were vanquished when a much larger force of Ethiopian Christian troops crossed the Red Sea to attack them. (Today a tiny remnant of those Arab-descended Jews—no more than a few hundred—still live in a Yemen descending into chaos as militant Shia Houthi rebels—whose slogan is “Death to America, Death to Israel, Damnation to the Jews”—have seized power. The United States and Britain, which tried to get the remaining Jews out of Yemen, both closed their embassies as a result of escalating violence in 2015. Suleiman Jacob, the unofficial rabbi of a community of just fifty-five Jews in the capital of Raida, said in a poignant interview, “There isn’t a single one of us here who doesn’t want to leave. Soon there will be no Jews in Yemen, inshallah.”8)

Hartung tells of a horrifying study by the Israeli psychologist George Tamarin. Tamarin presented to more than a thousand Israeli schoolchildren, aged between eight and fourteen, the account of the battle of Jericho in the book of Joshua:   Joshua said to the people, ‘Shout; for the LORD has given you the city. And the city and all that is within it shall be devoted to the LORD for destruction . . . But all silver and gold, and vessels of bronze and iron, are sacred to the LORD; they shall go into the treasury of the LORD.’ . . . Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword . . . And they burned the city with fire, and all within it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.   Tamarin then asked the children a simple moral question: ‘Do you think Joshua and the Israelites acted rightly or not?’ They had to choose between A (total approval), B (partial approval) and C (total disapproval). The results were polarized: 66 per cent gave total approval and 26 per cent total disapproval, with rather fewer (8 per cent) in the middle with partial approval. Here are three typical answers from the total approval (A) group:   In my opinion Joshua and the Sons of Israel acted well, and here are the reasons: God promised them this land, and gave them permission to conquer. If they would not have acted in this manner or killed anyone, then there would be the danger that the Sons of Israel would have assimilated among the Goyim.   In my opinion Joshua was right when he did it, one reason being that God commanded him to exterminate the people so that the tribes of Israel will not be able to assimilate amongst them and learn their bad ways.   Joshua did good because the people who inhabited the land were of a different religion, and when Joshua killed them he wiped their religion from the earth.   The justification for the genocidal massacre by Joshua is religious in every case. Even those in category C, who gave total disapproval, did so, in some cases, for backhanded religious reasons. One girl, for example, disapproved of Joshua’s conquering Jericho because, in order to do so, he had to enter it:   I think it is bad, since the Arabs are impure and if one enters an impure land one will also become impure and share their curse.   Two others who totally disapproved did so because Joshua destroyed everything, including animals and property, instead of keeping some as spoil for the Israelites:   I think Joshua did not act well, as they could have spared the animals for themselves.   I think Joshua did not act well, as he could have left the property of Jericho; if he had not destroyed the property it would have belonged to the Israelites.   Once again the sage Maimonides, often cited for his scholarly wisdom, is in no doubt where he stands on this issue: ‘It is a positive commandment to destroy the seven nations, as it is said: Thou shalt utterly destroy them. If one does not put to death any of them that falls into one’s power, one transgresses a negative commandment, as it is said: Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth!

Everything has already been caught, until my death, in an icefloe of being: my trembling when a piece of rough trade asks me to brown him (I discover that his desire is his trembling) during a Carnival night; at twilight, the view from a sand dune of Arab warriors surrendering to French generals; the back of my hand placed on a soldier's basket, but especially the sly way in which the soldier looked at it; suddenly I see the ocean between two houses in Biarritz; I am escaping from the reformatory, taking tiny steps, frightened not at the idea of being caught but of being the prey of freedom; straddling the enormous prick of a blond legionnaire, I am carried twenty yards along the ramparts; not the handsome football player, nor his foot, nor his shoe, but the ball, then ceasing to be the ball and becoming the “kick-off,” and I cease being that to become the idea that goes from the foot to the ball; in a cell, unknown thieves call me Jean; when at night I walk barefoot in my sandals across fields of snow at the Austrian border, I shall not flinch, but then, I say to myself, this painful moment must concur with the beauty of my life, I refuse to let this moment and all the others be waste matter; using their suffering, I project myself to the mind's heaven. Some negroes are giving me food on the Bordeaux docks; a distinguished poet raises my hands to his forehead; a German soldier is killed in the Russian snows and his brother writes to inform me; a boy from Toulouse helps me ransack the rooms of the commissioned and non-commissioned officers of my regiment in Brest: he dies in prison; I am talking of someone–and while doing so, the time to smell roses, to hear one evening in prison the gang bound for the penal colony singing, to fall in love with a white-gloved acrobat–dead since the beginning of time, that is, fixed, for I refuse to live for any other end than the very one which I found to contain the first misfortune: that my life must be a legend, in other words, legible, and the reading of it must give birth to a certain new emotion which I call poetry. I am no longer anything, only a pretext.

Even more threatening to Christian assumptions than the Qur’an’s flat denial that Jesus had been crucified, however, was the imperious, not to say terrifying, tone of authority with which it did so. Very little in either the Old or the New Testament could compare. For all the reverence with which Christians regarded their scripture, and for all that they believed it illumined by the flame of the Holy Spirit, they perfectly accepted that most of it, including the Gospels themselves, had been authored by mortals. Only the covenant on the tablets of stone, given to Moses amid fire and smoke on the summit of Sinai, ‘and written with the finger of God’,13 owed nothing to human mediation. Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that Moses, of all the figures in the Old and New Testaments, should have featured most prominently in the Qur’an. He was mentioned 137 times in all. Many of the words attributed to him had served as a direct inspiration to Muhammad’s own followers. ‘My people! Enter the Holy Land which God has prescribed for you!’14 The Arab conquerors, in the first decades of their empire, had pointedly referred to themselves as muhajirun: ‘those who have undertaken an exodus’. A hundred years on from Muhammad’s death, when the first attempts were made by Muslim scholars to write his biography, the model that they instinctively reached for was that of Moses. The age at which the Prophet had received his first revelation from God; the flight of his followers from a land of idols; the way in which—directly contradicting the news brought to Carthage in 634—he was said to have died before entering the Holy Land: all these elements echoed the life of the Jews’ most God-favoured prophet.15 So brilliantly, indeed, did Muslim biographers paint from the palette of traditions told about Moses that the fading outlines of the historical Muhammad were quite lost beneath their brushstrokes. Last and most blessed of the prophets sent by God to set humanity on the straight path, there was only the one predecessor to whom he could properly be compared. ‘There has come to him the greatest Law that came to Moses; surely he is the prophet of this people.’16

Another obstacle was the stubbornness of the countries the pipeline had to cross, particularly Syria, all of which were demanding what seemed to be exorbitant transit fees. It was also the time when the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel were aggravating American relations with the Arab countries. But the emergence of a Jewish state, along with the American recognition that followed, threatened more than transit rights for the pipeline. Ibn Saud was as outspoken and adamant against Zionism and Israel as any Arab leader. He said that Jews had been the enemies of Arabs since the seventh century. American support of a Jewish state, he told Truman, would be a death blow to American interests in the Arab world, and should a Jewish state come into existence, the Arabs “will lay siege to it until it dies of famine.” When Ibn Saud paid a visit to Aramco’s Dhahran headquarters in 1947, he praised the oranges he was served but then pointedly asked if they were from Palestine—that is, from a Jewish kibbutz. He was reassured; the oranges were from California. In his opposition to a Jewish state, Ibn Saud held what a British official called a “trump card”: He could punish the United States by canceling the Aramco concession. That possibility greatly alarmed not only the interested companies, but also, of course, the U.S. State and Defense departments. Yet the creation of Israel had its own momentum. In 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine recommended the partition of Palestine, which was accepted by the General Assembly and by the Jewish Agency, but rejected by the Arabs. An Arab “Liberation Army” seized the Galilee and attacked the Jewish section of Jerusalem. Violence gripped Palestine. In 1948, Britain, at wit’s end, gave up its mandate and withdrew its Army and administration, plunging Palestine into anarchy. On May 14, 1948, the Jewish National Council proclaimed the state of Israel. It was recognized almost instantly by the Soviet Union, followed quickly by the United States. The Arab League launched a full-scale attack. The first Arab-Israeli war had begun. A few days after Israel’s proclamation of statehood, James Terry Duce of Aramco passed word to Secretary of State Marshall that Ibn Saud had indicated that “he may be compelled, in certain circumstances, to apply sanctions against the American oil concessions… not because of his desire to do so but because the pressure upon him of Arab public opinion was so great that he could no longer resist it.” A hurriedly done State Department study, however, found that, despite the large reserves, the Middle East, excluding Iran, provided only 6 percent of free world oil supplies and that such a cut in consumption of that oil “could be achieved without substantial hardship to any group of consumers.

Trust it little. Fear it much. Man at sea is but a worm on a bit of wood, now engulfed, now scared to death. —AMRU BIN AL-’AS, THE ARAB CONQUEROR OF EGYPT, 640 A.D.

Until his death in 1460, Prince Henry sponsored Atlantic voyages to West Africa by the Portuguese, to circumvent Islamic slave traders, and in doing so created a different sort of slavery than had existed before. Premodern Islamic slave traders, like their Christian counterparts in premodern Italy, were not pursuing racist policies—they were enslaving what we now consider to be Africans, Arabs, and Europeans alike.

The Cats in the City Location: an Arab city. Time: the age of defeat. The twenty-first century. General atmosphere: “fancy” neighborhoods. Expensive houses painted in tombstone colors. Beautiful and well-maintained gardens. Flowers that no one dares to smell. Imported cars. Imported devices. Imported clothes. Imported foods. Endless consumer shops for anything and everything. Between every other restaurant, there are shops selling cosmetics and souvenirs. Between every other consumer market, There is a worship place. All consumer shops are built skillfully On the scab of the same old wound; A wound that can flood the city with blood and death With the slightest fingernail scratch. As I walk farther from the city, The consumer shops vanish. The lights are suddenly dimmed. The cheering and the hustle and bustle of the consumers go silent. I see myself in total darkness. I am alone hearing nothing but the sounds of my footsteps, And the meows of hungry stray street cats, Covered with the ashes of daily existence. A thin and hungry cat approaches me, She meows in despair and starvation, Begging me for her bite of the day (or the week?) I throw her a small piece of my sandwich. She picks it up and runs away To celebrate her temporary gains! She leaves me alone wondering in darkness: What reflects the reality of this city more The 'fancy' neighborhoods I saw earlier, Or the starving cats in the darkness? June 8, 2014

~ Allah determined Arabic to be the language of Islam. ~ A Muslim must perform the five daily prayers in Arabic to be accepted by Allah. ~ The Quran is written in ancient Arabic, and Muslims believe that its meaning transcends translation. ~ After death every Muslim must answer the angel’s questions in Arabic as a test.

The young Moroccan-Dutch youth downloading English translations of Arabic texts from the Internet is also looking for a universal cause, severed from cultural and tribal specificities. The promised purity of modern Islamism, which is after all a revolutionary creed, has been disconnected from cultural tradition. That is why it appeals to those who feel displaced, in the suburbs of Paris no less than in Amsterdam. They are stuck between cultures they find equally alienating. The war between Ellian’s Enlightenment and Bouyeri’s jihad is not a straightforward clash between culture and universalism, but between two different visions of the universal, one radically secular, the other radically religious.

A Quotation of the Foreword of Sheikh Hasan ‘Abdul-Bassir ‘Arafah (General Manager of the Islamic Da‘wah, the Ministry of Awqaf of Egypt in Alexandria): For the present, there is a ferocious attack on our Islamic heritage. Modernity Thoughts and radical groups still misunderstand and impugn the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. Besides, to offend the companions of the Prophet ﷺ. The Prophet ﷺ had witnessed to them with fairness. They were like the stars in the heavens. The book’s contents are simple but not easy, written down by Eng.: Ahmad ElYamany. The author was affected by his father’s upbringing; I mean that his father educated him according to the Thought of Al-Azhar Ash-Sharif (1). His father did his best upon a pulpit of Masjid(s) for standing up for the Sunnah until his death. Now, the author does follow the example of his father. He did write down this book to explain The Study of Tradition Terminology (2) for ordinary people in simple words. Besides, he does show how the previous Imams of the ‘Ummah took care of The Study of Tradition Terminology. This book geared-towards an obstacle against those who make a ferocious attack on the Sunnah and the heritage. __________________ (1) The Thought of Al-Azhar Ash-Sharif: I do mean the Sunni Madhab. The Sunni Madhab is a term generally applied to the large sect of Muslims, which consists of: • Regarding Fiqh: who follows one of these authorised Madhabs: - Madhab of Imam Abu Hanifah (مذهب أبو حنيفة), Madhab of Imam Malik (مذهب مالك), Madhab of Imam Ash-Shafi‘i (مذهب الشافعي), or Madhab of Imam Ahmad son of Hanbal (مذهب أحمد بن حنبل). • Regarding Creed: who follows one of these authorised Theologies: - The Ash‘arism Theology (Ash‘ariyah: Arabic المدرسة الأشعرية) or The Maturidism Theology (Maturidiyah: Arabic: المدرسة الماتُريدية). • Regarding Sufism: who follows one of any authorised Orders or Schools (Tariqah: Arabic: الطريقة الصوفية) of Sufism, such: - Al-Ghazzaliyah (الغزَّالية), Al-Qadiriyah (القادرية), Ash-Shazliyah (الشاذلية), Ar-Rifa‘iyah (الرفاعية), and so on. (2) The Study of Tradition Terminology: (Arabic: علم مصطلح الحديث), pronounced in the Roman Transliteration: ‘Ilm Mustalah Al-Hadith. The word Al-Hadith or Hadith means Communication or Narration. In the Islamic context, it has come to denote the record of what the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, said, did, or tacitly approved.

The fact that NSO sold Pegasus in 2017 to the Saudis barely registered any outrage until the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in December 2018. Israel has a long covert history of relations with Saudi Arabia, providing intelligence about threats to its royal family from as early as the 1970s.49 Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who became the country’s spy chief, spent decades meeting Israeli and Jewish leaders as well as Mossad chiefs.50 NSO was immediately blamed for being an accessory to the Khashoggi killing, giving the accused ring leader bin Salman and his team the ability to track Khashoggi’s movements before his death. NSO denied any responsibility but nonetheless reportedly briefly canceled its contract with the Kingdom. NSO’s denials of any complicity in the murder were bogus, with evidence emerging that his wife, fiancé, and associates had their phones compromised by Pegasus both before his death and in the days after, including by the United Arab Emirates, a close ally of Saudi Arabia that often tracks dissidents for its friend. Today, both Khashoggi’s wife and fiancé, Hanan Elatr and Hatice Cengiz, live in fear for their lives.51

At times … I wish I could meet in a duel the man who killed my father and razed our home, expelling me into a narrow country. And if he killed me, I’d rest at last, and if I were ready— I would take my revenge! * But if it came to light, when my rival appeared, that he had a mother waiting for him, or a father who’d put his right hand over the heart’s place in his chest whenever his son was late even by just a quarter-hour for a meeting they’d set— then I would not kill him, even if I could. * Likewise … I would not murder him if it were soon made clear that he had a brother or sisters who loved him and constantly longed to see him. Or if he had a wife to greet him and children who couldn’t bear his absence and whom his gifts would thrill. Or if he had friends or companions, neighbors he knew or allies from prison or a hospital room, or classmates from his school … asking about him and sending him regards. * But if he turned out to be on his own— cut off like a branch from a tree— without a mother or father, with neither a brother nor sister, wifeless, without a child, and without kin or neighbors or friends, colleagues or companions, then I’d add not a thing to his pain within that aloneness— not the torment of death, and not the sorrow of passing away. Instead I’d be content to ignore him when I passed him by on the street—as I convinced myself that paying him no attention in itself was a kind of revenge.

On the Jewish side, the war years passed in the shadow of the White Paper, with its restrictions on immigration, a ban on most land purchases, and the prospect of an independent state in which the Jews would become a permanent minority. David Ben-Gurion famously pledged to ‘fight the White Paper as if there were no war and to fight the war as if there were no White Paper’. He also declared that just as the First World War had given birth to the Balfour Declaration, this new conflict should give the Jews their own state. Even before news of mass killings of Jews began to filter out of Nazi-occupied Europe, facilitating illegal immigration had become a preoccupation for Zionist institutions. Running the British blockade became a national mission. In November 1940, a rickety ship called the Patria sank in Haifa harbour after Haganah operatives miscalculated the force of a bomb they had planted. The intention had been to cripple the vessel and prevent the deportation of its Jewish passengers, but in the event three hundred drowned. Far worse was to come. In January 1942 the Wannsee Conference in Berlin secretly drew up operational plans for Hitler’s ‘final solution’. In February, an old cattle transport called the Struma was hit by a mine or torpedo and sank in the Black Sea, where it had been sent by the Turkish authorities after the British refused to transfer its Romanian Jewish refugees to Palestine. This time the death toll was 768, a grim dramatization of the plight of Jews fleeing for their lives and the impossibility of relying on British goodwill. ‘The Zionists,’ said Moshe Shertok, ‘do not mean to exploit the horrible tragedy of the Jews of Europe but they cannot refrain from emphasising the fact that events have totally proven the Zionist position on the solution of the Jewish problem. Zionism predicted the Holocaust decades ago.

Britain promised the Arabs that they would not support the establishment of a Jewish state in the region and helped curb migration (which wound up being a death sentence for many Jews who were trapped in Europe).

the six Gulf Cooperation countries comprising Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Oman had granted asylum to a grand total of zero Syrian refugees by 2016.

We are still slaves, facing colonialists and their pawns, direct or indirect, in the package of so-called democracies. - The world is such a train that has engines at both ends, the USA drives the front side while Russia operates the backside, and Western Europe performs as a ticket collector of that endless journey towards the mirage; all other states are passengers of that - The so-called Wars on terror, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or such other victimized Muslim States by the USA, West, Russia, Israel, and pawn leaders of the Muslim world, were for oligopoly, duopoly interests to monopolize and that resulted in thousands of deaths. The oppressor Arab leaders supported the destruction of Iraq, Libya, Yemen with all national resources, and Pakistan criminally favoured and fought in Afghanistan against those that its institutions created to defeat the former Soviet Union to obey and fulfil the desire of the USA; whereas, India benefited and achieved evil goals from legalized terror with the approval of the United Nations. The conclusion of those wars is that; India and Pakistan fooled the USA and West Europe for dollars, and the USA lied to its people, and Russia enjoyed the tragedies and consequences of the unnecessary wars; sure, history will never justify that and forgive criminals and such warmongers.

The so-called Wars on terror, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or such other victimized Muslim States by the USA, West, Russia, Israel, and pawn leaders of the Muslim world, were for oligopoly, duopoly interests to monopolize and that resulted in thousands of deaths. The oppressor Arab leaders supported the destruction of Iraq, Libya, Yemen with all national resources, and Pakistan criminally favoured and fought in Afghanistan against those that its institutions created to defeat the former Soviet Union to obey and fulfil the desire of the USA; whereas, India benefited and achieved evil goals from legalized terror with the approval of the United Nations. The conclusion of those wars is that; India and Pakistan fooled the USA and West Europe for dollars, and the USA lied to its people, and Russia enjoyed the tragedies and consequences of the unnecessary wars; sure, history will never justify that and forgive criminals and such warmongers.

Raymond Lull, was the first Westerner to devise and carry out a full-fledged mission strategy among Muslims. Lull followed his own advice that Europeans learn Arabic in order to communicate the gospel in Islamic regions. His life ended during a fourth mission trip to Muslims, when again his actions matched his words. “Missionaries will convert the world by preaching, but also through the shedding of tears and blood and with great labour, and through a bitter death.”[48]

پروژه‌های سیاسی موجود در دنیا –نئولیبرالیسم و مذهب‌گرایی– نمی‌توانند مشکلات حال حاضر را حل کنند. به پروژه‌ی دیگری نیاز است. جهان دیگری را باید تصور کرد. رؤیای دیگری را باید در سر پروراند تا ما را به سوی آینده پیش ببرد

There are definitely positive aspects to British and French colonialism that are rarely mentioned. The British never imposed their religion and culture under penalty of death, and bottom line, their positives were often greater than their negatives. But ironically, Arabs until today blame their victimization on colonial powers and are unwilling to

There are definitely positive aspects to British and French colonialism that are rarely mentioned. The British never imposed their religion and culture under penalty of death, and bottom line, their positives were often greater than their negatives. But ironically, Arabs until today blame their victimization on colonial powers and are unwilling to consider whether Islam and Sharia have anything to do with

There are definitely positive aspects to British and French colonialism that are rarely mentioned. The British never imposed their religion and culture under penalty of death, and bottom line, their positives were often greater than their negatives. But ironically, Arabs until today blame their victimization on colonial powers and are unwilling to consider whether Islam and Sharia have anything to do with it.

In 1178, the eighteen-year-old Tamara was crowned co-ruler alongside her embattled father Giorgi III, who married his other daughter Rusudan to a Komnenos prince. In the Latin west, most women in power were swiftly deposed by magnates, but influenced by the Constantinopolitan tradition of empresses, Tamara at least had a template. Queen at twenty-four on the death of her father, Tamara manoeuvred carefully to appease rebellious potentates who resented feminine power, but in 1185 she was forced to marry a Russian prince descended from Rurik, Yuri of Vladimir-Suzdal. The heyday of Rus was long gone. The Rurikovichi feuded constantly as they struggled to rule the most powerful principalities. Yuri got lucky, becoming king of Georgia, but Tamara was king of kings. She loathed the oafish Yuri, who, ‘when drunk, showed his Scythian habits; utterly debauched and depraved, he even embraced sodomitic behavour’. In 1187, she accused him of unnatural vices, divorced him and exiled him to Constantinople. Liberated from the patriarchy of clergymen and barons, she now married – unusually, for love – her attractive, intelligent cousin David Soslam, an Ossetian prince whom she had known all her life. Faced with Islamic resurgence, she formed an alliance with Saladin, then unleashed her husband David against the Turkic rulers of eastern Türkiye and western Iran. When she was challenged by a Seljuk prince, she told him, ‘You rely on gold and numerous warriors, I on God’s power.’ Her coins, in Arabic and Georgian, just read: ‘Champion of the Messiah’.

The only Hitler of Germany was one who adopted the way of atrocities and cruelties for a limited period; he was evil-minded, whereas every leader of Israel was and is characteristically similar to Hitler for several decades of victimising; despite that, they are not evil characters. The Western states eliminated Hitler, but those countries supported and perpetuated the leaders of Israel, and still, they remain on such distinctive policies; it is the worst hypocrisy in human history. Virtually, it will be a self-suicidal move of the Muslim world, especially the Arab States, as religiously, politically, morally, and principally, to recognize Israel, ignoring the Palestinians, in the presence of the United Nations resolutions. Indeed, Israel exists; however, it is an unreal reality as the concept and context of the real validity of Palestinians. Factually, recognition of Israel by the Muslim States and Arab dictators means a license of hegemony, allowing Israel to dominate the Muslim world. The Muslims of the world absolutely will never agree with it and dismiss such a move of Arab dictators. The tiny democracy of the world, Israel seems as an authority upon the United Nations since it does what it wants. Israel is not afraid nor frightened; its state is just the warmonger and the hate-sponsor within humanity. Israel is the creation of the West, supported by the West, and licensed to kill by the West; the Muslim rulers expect a fruitful solution from them; I realize it is an endless stupidity. Spirit of Palestine *** If you do not understand The international law that You constituted yourself If you do not obey and respect Your laws and resolutions We have the right to defend our land By our way, by all means, Whether you call it terrorism Or something else For us, It is the fight for freedom You cannot accept the truth We cannot accept the lies Truth always prevails We will never surrender Nor yield to the evil And genocide forces We are the spirit of Palestine Long live Palestine, Long live Palestine At every cost. Palestine Never Disappears *** They stole Palestine Our land and then our homes They threw us out At gunpoint For our determination And rights We throw the stones They trigger bullets The champions of human rights Watch that, Clapping and cheering As like it is a football match And the football referee is Israel However, Palestine will never disappear Never; never; never We will fight without fear Until we recover and have that Palestine is Crying *** Under the flames of the guns Palestine is crying The Arab world is cowardly silent, West and the rest of the world, Deliberately ignoring justice Even also they are criminally denying Whereas Palestinians are dying If there are no weapons: There will be neither terrible wars Nor criminal deaths, nor tensions Manufacture oxygen of life expectations It is a beautiful destination For all destinations I wish I could fragrance peace and love In the minds and hearts of two Generations of two real brothers. Day Of Mourning, Not Mother’s Day *** A lot of Mothers of Palestine are crying And burying their children, who became The victim of Israel’s cruelty Those mothers have no children To celebrate their Mother’s Day It is a Day of Mourning for those mothers Not Mother’s Day Oh, Palestine, cry, cry, not on Israel But on Muslims who are dead sleeping. Ahed Tamimi Of Palestine The Voice Of Freedom *** You can trigger bullets Upon those, Who stay determined You can shoot Or place under house arrest Hundreds of thousands As such Ahed Tamimi However, You cannot stop The voices, for the freedom And Self-determination You will hear In every second, minute Every hour, every day Until you understand And realize, Voices of the human rights

When will the world understand that violence never erupts inadvertently, that all violence in our times is premeditated and agreed upon by a small elite that decides in advance that any nation that rejects malls, consumption, and superficiality, must be disciplined with free death for those who resist! It is also agreed upon – and it all costs – that the minds and souls of all survivors must permanently be pierced with bullet holes! [From a poem titled "A Mall and Bullets Holes". Original poem published in Arabic on July 4, 2024 at ahewar.org]

A Mall and Bullet Holes" While walking in the city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country devastated and drained by the wars of the global elite, exactly like mine, I arrived at an intersection and noticed a huge mall on the right side… On the left side, there was an old residential building filled with bullet holes that looked like eyewitnesses to all the free death that took place here in a war that has since ended, yet its real causes and the criminals behind it are still lurking in every corner, like infected pus ready to burst at any moment of awareness… I wondered bitterly: When will the world understand that violence never erupts inadvertently, that all violence in our times is premeditated and agreed upon by a small elite that decides in advance that any nation that rejects malls, consumption, and superficiality, must be disciplined with free death for those who resist! It is also agreed upon – and it all costs – that the minds and souls of all survivors must permanently be pierced with bullet holes! In the same intersection, I observed a redhaired elderly woman with sorrowful eyes deep as bullet holes… I then saw a group of youth wearing modern clothes, like those we see in malls… The elderly woman looked at them as if wishing to tell them about all that happened here, but they didn’t notice her existence for their eyes were fixated on their phones… I painfully wondered then: Has anyone told them about what happened here? Can they distinguish the sounds of bombs from those of fireworks? Has this elderly woman, who looked broken and brokenhearted, told them about the real price she’d paid with all the holes left in her heart and her history for the sake of these malls and cheap consumer goods? [Original poem published in Arabic on July 4, 2024 at ahewar.org]

If a lot of people are suffering because of a few people, why didn’t the majority do something about it a long time ago? Why’d everyone let it get so bad?” “If you drop a lobster in a pot of boiling water,” Zyrha tells him, “it’ll thrash around for its life.” “Wouldn’t we all?” Darrion smirks. “If you drop the lobster in a pot of cool water and slowly raise the temperature, it’ll die without a struggle. It’ll get used to the incremental increases until it’s too late to know it’s dead. You asked how we got here. The temperature had been rising in the Old States for a long time. People were dying left and right without a struggle. A few leaders had control over everything: money, power, the military, health care, schools, utilities, transportation, laws, courts, and the media. They had everything. Everything except the one thing every person in power needs.” “What’s that?” Darrion asks through a strained quiver. “An enemy.” “An enemy,” he repeats. “The question became which one. There were so many to choose from.” Zyrha claps her hands and gives a sarcastic laugh. “Black people. Brown people. Asians. Mexicans. Arabs. Women. The biracial. The multiracial. Old people. Young people. Short people. The overweight, the underweight, the sick, the helpless, the homeless, the unemployed. The asexual, the bisexual, the homosexual, the transgendered. People with special needs. The neurodivergent. Pot-smokers. Immigrants. Socialists. Communists. Atheists. Jews. Muslims. Intellectuals. Influencers. Athletes. Academics. Writers. Pacifists. Celebrities.” Zyrha pauses to draw in a long breath. “They were all contrived of course. They were invented enemies designed to occupy the amygdala—that’s the brain’s fear center—so the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for rational thought and good decision-making—wouldn’t take over. Anyway, there’d been a lot of manufactured enemies, and, frankly, they’d been done to death.

Jews are painted by the brush strokes of thousands of years of persecution. Repeatedly reminding the world of the pogroms and the holocaust is both tiresome and has worn thin. But these atrocities are worth remembering. For when Arab fanatics and radical Muslims call for all Muslims to fulfill their duty to kill all Jews wherever they may be found, they are talking about each and every Jew, everywhere, and they are not joking. They are deadly serious.

In many respects, the conquests were swift and largely bloodless. Instead of the usual scenes of wanton death and destruction, the cities and towns occupied by the Arabs were treated almost gently, and seem to have welcomed the exchange of rulers. Given the disarray of both the Persian and the Byzantine armies in the region, and the absence of strong organized resistance, that makes sense. There was, in essence, no need for substantial violence.

Several market people came to salute, who knew that we had no hand in the massacre, as we are a different people from the Arabs. In going and coming they must have a march of 25 miles with loads so heavy no slave would carry them. They speak of us as "good:" the anthropologists think that to be spoken of as wicked is better. Ezekiel says that the Most High put His comeliness upon Jerusalem: if He does not impart of His goodness to me I shall never be good: if He does not put of His comeliness on me I shall never be comely in soul, but be like these Arabs in whom Satan has full sway—the god of this world having blinded their eyes.

The Arab progeny here have scanty beards, and many grow to a very great height—tall, gaunt savages; while the Muscatees have prominent nose-bridges, good beards, and are polite and hospitable. I wish I had some of the assurance possessed by others, but I am oppressed with the apprehension that after all it may turn out that I have been following the Congo; and who would risk being put into a cannibal pot, and converted into black man for it?

24th May, 1872.—Speke at Kasengé islet inadvertently made a general statement thus: "The mothers of these savage people have infinitely less affection than many savage beasts of my acquaintance. I have seen a mother bear, galled by frequent shots, obstinately meet her death by repeatedly returning under fire whilst endeavouring to rescue her young from the grasp of intruding men. But here, for a simple loin-cloth or two, human mothers eagerly exchanged their little offspring, delivering them into perpetual bondage to my Beluch soldiers."—Speke, pp. 234,5. For the sake of the little story of "a bear mother," Speke made a general assertion on a very small and exceptional foundation. Frequent inquiries among the most intelligent and far-travelled Arabs failed to find confirmation of this child-selling, except in the very rare case of a child cutting the upper front teeth before the under, and because this child is believed to be "moiko" (unlucky), and certain to bring death into the family. It is called an Arab child, and sold to the first Arab, or even left at his door. This is the only case the Arabs know of child-selling. Speke

Inside, the dwellings are clean and comfortable, and before the Arabs came bugs were unknown—as I have before observed, one may know where these people have come by the presence or absence of these nasty vermin: the human tick, which infests all Arab and Suaheli houses, is to the Manyuema unknown.

ceased to breathe. Here is a well-authenticated instance which goes far to prove the truth of an assertion made to travellers in many parts of Africa. The natives protest that one species of snake will deliberately chase and overtake his victim with lightning speed, and so dreadfully dangerous is it, both from the activity of its poison and its vicious propensities, that it is perilous to approach its quarters. Most singular to relate, an Arab came to some of the men after their arrival at Zanzibar and told them that he had just come by the Unyanyembé road, and that, whilst passing the identical spot where this disaster occurred, one of the men was attacked by the same snake, with precisely the same results; in fact, when looking for a place in which to bury him they saw the grave of Losi, and the two lie side by side.

Susi, to whom this snake is known in the Shupanga tongue as "Bubu," describes it as about twelve feet long, dark in colour, of a dirty blue under the belly, with red markings like the wattles of a cock on the head. The Arabs go so far as to say that it is known to oppose the passage of a caravan at times. Twisting its tail round a branch, it will strike one man after another in the head with fatal certainty. Their remedy is to fill a pot with boiling water, which is put on the head and carried under the tree! The snake dashes his head into this and is killed—the story is given for what it is worth.

Just as they came to the Likwa, a long string of men was seen on the opposite side filing down to the water, and being uncertain of their intentions, precautions were quickly taken to ensure the safety of the baggage. Dividing themselves into three parties, the first detachment went across to meet the strangers, carrying the Arab flag in front. Chuma headed another band at a little distance in the rear of these, whilst Susi and a few more crouched in the jungle, with the body concealed in a roughly-made hut. Their fears, however, were needless: it turned out to be a caravan bound for Fipa to hunt elephants and buy ivory and slaves. The new arrivals told them that they had come straight through Unyanyembé from Bagamoio, on the coast, and that the Doctor's death had already been reported there by natives of Fipa.

20th October, 1873.—We will here run on ahead with Chuma on his way to communicate with the new arrivals. He reached the Arab settlement without let or hindrance. Lieut. Cameron was quickly put in possession of the main facts of Dr. Livingstone's death by reading Jacob's letter, and Chuma was questioned concerning it in the presence of Dr. Dillon and Lieut. Murphy. It was a disappointment to find that the reported arrival of Mr. Oswell Livingstone was entirely erroneous; but Lieut. Cameron showed the wayworn men every kindness. Chuma

The Arabs say that the Manyuema now understand that every gunshot does not kill; the next thing they will learn will be to grapple in close quarters in the forest, where their spears will outmatch the guns in the hands of slaves, it will follow, too, that no one will be able to pass through this country; this is the usual course of Suaheli trading; it is murder and plunder, and each slave as he rises in his owner's favour is eager to show himself a mighty man of valour, by cold-blooded killing of his countrymen: if they can kill a fellow-nigger, their pride boils up. The conscience is not enlightened enough to cause uneasiness, and Islam gives less than the light of nature.

It's as though you had lost an arm or leg but still instinctively reach out to feel your missing limb or try to walk again, placing your entire weight on something that is no longer is there.

I could only liken it to the strength of a wheat stalk, which when struck by a storm, bends to the ground, but does not break. This stalk of wheat stands tall like a spear in a tempest, clinging to the earth where its roots are embedded deep, embracing the sun from which it draws life.

Compton Gage, a Spiritual breed faction who seeks to restore early days of glory through Spiritual Warfare, a holy war directed against internal and external enemies both physical and spiritual. The perspective and movement focuses on religious studies and the winning of hearts and minds (da‘wah) as a way of creating a Holy society rule by the New World Order law. From Compton Gage’s perspective, humankind must strive to disseminate and implement Allah in all areas of life by liberating the lands on planet earth from other cultures through the holy war, which is perceived as the personal duty (fard ‘ayn) of every human being. "Thus we must fight the enemies of the world through the Holy Book and uncompromising military struggle." Moreover, according to the Conflict with demonic strongholds and moral deception that require spiritual weaponry and armor perception, its enemies are not only external, but also other regimes that cooperate with the unbelievers, evildoers, or secular Arab/African/Western regimes that are considered “infidel.” Therefore, according to Compton Gage, the Holy Book religious law justifies overthrowing them.

صمت الروح صمت يصقل الحرف قبل ان اتفوه به. صمت فنجان القهوة قبل ان ارتشفه. صمت الفاجعة. هذا الصمت عندما رنّ الهاتف، ما بعد منتصف الليل وقال لي مواسياً: "لقد حاولنا وخسرناه..." صمت الهاتف عندما اغلقته وتوجهت نحو المطبخ كي اشرب كأس ماء. كأس ماء كي لا اذرف دمعة. على الشرفة يردد المذياع النعوة: "انتقل الى رحمته تعالى المأسوف على شبابه...." هذا الغريب الذي لم انس حتى الآن صوته قال بجمود: "انتقل" ولم يذكر الى اين.. قال: "المأسوف على شبابه" ونسي طفولتي.. ينعون الميت وينسون من يخلف وراءه.. كان أبي يردد: "الحياة زهرية حتّى في حزنها" فارتديت الزهر. تأتي امي ترتدي الاسود وترحل. ترتدي الاسود وتنسى الوصية.

The Sabians were allowed to build a new Temple of the Moon God, and to continue their religious rites, after the Arab General Ibn Ghanam conquered Harran in the seventh century AD. This in itself is a sign of most unusual favor, since Islamic armies normally offered "pagans" the choice of either conversion or death. Even more interesting, however, is the Sabians' encounter with the Abbasid Caliph Abu Jafar Abdullah al-Ma'mun, who passed through their city in AD 830 and reportedly quizzed them intensively on their religion. Remembering the Sabian pilgrimages to Giza, it is reasonable to wonder whether there is any connection with the fact that in AD 820, a decade before he visited Harran, it was Ma'mun who tunnelled into the Great Pyramid and opened its previously hidden passageways and chambers. Indeed, it is through "Ma'mun's Hole" that visitors still enter the monument today. Described by Gibbon as "a prince of rare learning," it seems Ma'mun's investigation was prompted by information he'd received about the Great Pyramid, specifically that it contained: 'a secret chamber with maps and tables of the celestial and terrestrial spheres. Although they were said to have been made in the remote past, they were suppposed to be of great accuracy.

In some cases we found all the villages deserted; the people had fled at our approach, in dread of repetitions of the outrages of Arab slaves. The doors were all shut: a bunch of the leaves of reeds or of green reeds placed across them, means "no entrance here." A few stray chickens wander about wailing, having hid themselves while the rest were caught and carried off into the deep forest, and the still smoking fires tell the same tale of recent flight from the slave-traders. Many have found out that I am not one of their number, so in various cases they stand up and call out loudly, "Bolongo, Bolongo!" "Friendship, Friendship!" They

The Arabs ask many questions about the Bible, and want to know how many prophets have appeared, and probably say that they believe in them all; while we believe all but reject Mohamad. It is easy to drive them into a corner by questioning, as they don't know whither the inquiries lead, and they are not offended when their knowledge is, as it were, admitted. When asked how many false prophets are known, they appeal to my knowledge, and evidently never heard of Balaam, the son of Beor, or of the 250 false prophets of Jezebel and Ahab, or of the many lying prophets referred to in the Bible.

Immediately after the Franco-German war the value of ivory increased considerably; and when we look at the prices realized on large Zanzibar tusks at the public sales, we can well understand the motive power which drove the Arab ivory hunters further and further into the country from which the chief supply was derived when Dr. Livingstone met them.

The adults as a rule came into the slave-sticks from treachery, and had never been slaves before. Very often the Arabs would promise a present of dried fish to villagers if they would act as guides to some distant point, and as soon as they were far enough away from their friends they were seized and pinned into the yoke from which there is no escape. These

During the last foray, however, the people learned that every shot does not kill, and they came up to the party with bows and arrows, and compelled the slaves to throw down their guns and powder-horns. They would have shown no mercy had Manyuema been thus in slave power; but this is a beginning of the end, which will exclude Arab traders from the country. I rested half a day, as I am still ill. I do most devoutly thank the Lord for sparing my life three times in one day. The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble, and He knows them that trust in Him.

but in the evening my people came and told me that Shereef had sold off all my goods, and Moenyegheré confirmed it by saying, "We protested, but he did not leave a single yard of calico out of 3000, nor a string of beads out of 700 lbs." This was distressing. I had made up my mind, if I could not get people at Ujiji, to wait till men should come from the coast, but to wait in beggary was what I never contemplated, and I now felt miserable. Shereef was evidently a moral idiot, for he came without shame to shake hands with me, and when I refused, assumed an air of displeasure, as having been badly treated; and afterwards came with his "Balghere," good-luck salutation, twice a day, and on leaving said, "I am going to pray," till I told him that were I an Arab, his hand and both ears would be cut off for thieving, as he knew, and I wanted no salutations from him. In my distress it was annoying to see Shereef's slaves passing from the market with all the good things that my goods had bought.

The trade is chiefly with Madagascar: the houses are richly furnished with furniture, dishes from India, &c. At Garaganza there are hundreds of Arab traders, there too all fruits abound, and the climate is healthy, from its elevation. Why cannot we missionaries imitate these Arabs in living on heights?

ball of hair rolled in the stomach of a lion, as calculi are, is a great charm among the Arabs: it scares away other animals, they say. Lion's fat smeared on the tails of oxen taken through a country abounding in tsetse, or bungo, is a sure preventive; when I heard of this, I thought that lion's fat would be as difficult of collection as gnat's brains or mosquito tongues, but I was assured that many lions are killed on the Basango highland, and they, in common with all beasts there, are extremely fat: so it is not at all difficult to buy a calabash of the preventive, and Banyamwezi, desirous of taking cattle to the coast for sale, know the substance, and use it successfully (?).

The report of a Moslem Mission to his country was a falsehood, though the details given were circumstantial: falsehood is so common, one can believe nothing the Arabs say, unless confirmed by other evidence: they are the followers of the Prince of lies—Mohamad, whose cool appropriation of the knowledge gained at Damascus, and from the Jews, is perfectly disgusting. All his deeds were done when unseen by any witnesses. It is worth noticing that all admit the decadence of the Moslem power, and they ask how it is so fallen? They seem sincere in their devotion and in teaching the Koran, but its meaning is comparatively hid from most of the Suaheli. The Persian Arabs are said to be gross idolators, and awfully impure. Earth

No Arab has ever attempted to teach them the Arabic-Koran, they are called guma, hard, or difficult as to religion. This is not wonderful, since the Koran is never translated, and a very extraordinary desire for knowledge would be required to sustain a man in committing to memory pages and chapters of, to him, unmeaning gibberish. One only of all the native chiefs, Monyumgo, has sent his children to Zanzibar to be taught to read and write the Koran; and he is said to possess an unusual admiration of such civilization as he has seen among the Arabs. To

I have avoided giving offence to intelligent Arabs, who have pressed me, asking if I believed in Mohamad by saying, "No I do not: I am a child of Jesus bin Miriam," avoiding anything offensive in my tone, and often adding that Mohamad found their forefathers bowing down to trees and stones, and did good to them by forbidding idolatry, and teaching the worship of the only One God. This, they all know, and it pleases them to have it recognised.

Bin Nassib came last night and visited me before going home to his own house; a tall, brown, polite Arab. He says that he lately received a packet for Mr. Stanley from the American Consul, sealed in tin, and sent it back: this is the eleventh that came to Stanley. A

In conversing with a prince at Johanna, one of the Comoro islands lying off the north end of Madagascar, he took occasion to extol the wisdom of the Arabs in keeping strict watch over their wives. On suggesting that their extreme jealousy made them more like jailers than friends of their wives, or, indeed, that they thus reduced themselves to the level of the inferior animals, and each was like the bull of a herd and not like a reasonable man—"fuguswa"—and that they gave themselves a vast deal of trouble for very small profit; he asserted that the jealousy was reasonable because all women were bad, they could not avoid going astray. And on remarking that this might be the case with Arab women, but certainly did not apply to English women, for though a number were untrustworthy, the majority deserved all the confidence their husbands could place in them, he reiterated that women were universally bad. He did not believe that women ever would be good; and the English allowing their wives to gad about with faces uncovered, only showed their weakness, ignorance, and unwisdom.

His features were Middle Eastern, his eyes haunted but also defiant. They were all defiant, Gray had found. When he looked at someone like al-Omari, Gray couldn’t help but think of a Dostoyevsky creation, the displaced outsider, brooding, plotting and methodically stroking a weapon of anarchy. It was the face of a fanatic, of one possessed by a deranged evil. It was the same type of person who’d taken away forever the two people Gray had loved most in the world. Though al-Omari was thousands of miles away in a facility only a very few people even knew existed, the picture and sound were crystal clear thanks to the satellite downlink. Through his headset he asked al-Omari a question in English. The man promptly answered in Arabic and then smiled triumphantly. In flawless Arabic Gray said, “Mr. al-Omari, I am fluent in Arabic and can actually speak it better than you. I know that you lived in England for years and that you speak English better than you do Arabic. I strongly suggest that we communicate in that language so there is absolutely no misunderstanding between us.” Al-Omari’s smile faded, and he sat straighter in his chair. Gray explained his proposal. Al-Omari was to become a spy for the United States, infiltrating one of the deadliest terrorist organizations operating in the Middle East. The man promptly refused. Gray persisted and al-Omari refused yet again, adding that “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” “There are currently ninety-three terrorist organizations in the world as recognized by the U.S. State Department, most of them originating in the Middle East,” Gray responded. “You have confirmed membership in at least three of them. In addition, you were found with forged passports, structural plans to the Woodrow Wilson Bridge and bomb-making material. Now you’re going to work for us, or it will become distinctly unpleasant.” Al-Omari smiled and leaned toward the camera. “I was interrogated years ago in Jordan by your CIA and your military and your FBI, your so-called Tiger Teams. They sent females in wearing only their underwear. They wiped their menstrual blood on me, or at least what they called their menstrual blood, so I was unclean and could not perform my prayers. They rubbed their bodies against me, offered me sex if I talk. I say no to them and I am beaten afterward.” He sat back. “I have been threatened with rape, and they say I will get AIDS from it and die. I do not care. True followers of Muhammad do not fear death as you Christians do. It is your greatest weakness and will lead to your total destruction. Islam will triumph. It is written in the Qur’an. Islam will rule the world.

When the well-disciplined soldier emerged from the mud of the trenches, he let himself be led to an anonymous death, meted out on an industrial scale. If an element of heroism could be recognized in this, it was simply on account of his capacity to slavishly endure the dehumanized horror, when the mutilated bodies of the veterans and the minds destroyed by trauma haunted a Europe fascinated by the spectacle of its own decline. The Arab warrior, on the other hand, was as capable of hatred as he was capable of love; his explosions of anger could follow his most magnanimous gestures. For him, war was still romantic, an ‘excitement’ whose tragic outcomes he accepted as a fatality inherent to life. In short, the Arabs were different from us, so different that ‘they have no objection to being killed’, as Hugh Trenchard, head of the RAF general staff, explained to the sensitive souls of the British Parliament.49 Arabs loved war precisely because it involved a confrontation with death, and as opposed to the effeminate Europeans, they did not make the flabby distinction between combatants and non-combatants. If you thought about it properly, not bombing them would almost amount to insulting their values.

Muhammad’s violent end years and final violent words were quickly followed by those who succeeded him in power, after his death in 632 AD.          “Within thirty years after Muhammad’s death Islam achieved the most spectacular expansion in its history. During the caliphate of Muhammad’s immediate successors from 632 to 661, Islam conquered the whole Arabian peninsula and invaded territories which had been in Greco-Roman hands since the reign of Alexander the Great….Damascus fell in 635. Jerusalem was captured in 638. In the same year Antioch fell, and the other great Hellenistic capital, Alexandria, became a permanent Arab possession in 646. Coastal cities in Syria, Palestine and Egypt, as well as the island of Cyprus were successively occupied by Arabs in a short period of time…The rapid advance of Islam spread panic and consternation among the Christians in the Greek Near East…The Arabic wars against the Greeks were not only political and economic wars, but holy wars of Islam against Christianity.” (“Greek Christian and Other Accounts of the Muslim Conquests of the Near East,” Demetrios Constantelos, article in The Legacy of Jihad, Prometheus Books, 2005, Edited by Andrew Bostom, MD).

Yet all the while these same liberals were calling for more uprisings in the Arab world, more bravery from the protestors, more upheavals, more violence and chaos, anywhere except outside their own front door. In a sense, the liberals in the West are even more objectionable than the neoconservatives. Both, of course, are armchair generals, sipping on their claret and puffing on their cigars as they send thousands out of the trenches to certain death. As George Orwell famously said: “All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

Now that death was the punishment for being caught in possession of a gun, 'cordon and search' operations restarted in earnest when the British army surged into northern Palestine in May 1938. While one force surrounded a village, another would go in to hunt for suspects and their weapons. This task was 'thoroughly nauseating, both physically and mentally', wrote one soldier, during a search in which five Arabs were killed... British soldiers arrested those suspected of assisting the insurgents, and dynamited or bulldozed their homes. Collective punishments were imposed on villages where individual culprits could not be singled out. Arthur Lane went to one village suspected of assisting the rebellion with another soldier to demand a fine from the mukhtar. After the headman slammed his front door in Lane's face, and then his irate wife emerged brandishing a wooden spoon to chase Lane's colleague away, Lane tersely remembered what happened what happened next: 'We burned her house down.

Ibrahim, a male child of the Holy Prophet passed away. The Prophet was sad and grieved on account of his demise and tears trickled from his eyes involuntarily. Solar eclipse took place on the day the child died. The superstitious and mythloving Arabs considered the eclipse to be a sign of the greatness of the affliction of the Holy Prophet and said: “The sun has been eclipsed on account of the death of the son of the Prophet”. The Holy Prophet happened to hear these words. He mounted the pulpit and said: “The sun and the moon are two great signs of the Omnipotence of Allah and obey His orders. They are not eclipsed on account of the death or life of anyone. Whenever solar or lunar eclipse takes place offer signs prayers”. Having said this he dismounted the pulpit and offered signs prayers along with others.10

On June 23 the Detroit Free Press printed Jimmy’s last letter to the editor under the title “Race: The Issue Isn’t Black and White.” This letter said: It is no longer useful to look at the racial climate of this country only in terms of black and white. People from more than 100 ethnic groups live here. By 2040 European Americans and African Americans will be among the many minorities who make up the United States. Blacks in Detroit are a majority; they need to stop thinking like a minority or like victims. Both African Americans and European Americans should be thinking of how to integrate with Detroiters of Latino and Arab descent. To the very end Jimmy was striking out at two of his favorite targets: racial (or what he called biological) thinking, and blacks viewing themselves as a minority. When Ossie and Ruby stopped by to see us in June, he met them at the door with a three-page memo suggesting things for them to work on. The next week Ruby sent him a big batch of rich dark gingerbread that she had baked. A few weeks before his death he called Clementine to alert her to the killing of children that was going on in Liberia and to instruct her how to intervene. A few days later he spoke at a Detroit Summer gathering. The next day he went out with a friend (without his oxygen tank) to supervise the moving of a refrigerator. The week before he died he did a two-hour interview with a local radio reporter. Up to two days before his death, he was grooming himself as carefully as always. Then, suddenly on Tuesday night, July 20, he began to stumble, sat down in a bedroom chair, and never got up or spoke again. I was all alone and wasn’t sure what I should do. There didn’t seem to be any point in calling anybody. So I kept stroking him and saying to him over and over: You are a helluva guy. You raised a whole lot of hell—and a helluva lot of questions. You made a helluva lot of friends—and a helluva lot of enemies. You had a helluva lot of ideas— And wrote a helluva lot of books and pamphlets. You made a helluva lot of difference to a helluva lot of people.

Apparently England is ever forgetting that she is at present the greatest Mohammedan empire in the world. Of late years she has systematically neglected Arabism and, indeed, actively discouraged it in examinations for the Indian Civil Service, where it is incomparably more valuable than Greek and Latin. Hence, when suddenly compelled to assume the reins of government in Moslem lands, as Afghanistan in times past and Egypt at present, she fails after a fashion which scandalises her few (very few) friends; and her crass ignorance concerning the Oriental peoples which should most interest her, exposes her to the contempt of Europe as well as of the Eastern world. When the regrettable raids of 1883-84, culminating in the miserable affairs of Tokar, Teb and Tamasi, were made upon the gallant Sudani negroids, the Bisharin outlying Sawakin, who were battling for the holy cause of liberty and religion and for escape from Turkish task-masters and Egyptian tax-gatherers, not an English official in camp, after the death of the gallant and lamented Major Morice, was capable of speaking Arabic. Now Moslems are not to be ruled by raw youths who should be at school and college instead of holding positions of trust and emolument. He who would deal with them successfully must be, firstly, honest and truthful and, secondly, familiar with and favourably inclined to their manners and customs if not to their law and religion.

The pulse of history beats in every family. All of our lives are engraved with epics of love and death. What my family gained and lost in the twentieth century, though extreme, was not unique. War has touched all of us. Fate and chance and character make and break every generation. The Shoah was not the only genocide. America is not the first land of opportunity nor will it be the last. Warring peoples have fought over the Holy Land for thousands of years, all of them claiming to have God on their side. In a family history written by Palestinian Arabs, Chaim and Sonia and their fellow Zionists would be oppressors; the Koran, not the Torah, would be the holy book; Jerusalem would be a besieged, stolen city. Open the book of your family and you will be amazed, as I was, at what you find.

Bob is a perfectly fine name. So is Baboo." "And Layla is a lovely name," Bob said. "Did you know it means 'dark beauty' in Arabic? It suits you." "Thank you." Her smile faded when Sam scowled. "It's a tragic name," Sam said. "Very unlucky. I'm sure you know the Arabian legend of Qays and Layla, a young couple who fell so deeply in love they were unable to contain their passionate devotion." "What exactly does that mean?" Layla asked, hoping to distract him in case Bob was superstitious like Lakshmi Auntie. India had a billion-dollar superstition-centric industry focused on astrology, black magic, and fake babas. An unlucky name had derailed more than one prospective marriage. "Is it anything like being unable to contain your opinion about things no one asked you about?" "I'm sure we can all guess what it means." Sam didn't address her sarcastic quip. "Layla used poor Qays for his magnificent body and then went prowling around for a new man only hours after leaving his bed. It caused quite the scandal in their conservative community. Qays was denied her hand in marriage and prevented from seeing her ever again, although why he would want her after that, I don't know. Distraught, he fled into the wilderness while chanting love poems about his darling Layla until he descended into madness and death.

The Arab people are second to none in regretting the woes which have been inflicted on the Jews of Europe by Europeans. But the question of these Jews should not be confused with Zionism, for there can be no greater injustice than solving the problems of the Jews of Europe by committing another injustice on us, the Palestinian Arabs. The Europeans should not solve their own problems by creating problems for other people.” During the hearings, four UNSCOP members went to Haifa just as the Exodus was being towed into port by British ships. They watched as British soldiers used rifle butts, hose pipes, and tear gas on the death camp survivors. These people were then locked up in cages and shipped out of Palestine. The four UNSCOP members returned to Jerusalem pale with shock. Ultimately, UNCSOP recommended the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. On

The Arab people are second to none in regretting the woes which have been inflicted on the Jews of Europe by Europeans. But the question of these Jews should not be confused with Zionism, for there can be no greater injustice than solving the problems of the Jews of Europe by committing another injustice on us, the Palestinian Arabs. The Europeans should not solve their own problems by creating problems for other people.” During the hearings, four UNSCOP members went to Haifa just as the Exodus was being towed into port by British ships. They watched as British soldiers used rifle butts, hose pipes, and tear gas on the death camp survivors. These people were then locked up in cages and shipped out of Palestine. The four UNSCOP members returned to Jerusalem pale with shock. Ultimately, UNCSOP recommended the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. On November 29, 1947, all of Palestine—Arab and Jew—gathered around their radios to listen to the General Assembly of the United Nations vote on the UNSCOP proposal for the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. If it passed, the Jews would finally have their state. If it failed, the Jews would be forced to live in a single state of Palestine as a minority dominated by the Arabs. The outcome of the vote was very much in doubt. The entire Muslim world opposed partition. Moreover, a two-thirds majority was required for the motion to pass. Behind the scenes, however, American diplomats worked hard to push it through. In the end, the tally was thirty-three in favor, thirteen opposed, and ten abstentions. The motion carried.

But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since, its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness. In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside. The more emotional Pathans are powerless to resist. All rational considerations are forgotten. Seizing their weapons, they become Ghazis—as dangerous and as sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such. While the more generous spirits among the tribesmen become convulsed in an ecstasy of religious bloodthirstiness, poorer and more material souls derive additional impulses from the influence of others, the hopes of plunder and the joy of fighting. Thus whole nations are roused to arms. Thus the Turks repel their enemies, the Arabs of the Soudan break the British squares, and the rising on the Indian frontier spreads far and wide. In each case civilisation is confronted with militant Mahommedanism. The forces of progress clash with those of reaction. The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace.

[Long Life] This famous writer has died at 92 And that legend journalist, The darling of authorities and mainstream media, Has died at 95. This pious religious man Has died at 96, And that billionaire, Known for his countless charities and charitable deeds Has died at 96 also… The veteran and shrewd politician, The former president of that country, Has died at 95 as well… And the same questions that dawned on me Ever since I understood the oppression & filthiness Of what the elites, authorities, and those in power are capable of, Begin ringing in my ears once again: Can anyone aware of the ugliness of what is going on live a long life? Is it a coincidence that most people, writers, and artists Who enriched my awareness and world died prematurely Or died, literally or metaphorically, by suicide, assassination, or in prison? Can a shred of awareness fell upon us without defeating the body and the soul Cell by cell and one organ after another causing a premature death? I also wonder have the writers, journalists, religious men, and politicians Who lived long lives enriched truth and justness, Or have they gotten rich at the expense of the above to live long lives up to 92, 93, 94, 95, & 96? And by biggest questions of all: Is there somewhere, in some world, in some place, a dagger of awareness that stabs without the killing the stabbed prematurely? [Original poem published in Arabic on December 31, 2022, at ahewar.org]

Here goes my train Sounding its whistle once again As it continues its old journey To a new station A new foreign land A new exile A new illusion A new face A new death…

I lost all hope Ever since I discovered That one home can’t contain me One life is not enough for me And one death won’t do… (July 1, 2015)

The custom of chopping hands of death enemies was a local custom and was introduced in the Congo by the Arabs from the Muslim sharia law to punish thieves. The first penal code introduced by Leopold II in 1888, strictly forbids this cruel practice. The report of "The Inquiry Commission" of 1905 is absolutely clear in this respect. Though this report was extremely severe in denouncing such crimes, King Leopold II did not hesitate to have it published - in extenso - in the "Journal Officiel de l'Etat Indépendant du Congo" and issued no less than 24 royal decrees to put an end to all those malpractices.

23rd May, 1872.—There seems but little prospect of Christianity spreading by ordinary means among Mohamadans. Their pride is a great obstacle, and is very industriously nurtured by its votaries. No new invention or increase of power on the part of Christians seems to disturb the self-complacent belief that ultimately all power and dominion in this world will fall into the hands of Moslems. Mohamad will appear at last in glory, with all his followers saved by him. When Mr. Stanley's Arab boy from Jerusalem told the Arab bin Saleh that he was a Christian, he was asked, "Why so, don't you know that all the world will soon be Mohamadan? Jerusalem is ours; all the world is ours, and in a short time we shall overcome all.

The black American missionary George Washington Williams, visiting in 1890, noted “the most revolting crimes” committed by the natives: “Human hands and feet and limbs, smoked and dried, are offered and exposed for sale in many of the native village markets. From the mouth of the Lomami-River to Stanley-Falls there are thirteen armed Arab camps; and in them I have seen many skulls of murdered slaves pendant from poles and over these camps floating their blood-red flag.” Oddly, Hochschild quotes Williams’ testimony against native practices to criticize the EIC for being insufficiently vigorous in its attempts to govern the territory. Heads I win, tails you lose. As this logical slip implies, a justifiably proportionate response to the scourge of the slave trade required keen efforts by the EIC to recruit and feed soldiers, clear villages in areas prone to slave raids, establish military and governance posts, and pursue slave armies to the death. “Accommodating the Arab slave traders would be a crime,” wrote the EIC captain, and later WWI hero, Jules Jacques de Dixmude in 1892.

No objection would be made to teaching the natives of the country to read their own languages in the Roman character. No Arab has ever attempted to teach them the Arabic-Koran, they are called guma, hard, or difficult as to religion. This is not wonderful, since the Koran is never translated, and a very extraordinary desire for knowledge would be required to sustain a man in committing to memory pages and chapters of, to him, unmeaning gibberish.

The Son of a vacuum Among the tall trees he sat lost, broken, alone again, among a number of illegal immigrants, he raised his head to him without fear, as nothing in this world is worth attention. -He said: I am not a hero; I am nothing but a child looking for Eid. The Turkmen of Iraq, are the descendants of Turkish immigrants to Mesopotamia through successive eras of history. Before and after the establishment of the Ottoman Empire, countries crossed from here, and empires that were born and disappeared, and still, preserve their Turkish identity. Although, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the division of the Arab world, they now live in one of its countries. Kirkuk, one of the heavens of God on earth, is one of the northern governorates of Iraq in which they live. The Kurdish race is shared with them, a race out of many in Iraq. Two children of two different ethnicities, playing in a village square in Kirkuk province when the news came from Baghdad, of a new military coup. Without delay, Saddam Hussein took over the reins of power, and faster than that, Iraq was plunged into successive wars that began in 1980 with its neighbor Iran, a war that lasted eight years. Iraq barely rested for two years, and in the third, a new war in Kuwait, which did not end in the best condition as the leader had hoped, as he was expelled from it after the establishment of an international coalition to liberate it, led by the United States of America. Iraq entered a new phase of suffering, a siege that lasted more than ten years, and ended up with the removal of Saddam Hussein from his power followed by the US occupation of it in 2003. As the father goes, he returns from this road, there is no way back but from it. As the date approaches, the son stands on the back of that hill waiting for him to return. From far away he waved a longing, with a bag of dreams in his hands, a bag of candy in his pocket, and a poem of longing by a Turkmen poet who absorb Arabic, whose words danced on his lips, in his heart. -When will you come back, dad? -On the Eid, wait for me on the hill, you will see me coming from the road, waving, carrying your gifts. The father bid his son farewell to the Arab Shiite city of Basra, on the border with Iran, after the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war, as the homeland is calling its men, or perhaps the leader is calling his subjects. In Iraq, as in many countries of the Arab world, the homeland is the leader, and the leader is the homeland. Months passed, the child eagerly anticipating the coming of the feast, but the father hurried to return without an appointment, loaded on the shoulders, the passion reached its extent in the martyr’s chest, with a sheet of paper in his pocket on which he wrote: Every morning takes me nostalgic for you, to the jasmine flower, oh, melody in the heart, oh balm I sip every while, To you, I extend a hand and a fire that ignites in the soul a buried love, night shakes me with tears in my eyes, my longing for you has shaped me into dreams, stretching footsteps to the left and to the right, gleam, calling out for me, you scream, waking me up to the glimpse of the light of life in your face, a thousand sparkles, in your eyes, a meaning of survival, a smile, and a glace, Eid comes to you as a companion, without, life yet has no trace, for roses, necklaces of love, so that you amaze. -Where is Ruslan? On the morning of the feast day, at the door of his house, the kids asked his mother, -with tears in her eyes: He went to meet his father. A moment of silence fell over the children, -Raman, with a little gut: Aunt, do you mean he went to the cemetery? -Mother: He went to meet him at those hills.

The fact of zero He added nonstop: Did you know that zero was not used throughout human history! Until 781 A.D, when it was first embodied and used in arithmetic equations by the Arab scholar Al-Khwarizmi, the founder of algebra. Algorithms took their name from him, and they are algorithmic arithmetic equations that you have to follow as they are and you will inevitably get the result, the inevitable result. And before that, across tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, humans refused to deal with zero. While the first reference to it was in the Sumerian civilization, where inscriptions were found three thousand years ago in Iraq, in which the Sumerians indicated the existence of something before the one, they refused to deal with it, define it and give it any value or effect, they refused to consider it a number. All these civilizations, some of which we are still unable to decipher many of their codes, such as the Pharaonic civilization that refused to deal with zero! We see them as smart enough to build the pyramids with their miraculous geometry and to calculate the orbits of stars and planets with extreme accuracy, but they are very stupid for not defining zero in a way that they can deal with, and use it in arithmetic operations, how strange this really is! But in fact, they did not ignore it, but gave it its true value, and refused to build their civilizations on an unknown and unknown illusion, and on a wrong arithmetical frame of reference. Throughout their history, humans have looked at zero as the unknown, they refused to define it and include it in their calculations and equations, not because it has no effect, but because its true effect is unknown, and remaining unknown is better than giving it a false effect. Like the wrong frame of reference, if you rely on it, you will inevitably get a wrong result, and you will fall into the inevitability of error, and if you ignore it, your chance of getting it right remains. Throughout their history, humans have preferred to ignore zero, not knowing its true impact, while we simply decided to deal with it, and even rely on it. Today we build all our ideas, our civilization, our software, mathematics, physics, everything, on the basis that 1 + 0 equals one, because we need to find the effect of zero so that our equations succeed, and our lives succeed with, but what if 1 + 0 equals infinity?! Why did we ignore the zero in summation, and did not ignore it in multiplication?! 1×0 equals zero, why not one? What is the reason? He answered himself: There is no inevitable reason, we are not forced. Humans have lived throughout their ages without zero, and it did not mean anything to them. Even when we were unable to devise any result that fits our theorems for the quotient of one by zero, then we admitted and said unknown, and ignored it, but we ignored the logic that a thousand pieces of evidence may not prove me right, and one proof that proves me wrong. Not doing our math tables in the case of division, blowing them up completely, and with that, we decided to go ahead and built everything on that foundation. We have separated the arithmetic tables in detail at our will, to fit our calculations, and somehow separate the whole universe around us to fit these tables, despite their obvious flaws. And if we decide that the result of one multiplied by zero is one instead of zero, and we reconstruct the whole world on this basis, what will happen? He answered himself: Nothing, we will also succeed, the world, our software, our thoughts, our dealings, and everything around us will be reset according to the new arithmetic tables. After a few hundred years, humans will no longer be able to understand that one multiplied by zero equals zero, but that it must be one because everything is built on this basis.

The adults as a rule came into the slave-sticks from treachery, and had never been slaves before. Very often the Arabs would promise a present of dried fish to villagers if they would act as guides to some distant point, and as soon as they were far enough away from their friends they were seized and pinned into the yoke from which there is no escape.

-Have you ever thought about determinism? He continued and did not wait to hear the answer: In the past, humans believed that the eye sends a ray of light to bodies and sees them, then the Arab scholar Ibn Al-Haytham asked a logical question: If my eyes send a ray of light, why do I not see in the dark? Then he discovered that the eye is blind in its origin, a receiver and not a transmitter, it only sees when the light is reflected from the objects, so it picks up its reflection and does not send it. We understand determinism as we understand the sense of sight today, we receive it and do not send it, so we see that we are the subject and the deterministic object, we have no power before it, we have to receive it and submit to it, but what if our understanding of it is wrong?! As our understanding of the sense of sight was, while we think we receive determinism, we are in fact sending it. What if determinism had no existence, no reflection, and we were not designed to receive it but rather designed to make and transmit it. The general interpretation of determinism, on which all Muslims and non-Muslims agree, is that every event in the universe, including man’s perception and actions, is subject to a logical sequence of causes within a single continuum. Muslims say that God’s decree and predestination are pre-written and cannot be changed, but they struggle with the eternal question, if this was written for me in advance, then why would God punish me for something that I cannot change? Where is the justice in here! While unbelievers say it was nature, the laws of the universe, that created determinism, and they run into the zero-cause barrier, what is that cause that does not come from any cause? It resulted in the chain that created all causes. Muslims answer them, Cause Zero is neither a cause nor a causative, nor even a result, it is God, he was and will continue to exist, and the understanding of His nature is not within the limits of our mind, for it has no nature at all. The non-believers accuse them, that their inability to understand or know the nature of the Zero cause, made them create the idea of God in their minds, to relieve themselves of the trouble of searching. The entire dispute is based on the zero cause, assuming that determinism is a series written on us, we cannot change it, and we have no authority over it, but what if determinism is actually written on us, and we are the ones who wrote it in the first place, or perhaps we are writing it now.

20th October, 1873.—We will here run on ahead with Chuma on his way to communicate with the new arrivals. He reached the Arab settlement without let or hindrance. Lieut. Cameron was quickly put in possession of the main facts of Dr. Livingstone's death by reading Jacob's letter, and Chuma was questioned concerning it in the presence of Dr. Dillon and Lieut. Murphy. It was a disappointment to find that the reported arrival of Mr. Oswell Livingstone was entirely erroneous; but Lieut. Cameron showed the wayworn men every kindness.

Revenge by the Arabs wasn’t dismissed, but noone, except for the Vicario brothers, had thought of poison. It was supposed, rather, that they would wait for nightfall, in order to pour gasoline through the skylight, and burn up the prisoners in their cell; but even that was too easy a supposition. The Arabs comprised a community of peaceful immigrants who had settled at the beginning of the century in Carribean towns— even in the poorest and most remote—and there they remained, selling colored cloth and bazaar trinkets. They were clannish, hardworking, and Catholic. They married among themselves, imported their wheat, raised lambs in their yards, and grew oregano and eggplants, and playing cards was their only driving passion. The older ones continued speaking the rustic Arabic they had brought from their homeland, and they maintained it intact in the family down to the second generation, but those of the third, with the exception of Santiago Nasar, listened to their parents in Arabic and answered them in Spanish. So it was inconceivable that they would suddenly abandon their pastoral spirit to avenge a death for which we all could have been to blaim.

[Death by Starvation or Boredom] Many are those who work For cheap wages Only to barely survive One breath at a time… Just one more breath… And others who have so much Yet work simply to kill boredom Only to feel that they are saving A world that is drowning Because of their greed And their love for power and wealth… The first one remains one step or less Closer to dying of starvation; While the second one -who provides the wages of the first one- Remain one step or less closer to dying of boredom… And here lies the irony! It’s as if fate insists on breaking All human barriers To force everyone to choose Between death by starvation or boredom… And owe to those who die of both… [Original poem published in Arabic by ahewar.org on January 28, 2023]

Ultimately, the eastern parts of the empire were unable to withstand Persian invasions and the rapid Arab expansion that followed the death of Mohammed in 632. Because the Arab conquest of Jerusalem in 637–38 endangered the recently rescued and restored relic of the True Cross, Heraclius once again instigated its rescue and safe removal, this time to Constantinople.46 The relic was most likely installed in the basilica of Hagia Sophia, which shared with the Holy Sepulcher some comparison to the ancient temple of Solomon.47 As mentioned earlier in this chapter, the main source for this location is the account of a bishop from Gaul, Arculf, who happened to visit Constantinople around the year 680, on his way home from Jerusalem, where he had seen a monumental silver cross mounted on the rock of Golgotha.48 In his diary, Arculf records attending a liturgy in the Great Church (Hagia Sophia) and seeing a large and beautiful cabinet (armorium) containing the cross fragments.

Another route by which Galen’s ideas were transmitted during this period was through the work of the tenth-century physician ‘Alī ibn al-’Abbās Maǧūsī, known in the West as Haly Abbas–a historian has described him as ‘a Persian who took an Arab name and wrote in the language of the Qu’ran, a Zoroastrian who was imbibed with Greek traditions, a thinker from the Islamic world who was adopted by the Western Latin community less than a century after his death’.To emphasise the cosmopolitan mix of this period, his work was subsequently translated into Latin in Italy by a Christian monk who had been a Muslim refugee from North Africa.

The years between the end of the Second World War and 2010 or 2011, Pinker designates the long peace.19 It is a peace that encompassed the Chinese Communist revolution, the partition of India, the Great Leap Forward, the ignominious Cultural Revolution, the suppression of Tibet, the Korean War, the French and American wars of Indochinese succession, the Egypt-Yemen war, the Franco-Algerian war, the Israeli-Arab wars, the genocidal Pol Pot regime, the grotesque and sterile Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, ethnic cleansings in Rwanda, Burundi, and the former Yugoslavia, the farcical Russian and American invasions of Afghanistan, the American invasion of Iraq, and various massacres, sub-continental famines, squalid civil insurrections, blood-lettings, throat-slittings, death squads, theological infamies, and suicide bombings taking place from Latin America to East Timor. Alone, broken, incompetent, and unloved, the Soviet Union lumbered into oblivion in 1989. The twentieth century had come to an end.

By way of generalization of this book, it can be maintained that other regional organizations like the Arab League and the African Union can create collective identities similar to the EU, depending on their political unity and economic interdependence and on the existing common culture of the region able to define it as a civilization or part of it. This, however, requires specific research in the future.

The death of Abdul Khader was more than simply the loss of the Arabs’ most capable leader: in a society that revered the individual, he was irreplaceable. A contemporary recorded: “There is something in our blood that ascribes such importance to the man—such hero worship to the leader—that when he dies, everything collapses.”7 These words would prove prophetic in the next few days.

Abu Hafs was in Peshawar at the time, and recalls that the condition among the Arabs was extremely somber, as fighting had broken out inside Afghanistan between forces loyal to Hekmatyar and Sayyaf, respectively, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Afghan mujahidin.

America" Loans Interest rates Endless advertisements Usury and deception Countless heavy bodies filled with fear Migrant, refugee, and illegal bodies that came escaping America’s oppression in their own countries… America Depression, anxiety, and pain relief pills A political, media, and institutional matrix of power ran by one lobby… Credit cards Bankruptcy Debts Drugs The homeless Racism Weapons Strict security measures Suffocating any attempt for any meaningful change under the pretext of the homeland security… America Sanctions imposed on this country and that, Internal psychological sanctions imposed on a majority of the naïve who believe themselves to be free… America Tasteless fruit, vegetables, meats, eggs, and cheeses, injected with hormones, sprayed with pesticides and many other carcinogenic substances… America Houses that look beautiful from the outside, inhabited by people who are mostly lonely, going through psychological or nervous breakdowns, or perhaps wrestling with depression or hysteria, the luckiest of them are on daily pills to help them adapt to the psychological and spiritual death surrounding them from all sides… America Fruitless trees and scentless flowers, as if as a punishment or a curse from heaven upon those who stole the land from its native people, after erasing most of them… America Bills Sad letters in the mail, mostly from companies and advertisers wishing you a delightful day and great consumption, encouraging you to solve your problems with more consumption, and reminding you that you may die abruptly of loneliness or the toxins that you consume, and therefore, you must seriously consider purchasing your casket and the plot under which you will be buried… [Original poem published in Arabic on August 27, 2024 at ahewar.org]

Zarrinkoub may have had other reasons for changing his mind about the role of Arabs and Islam in Iranian history. He was certainly aware of what happened to Parviz Nātel Khānlari, the promoter of his first book and one of his professors, in the early days of the Islamic Revolution. Because of his friendship with Mohammad Reza’s Minister of the Royal Court Asadollah Alam (1919-78), Khānlari was stripped of all his posts and imprisoned.23 Manṣur Rastegār Fasā’i’, a biographer of Khānlari, believes Motahhari, who was aware of Khānlari’s services to Persian linguistics, letters, and music, would have intervened on his behalf had he not been assassinated. After spending a harrowing hundred days in prison, Khānlari was released, but he was deprived of his pension and required to pay back the salary he earned as a senator. Despite efforts by expatriate groups to help Khānlari leave Iran, he chose to remain in his homeland and died there in 1990, in poverty and severe pain.24 The change in Zarrinkoub’s attitude was reported in an article published by the site Rahyāfteh25 called “To What Extent are the Matters in the Book Two Centuries of Silence by Abdolhossein Zarrinkoub Correct?” The article asserts that, having come of age during a time when cultural policy in Iran was to attack Islam and to sanctify ancient Iran (ḥamleh beh Eslām va taqdis-e Irān-e bāstān), Zarrinkoub was among those “pretend-chauvinist intellectuals” (rowshan-fekrān-e showvinist-māb) who showed great courage in openly admitting the error of their ways. To have a public intellectual of Zarrinkoub’s stature regret writing Two Centuries of Silence was and continues to be a boon to ideologues in the Islamic Republic.26 Even after his death, the author’s much-publicized change of heart serves as a lesson to others who might harbor thoughts of crossing the bright red lines around the taboo topics in today’s Iran.

Having reviewed diverse theories and hypotheses on the waning of the Age of Enlightenment in Central Asia, it is now time to step back and raise a larger question: does it really require an explanation? The assumption behind our search for causes is that if one or another factor had not come into play, the movement of thought would have continued. But that great period of intense cerebration, that age of inquiry and innovation, had lasted for more than four centuries. If more information on the centuries preceding the Arab invasion had survived, we might confidently extend that period of flowering even further back in time. Even without this addition, the Age of Enlightenment was five times longer than the lifetime of Periclean Athens; a century longer than the entire history of the intellectual center of Alexandria from its foundation to the destruction of its library; only slightly shorter than the entire life span of the Roman Republic; longer than the Ming or Qing dynasties in China and the same length as the Han; about the same length as the history of Japan from the founding of the Tokugawa dynasty to the present; and of England from the age of Shakespeare to our own day. As they say in the theater world, it had a long run. It is well and good to speak of causes of the decline of the passion for inquiry and innovation, or of some supposed exhaustion of creative energies. But just as we feel little need to discover the cause of a nonagenarian’s death, we need not inquire too urgently into the cause of the waning of this remarkable age. Of course, the question of why the region as a whole remained in a state of backwardness from the end of the Age of Enlightenment down to recent times is vitally important, but it involves many factors besides those that came into play in the intellectual decline. It should form the subject of another book.

AROUND 1271 OR 1272, MARCO POLO, THE RENOWNED VENETIAN merchant adventurer, was on his way through Persia en route for Cathay when he came upon a story told by travellers in that region. Twenty-five years later he recounted it in his book II Milione, better known today as The Travels of Marco Polo. The story concerned a remote area ruled by one they called the Old Man of the Mountains, whose followers were notorious for their ruthlessness. According to Marco Polo, they had been in existence since the middle of the eleventh century and there was not an Arab leader who did not go in mortal dread of them. The disciples of this leader were kept loyal to their master by the promise that, were they to die whilst in his service, they would assuredly go to Paradise. To strengthen their resolve, the Old Man of the Mountains gave initiates to his following a preview of what it would be like in Paradise by maintaining a fabulous garden within his mountain stronghold. In this pleasure ground, exquisitely beautiful houris wandered ready to fulfil any desire, the fountains ran with milk and honey and the flowers were beyond compare. However, it was said, to enter this fabled place the would-be acolyte was first given a powerful drug and, only when unconscious, allowed in: before leaving, he was again drugged. After their induction, the initiates were given a solid Islamic education but were also taught the arts of murder, killing anyone whom their master commanded be put to death. Before going into battle, they apparently partook of the same drug to increase their courage. The drug was hashish. The veracity of Marco Polo’s writings has long been suspect, yet the story has stuck, enhanced and exaggerated as the centuries have passed. The legend of the Old Man of the Mountains has become nothing short of unassailable fact and his followers, notorious as much for their merciless cruelty as their gargantuan appetites for hashish, have become a byword for brutality. Even the name by which they came to be known derived from the drug it was alleged they took: they were called the Hashshashin. They are now known as the Assassins.

The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood denounced the UN decision, called for volunteers for Palestine and contributions, and announced that "it is a ... battle either for life or death to a nation of 70 million souls ... whom the vilest, the most corrupt, tricky and destructive people wish to conquer and displace. " 198

It has not been stylish to pay attention to those warrior castes who neither planted nor herded, but devoted their lives to pillage and forgotten causes: the illiterate Greek chieftains on their decade-long excursion to the plains of Asia Minor; the tribal bands of Northern Europeans who raided Rome and then its Christian outposts; the Asiatic "hordes" who swept through medieval Europe; the Crusaders who looted the Arab world; the elite officership of European imperialism; and so on. These were men—not counting their conscripts and captives—who lived only parasitically in relation to the production of useful things, who lived for perpetual war, the production of death

These experts sought to promote the idea, which culminated after 9/11 in the War on Terror, that the West was up against enemies of such unfathomable evil that engaging with their causes or motivations was pointless, and that virtually anything the national security state did to combat them, including a dramatic rise in civilian deaths, was justified. To the millions of people whom it impacted - Arabs, Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis, and Africans of secular background or various faiths - the terrorism paradigm created a painful double existence. Those who believed that, in many instances, violence committed in their countries of origin stemmed from legitimate grievances - that the violence was not legitimate, but the underlying pathologies and grievances were - felt themselves unable to acknowledge this in public life.

As the UN Development Program (UNDP) determined in a series of Arab Development Reports, the Israeli occupation of Palestine has, among other things such as the US invasion of Iraq, “ ‘adversely influenced’ human development.”41 Meanwhile, President Trump has suspended $65 million of aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), and is backing out of giving another $45 million of aid for food to the Palestinians. Even hard-liners in Israel have complained that this amounts to a death sentence for thousands of Palestinians.

Until his death in 1460, Prince Henry sponsored Atlantic voyages to West Africa by the Portuguese, to circumvent Islamic slave traders, and in doing so created a different sort of slavery than had existed before. Premodern Islamic slave traders, like their Christian counterparts in premodern Italy, were not pursuing racist policies—they were enslaving what we now consider to be Africans, Arabs, and Europeans alike. At the dawn of the modern world, the Portuguese began to exclusively trade African bodies. Prince Henry’s sailors made history when they navigated past the feared “black” hole of Cape Bojador, off Western Sahara, and brought enslaved Africans back to Portugal.

Until his death in 1460, Prince Henry sponsored Atlantic voyages to West Africa by the Portuguese, to circumvent Islamic slave traders, and in doing so created a different sort of slavery than had existed before. Premodern Islamic slave traders, like their Christian counterparts in premodern Italy, were not pursuing racist policies—they were enslaving what we now consider to be Africans, Arabs, and Europeans alike. At the dawn of the modern world, the Portuguese began to exclusively trade African bodies. Prince

I too have read his version of the facts. Like you and millions of others. And everyone got the picture, right from the start: He had a man’s name; my brother had the name of an incident. He could have called him “Two P.M.,” like that other writer who called his black man “Friday.” An hour of the day instead of a day of the week. Two in the afternoon, that’s good. Zujj in Algerian Arabic, two, the pair, him and me, the unlikeliest twins, somehow, for those who know the story of the story. A brief Arab, technically ephemeral, who lived for two hours and has died incessantly for seventy years, long after his funeral. It’s like my brother Zujj has been kept under glass. And even though he was a murder victim, he’s always given some vague designation, complete with reference to the two hands of a clock, over and over again, so that he replays his own death, killed by a bullet fired by a Frenchman who just didn’t know what to do with his day and with the rest of the world, which he carried on his back.

Conversions One important mission of Islam was to spread throughout the world. The Quran, the Hadis, the Hidaya and the Sirat-un-Nabi, the four all important works of Islam, direct the faithful to fulfill the above task. Therefore, ‘there was never any doubt in the minds of the Muslims of their right to spread over the earth  The Hidayah is quite explicit about the legality of jihad (holy war) against infidels even when they have not taken the offensive  The Muslim Turks found the moral justification for their advance into India in the induction to propagate Islam. As this could not, in the opinion of kings and warriors, be achieved without the subjugation of non-Muslims and occupation of their territory, the propagation of Islam became identical with war and conquest.’[85] In simple language, conquerors and rulers converted people by force. It has been seen that during the Arab invasion of Sind and the expeditions of Mahmud of Ghazni, defeated rulers, garrisons of captured forts, and civilian population were often forced to accept Islam. Turkish rule in Hindustan was established in the teeth of Rajput opposition and the process of war and conversion never ceased. Malik Kafur, the general of Alauddin Khalji, gave the Raja of Dwarsamudra a choice between Islam, death or payment of a huge idemnity.[86] But under Muhammad bin Tughlaq there is greater insistence on the vanquished Hindu princes to embrace Islam. The most glaring example of this is that during the Warangal campaign all the eleven sons of the Raja of Kampila were made Muslims. Muhammad bin Tughlaq converted many people in this fashion. When Firoz Tughlaq invaded Jajnagar (Orissa), he captured the son of the Rai of Sikhar, converted him to Islam, and gave him the name of Shakr Khan.[87]

.أنا أتنفس الموتَ كل يوم أحيا Each day I live, I breathe in death.

Contemporary Chuvash folk religion is heavily influenced by Islam, and it is not altogether clear when such influence occurred, making it difficult to be sure what Chuvash religion was like in the Middle Ages.117 However, a distinctive aspect of Chuvash culture is belief in the kiremet’, a spirit of a dead person who was evil in life or died a violent death, and the place associated with that spirit.118 The Chuvash word kiremet’ derives from Arabic keremet, which referred originally to the supernatural power of Islamic saints; but the Chuvashes took this belief in their own direction and, while kiremet’ were said to be evil, their presence in a place enforced its taboo status and offerings were made to them. Furthermore, kiremet’ were often conceived of as the spirits of foreigners or outsiders.

Why is black evil and white good?” he demanded of the Lord of Death. “I never saw it that way. If this is all my own thinking, then why is that so? Why is my Lord of Death not a big Arab slave trader, as it would be in my own village?

This includes enormous sums of money funneled to bodies that appear to support conflict resolution and fundamental rights. The problem is that far too much of this money goes to bodies that fight for the opposite. Below are just a few prominent examples. The Dutch government funds Electronic Intifada.[813] Ali Abunimah is one of its heads. Abunimah considers Mahmoud Abbas to be a “collaborator” with Israelis (the Palestinian term for a traitor who deserves death).[814] Abunimah is also a virulent opponent to the peace process and an open supporter of the “one-state solution”[815] whose real meaning—in the eyes of Europe, as well as Israel—is an end to the Jewish state. Sweden, Belgium, Ireland, Norway, and Holland have supported the NGO al-Haq over the last decade.[816] A Palestinian organization based in Ramallah, al-Haq is supposedly a neutral human rights organization. The problem? It supports both BDS and the right of return.[817] Could someone explain how funding such an organization promotes genuine peace? The Development Center (NDC) transfers millions of dollars to Israeli and Palestinian organizations. The fund is supported by the World Bank, France, and other European countries.[818] Formally, the fund supports human rights as such, but a check of the organizations it funds shows that most of them either support the right of return or are involved in BDS. Among the dozens of organizations backed by the European Union is the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), headed by Jeff Halper. Halper has made a name for himself giving lecture tours attacking not just Israel but also global capitalism. He even views the Saudi Peace Plan as nothing more than a ploy “intended more to placate the Arab Street than as an actual political position.”[819] In his opinion, Western leaders are practically begging Israel to become a regional power so that the West can continue to oppress the Arab masses. ICAHD also publicly supports BDS and Return.[820] Despite all this, this openly radical organization was supported by the European Union to the tune of €169,661 between February 2010 and June 2012.[821] We could go on like this forever to cover the ever-growing list of organizations which are funded by the European Union, and European countries.[822] Organization after organization sells the West a bill of goods about supporting human rights—and then goes on to support the campaign against the very existence of Israel, for a right of return,

The question is: How large does Israel need to be in order to be a viable state? All other questions are not matters of life and death. It is not a prerequisite that Arabs and Muslims love Israel for it to prosper. As for Palestinian Arabs, they can live happy full lives in a Jewish state if they accept that they live in a Jewish state. They can resettle and live happy full lives in any one of a number of states with Arab and Muslim majorities. They can also live happy full lives in a new state that can be created for them from within the other Arab states. The Jews of Israel, on the other hand, have nowhere else to go: It is the only state in which Jews are the majority, and so, Israel must be viable.

PATH OF THE DESCENDING STARS ORION THE HUNTER Constellation of Semyaza In Medieval Arabic astronomy, Orion was known as aljabbar (The Giant) and the sixth brightest star, Saiph was named saif al-jabbar (Sword of the Giant). Ancient Egypt held Orion as the constellation in which the deified Pharaoh would ascend to and become after death: Sah the “Father of the Gods”. Orion is identified with Semyaza in which the Watcher was suspended in the heavens according to some Jewish lore.

The standoff had already lasted five days. "It was a Monday, the 3rd of October 1502," wrote Tomé Lopes: "a date that I will remember every day of my life." By now Gama's soldiers had removed all the weapons they could find from the Arab ship. It was a sitting duck, and the admiral ordered his men into their boats. Their task was simple. They were to tow the Mîrî out to sea until it was safely away from the Portuguese fleet. Then they were to set it alight and burn it with everyone on board. The soldiers marched onto the Mîrî, set fires across the decks, and jumped back into the boats as the flames licked and the smoke billowed. Some of the Muslims rushed to smother the fires, and one by one they stamped them out. Others dragged out several small bombards they had managed to hide from the search party, and they hurriedly set them up. The pilgrims and merchants ran to grab anything that could serve as ammunition, including fist-sized stones from the piles of ballast in the hold. There was clearly no chance of surrender, and they were determined to die fighting rather than burn to death. When the soldiers in the boats saw the fires go out they rowed back to light them again. As they approached, women and men alike fired the bombards and hurled the stones. The Europeans cowered under the hail of missiles and beat a fast retreat. From a distance they tried to sink the Mîrî with their bombards, but the guns carried on the boats were too small to inflict real damage. The Muslim women tore off their jewelry, clutched the gold, silver, and precious stones in their fists, and shook them at the boats, screaming at their attackers to take everything they had. They held up their babies and little children and desperately pleaded with the Christians to take pity on the innocents. One last time, the merchants shouted and gestured that they would pay a great ransom if their lives were spared. Gama watched, hidden from sight, through a loophole in the side of his ship. Tomé Lopes was stunned: shocked by the admiral's refusal to relent, and amazed that he was willing to turn down such wealth. There was no doubt in his mind that the ransom would have been enough to buy the freedom of every Christian prisoner in Morocco and still leave great treasure for the king. Bergamo and his fellow factors were no doubt wondering just how much of their profit would go up in smoke. Yet there were plenty of zealous Christians among the crews who had no more qualms than their Crusader forebears about killing peaceful merchants and pilgrims. The dehumanizing notion that their enemies in faith were somehow not real people was too deeply ingrained to be shaken. Like holy warriors before and after, they avoided looking into the whites of their victims' eyes and got on with their godly business.

It can be hard to live a life without love and hope, watch the years go by uneventfully. You start seeing life as the real tragedy and death as a blessing.

Even the most cursory look around Israel—even a walk around any Israeli city—would reveal a population that is bewildering in its racial and religious diversity. There are Ethiopian Jews and Israeli Arabs, Arab Christians and Ashkenazi Jews. There are Jews whose ancestors fled Europe, Jews who have been indigenous to the land for generations, and Jews who fled from Arab lands before or after the creation of the State of Israel. These people fled from pogroms and massacres sometimes predating 1948, sometimes coming after it.

Memorization remaps the brain's neural networks. It reorganizes your master muscle. The human attempt to harness our minds is why we have mantras, why we say prayers, why we make plays. Memorizing the text of a tragedy in its entirety, as I had done in Arabic, by listening to it over and over, does a number on you. You carry the useless deaths and the maddening sorrows within your folds until you forget. Until the lines you've learned are lost.

From antiquity there is then an unbroken record of its constant presence wherever people have clustered in substantial settlements. It was a scourge of ancient Greece and Rome, of the Arab World, of the Far East, and of medieval and early modern Europe. In the West, TB achieved a peak of ferocity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and the massive urbanization that accompanied it. It is principally a respiratory disease spread through the air.

the aforementioned case of Muhammad Hegazy, who was not permitted to change his religion from Islam to Christianity on his I.D. card. In February 2009, another apostate, Maher Al-Gohary, fifty-eight, tried to officially convert to Christianity—only to be accused of apostasy, with prosecutors calling for the death penalty. As Maher himself put it: “Our rights in Egypt, as Christians or converts, are less than the rights of animals. We are deprived of social and civil rights, deprived of our inheritance and left to the fundamentalists to be killed. Nobody bothers to investigate or care about us.” He has been attacked in the street, spat upon, beaten, and threatened by text messages and phone calls—all simply because he petitioned to be granted the right to convert to Christianity. Eventually he and his daughter fled to Syria, once a moderate nation under secularist Bashar Assad. However, since the “Arab Spring” reached there, too—with Syrian Christians under attack by jihadis—in 2011, Maher and his daughter managed to flee to France where they applied for asylum.66

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I am Israel. I never miss a chance to claim victimhood while inflicting violence. In 1947, the United Nations handed me more than half of someone else’s land. A gift I didn’t earn, from colonial powers who didn’t own it. I accepted. My neighbors objected. I called it war—and in the chaos, I began my cleansing. Over 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes—some fled, yes—but many were forced out at gunpoint, their villages razed, their names erased. Then I planted pine trees over the ruins—to hide the memory. Forests where homes once stood. Parks over cemeteries. I made it green so the world wouldn’t see the black underneath. I called it “reforestation.” They called it erasure. I am Israel. I have never chosen peace—only dominance. In 1967, I launched a pre-emptive war and seized Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and Sinai. I claimed it was for security. I held onto it for power. I built settlements, one by one, choking Palestinian towns. International law said it was illegal. I ignored it. My map grew. Their freedom shrank. I am Israel. I could have ended the occupation. Many times. But I always said no. In 2000, at Camp David, I offered a patchwork of disconnected enclaves surrounded by walls, checkpoints, and soldiers. I called it peace. Palestinians walked away. I called them extremists. Then I built a wall, not on my border—but deep in theirs. I called it security. They called it theft. I am Israel. I glorify militarism. I raise children to believe they are chosen. My textbooks erase Palestine. My soldiers patrol streets with rifles pointed at teenagers. My media justifies bombings. My politicians joke about flattening Gaza. I send airstrikes to refugee camps, schools, and hospitals. Then I say they were human shields. I am Israel. I elected Netanyahu. Again and again. Not once, by mistake. But knowingly. I voted for leaders who vowed to crush the Palestinians, to expand settlements, to never allow a Palestinian state. My ministers speak of “the Arabs” as a demographic threat. My settlers burn olive trees. My mobs chant “Death to Arabs.” I call it patriotism. I am Israel. I speak of democracy—but deny it to millions under my control. I rule over millions who cannot vote in the country that controls their lives. I build roads they cannot drive on. I issue permits for them to breathe, to move, to live. I bomb Gaza, then seal it off and say it’s their fault. I say I left Gaza—but I control its air, sea, and borders. I say they are free—then I starve them. I am Israel. I demand recognition—but give none in return. I demand that Palestinians accept me as a Jewish state—while refusing to even say the word “Nakba.” I ignore the homes, lands, and history of those I displaced. I hold their keys in museums, not their hands. I deny the refugees their right to return. I make laws that call them “absentees,” even when they’re just over the hill. I am Israel. I cry antisemitism—when what I fear is accountability. I call any critic a hater. I blur the line between Judaism and Zionism, using one to shield the crimes of the other. I weaponize history to excuse apartheid. I manipulate trauma to justify conquest. I say “Never again”—but let it happen to others, by my own hand. I am Israel. I will never be secure

Death by Starvation or Boredom” Many toil for scraps and cheap wages, surviving one fragile breath at a time— just one more breath... While others, bloated with excess, labor only to escape boredom, pretending they’re saving a world drowning in the greed they created, and the power they refuse to let go. The first walks a tightrope between breath and hunger. The second, cushioned by comfort, drifts closer to spiritual starvation, their soul numbed by excess. And here lies the cruel symmetry— fate, with its blunt hands, levels the field by offering death either way: starvation... or boredom. But the greatest tragedy belongs to those who die of both.

They Say the World Will End Soon" They say the nuclear weapons—born of fear of the other— have become a curse, a plague, a scourge upon those who built them, even more than those they were meant to threaten… And I wonder: Will nuclear weapons bring about the end of the world? Or will it be humanity’s fear, complicity, and quiet submission? If what they say is true, before the world ends—and before I die— I wish to drink one last cup of cardamom-flavored tea, to taste one final fig, peach, or apricot, to inhale the scent of a quince, to dip one last piece of bread into Palestinian thyme and olive oil… Before the world ends, I want to smell pine needles, and breathe the scent of the season’s first rain after a long, dry summer. Before the world ends—and before I die— I long to read one more book from the thousands still waiting for me. I ask for one more spring to inhale bunches of Iraqi narcissus. And one more autumn to marvel at the dying leaves— defying death with beauty just before falling upon the indifferent ground. But most of all, my final wish before I die is that my death not be the end of the world…

(Beware of Strangers) As children, we are taught to beware of strangers, to refrain from approaching them. As we grow older, we learn that no one is stranger than those we thought we’d known all our lives. We learn that a stranger may carry more empathy, and understand us more deeply, and that affections from a stranger may be more sincere. So, I ask: Can humanity and strangeness be synonymous? Could we say, 'I am a stranger; therefore I am'? Can we truly feel alive without strange things, strange encounters, without strangers reminding us that our hearts and minds are still beating? They teach us to avoid strangers, yet life teaches us that human awareness can only be born of the dagger of strangeness… that life is tasteless without mingling with strangers… that familiarity is opposed to life! Thus, I loudly declare: A stranger I was born; a stranger I wish to remain! And I ask that you issue my death certificate the day I become familiar. October 29, 2022

Among the first journalists to make it into the town was Tamer al-Meshal of Al Jazeera Arabic. Al-Meshal arrived in Khuza’a as hundreds of traumatized refugees fled int he other direction, many carrying decomposing bodies wrapped in blankets. The road was littered with the corpses of those cut down by Israeli tank fire as they tried to escape. Among the bodies was that of a teenage girl killed a few meters in front of her wheelchair. In a home at the eastern edge of town, al-Meshal found a pile of burned bodies in a bathroom spattered with dried blood and pieces of flesh. On August 2, when a seventy-two-hour ceasefire finally took hold, Ghadir Rujeila was found by refugees who had been straming out of the village. She lay dead six meters in front of her wheelchair, crumpled along the side of the road, filled with shrapnel and partly decomposed. The teenage girl had apparently attempted to chase after her fleeing family before Israeli tank fire cut her down Left behind in the chaos, she bled to death alone.

Throughout the 51 Day War, The Shadow organized alongside Michael Ben-Ari, a ringleader of some of the settlement movement's most extreme elements. Ben-Ari was a former lieutenant of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the patron saint of Israel's ul-tra-nationalist right who immigrated from Brooklyn to Israel in 1971 to organize militant cells among fanatical Jewish youth. Though he was banned from the Knesset, where he served during the mid-1980s, for his open calls for violence, and his Kach party was outlawed, Kahane's influence has lived on in the discriminatory laws introduced by mainstream parties and through acolytes like Ben-Ari, who held a seat in the Knesset from 2009 to 2013. While in the Knesset, Ben-Ari turned his parliamentary field offices into organizing hubs for the anti-Af-rican movement, which organized vigilante patrols that harassed and incited violence against the sixty thousand non-Jewish African refugees living in Israel. Through Lehava, a radical hate group dedicated to preventing romantic relationships between Jews and Arabs, Ben-Ari and fellow Kahanists held rallies in mixed Jewish-Arab cities across Israel to spread held rallies in mixed Jewish-Arab cities across Israel to spread fear and hatred of supposedly predatory Arab males. In June, Lehava had helped organize the "Death to Arabs" rallies in Jerusalem that inspired the killing of Muhammad Abu Khdeir.

A week later, a mob of assorted right-wing nationalists assaulted an anti-war rally in Haifa, bombarding the gathering of Palestinians and leftists with a hailstorm of stones while police stood by and watched. After burning a Palestinian flag while chanting "Death to Arabs," a group of right-wing activists went looking for Arabs to assault. They found Suhail Assad, the deputy mayor of the city, beating him and his son so severely that they had to be hospitalized. When police passed by, the assailants simply walked away, and the police made no arrests.

Over the sound of gritty break-beats and stirring string samples, The Shadow and Subliminal defended cops and lonized army service, upending the anti-authority sensibility that defines traditional rap culture. When the two self-styled Zionist rappers performed during the bloodiest days of the in-tifada, their audiences often erupted with chants of "Death to Arabs!" In June, following the abduction of the three Israeli teens, Subliminal took to Facebook to lash out at a Palestinian-Israeli member of the Knesset, Haneen Zoabi, who had objected to her interviewer's characterization of the kidnappers as terrorists. "I'm not ashamed to say that I hope she'll be run down [in an auto accident] and die, or slip in the bath and rip her head off, or eat a rotten egg and die of food poisoning, or anything.

Those who had been inside before this latest conflict said that it was noticeable how radicalized the population had become. Copies of Mein Kampf in Arabic were one of the most common books they came across in civilian homes, as well as tracts like “How to Kill Jews.

There was a long silence. The peach, like the bunch of grapes, had fallen on the sand. 'Monsieur le Comte,' Mercédès said finally, looking imploringly at Monte Cristo, 'there is a touching Arab custom that promises eternal friendship between those who have shared bread and salt under the same roof. 'I know it, Madame,' the count replied. But we are in France and not in Arabia; and in France there is no more eternal friendship than there is sharing of bread and salt." 'But we are friends, are we not?' she said, breathing rapidly and looking directly into Monte Cristo's eyes, while clasping his arm with both hands. The blood rushed to the count's heart and he became as white as death; then it rose from his heart to his throat and spread across his cheeks. For a few moments his eyes would not focus, like those of a man dazzled by a bright light. 'Of course we are friends, Madame,' he replied. 'Why should we not be?