Origami

An amazing series of origami constructions that are just mind-blowing. click here...

THE ASSEMBLY OF JEWISH NOTABLES

This is a piece that I found very interesting. Napoleon was testing the loyalty of Jews in his republic and also to incorporate them or in a sense destroy them. Some of these issues are relevant to Muslims in the West and could be asked of us. This is how another minority replied all those years ago.

Answers to NapoleonResolved, by the French deputies professing the religion of Moses, that the following Declaration shall precede the answers returned to the questions proposed by the Commissioners of His Imperial and Royal Majesty. The assembly, impressed with a deep sense of gratitude, love, respect, and admiration, for the sacred person of His Imperial and Royal Majesty, declares, in the name of all Frenchmen professing the religion of Moses, that they are fully determined to prove worthy of the favours His Majesty intends for them, by scrupulously conforming to his paternal intentions; that their religion makes it their duty to consider the law of the prince as the supreme law in civil and political matters; that consequently, should their religious code, or its various interpretations, contain civil or political commands, at variance with those of the French code, those commands would, of course, cease to influence and govern them, since they must, above all, acknowledge and obey the laws of the prince.

That, in consequence of this principle, the Jews have, at all times, considered it their duty to obey the laws of the state, and that, since the revolution, they, like all Frenchmen, have acknowledged no others.

First Question:Is it lawful for Jews to marry more than one wife?

Answer:It is not lawful for Jews to marry more than one wife: in all European countries they conform to the general practice marrying only one.Moses does not command expressly to take several, but he does not forbid it. He seems even to adopt that custom as generally prevailing, since he settles the rights of inheritance between children of different wives. Although this practice still prevails in the East, yet their ancient doctors have enjoined them to restrain from taking more than one wife, except when the man is enabled by his fortune to maintain several.

The case has been different in the West; the wish of adopting the customs of the inhabitants of this part of the world has induced the Jews to renounce polygamy. But as several individuals still indulged in that practice, a synod was convened at Worms in the eleventh century, composed of one hundred Rabbis, with Gershom at their head. This assembly pronounced an anathema against every Israelite who should, in future, take more than one wife.

Although this prohibition was not to last for ever, the influence of European manners has universally prevailed.

Second Question:Is divorce allowed by the Jewish religion?

Is divorce valid when not pronounced by courts of justice by virtue of laws in contradiction with those of the French Code? Answer: Repudiation is allowed by the law of Moses; but it is not valid if not Previously pronounced by the French code.In the eyes of every Israelite, without exception, submission to the prince is the first of duties. It is a Principle generally acknowledged among them, that, in every thing relating to civil or political interests, the law of the state is the supreme law. Before they were admitted in France to share the rights of all citizens, and when they lived under a particular legislation which set them at liberty to follow their religious customs, they had the ability to divorce their wives; but it was extremely rare to see it put into practice. Since the revolution, they have acknowledged no other laws on this head but those of the empire. At the epoch when they were admitted to the rank of citizens, the Rabbis and the principal Jews appeared before the municipalities of their respective places of abode, and took an oath to conform, in every thing to the laws, and to acknowledge no other rules in all civil matters...

Read more...

Exasperation

Like many Iraqi and Arab observers, Muqtada was shocked when US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said last week that the US military would not intervene in an Iraqi civil war, leaving that to Iraqi forces.

' "May God damn you," Sadr said of Rumsfeld. "You said in the past that civil war would break out if you were to withdraw, and now you say that in case of civil war you won't interfere." '

Former top judge says US risks edging near to dictatorship

Julian Borger in WashingtonMonday March 13, 2006 GuardianThe following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Monday March 20 2006In the article below, we referred to a US court decision to order Terri Schiavo to be removed from life support, describing her in our account as "brain dead". Relatives of Terri Schiavo point out that although she was severely brain damaged there was no diagnosis of "brain dead" and neither was that the conclusion of the post-mortem examination. Sandra Day O'Connor, a Republican-appointed judge who retired last month after 24 years on the supreme court, has said the US is in danger of edging towards dictatorship if the party's rightwingers continue to attack the judiciary. In a strongly worded speech at Georgetown University, reported by National Public Radio and the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, Ms O'Connor took aim at Republican leaders whose repeated denunciations of the courts for alleged liberal bias could, she said, be contributing to a climate of violence against judges. Ms O'Connor, nominated by Ronald Reagan as the first woman supreme court justice, declared: "We must be ever-vigilant against those who would strong-arm the judiciary." She pointed to autocracies in the developing world and former Communist countries as lessons on where interference with the judiciary might lead. "It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings." In her address to an audience of corporate lawyers on Thursday, Ms O'Connor singled out a warning to the judiciary issued last year by Tom DeLay, the former Republican leader in the House of Representatives, over a court ruling in a controversial "right to die" case. After the decision last March that ordered a brain-dead woman in Florida, Terri Schiavo, removed from life support, Mr DeLay said: "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behaviour." Mr DeLay later called for the impeachment of judges involved in the Schiavo case, and called for more scrutiny of "an arrogant, out-of-control, unaccountable judiciary that thumbed their nose at Congress and the president". Such threats, Ms O'Connor said, "pose a direct threat to our constitutional freedom", and she told the lawyers in her audience: "I want you to tune your ears to these attacks ... You have an obligation to speak up. "Statutes and constitutions do not protect judicial independence - people do," the retired supreme court justice said.

Read more...

Basilica burning

Jonathan Cook in Nazareth was caught up in the attack on the Basilica of the Annunciation The news swept across Nazareth last Friday like wildfire. There had been a terror attack on the Basilica of the Annunciation, the huge church in the city centre built over a grotto where Christians believe the archangel Gabriel revealed to Mary she was bearing the son of God. By 6pm, half an hour after the first explosion, I was with a crowd of Nazarenes pushing their way through the only open gate into the walled-off courtyard of the church. Just visible, as final darkness fell, were faces etched by a mixture of anger and anxiety. Christians and Muslims, who share Nazareth, were equally shocked at the violation of one of the Holy Land’s most sacred spaces. The attack had begun at 5.30pm, half way through a special service for Lent, attended by hundreds of local Roman Catholics and a handful of tourists. Twelve-year-old Subhi Espanioly, who was there with his grandmother, said he had been startled by a loud explosion followed by coloured smoke. Subhi and the other members of the congregation huddled together for several terrifying minutes as a series of further explosions were set off. During a lull, a priest and several Nazarenes overpowered a grey-bearded man in jeans, 44-year-old Haim Habibi, an Israeli Jew who was with his wife, Violet, and the couple’s 20-year-old daughter Odelia. Subhi said that when he arrived for the service he had seen the three of them wheeling a baby’s pushchair around the courtyard, looking at a permanent exhibition of murals and paintings of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus donated by international churches. After angry bystanders started beating Habibi, priests and a small contingent of local policemen hurried the three intruders into an annex of the church, where they were locked up for their own safety. By the time of my arrival, the church courtyard and the approach road, Casa Nova, were nearly full. Most of the crowd were silent but young hotheads stood on the roof of the annex building, jeering at the terrorists they assumed were inside. No one was ready to leave the courtyard. Nazarenes were gripped by the need to show communal solidarity in the face of the latest assault by a Jew on an Arab holy place and on a Palestinian community. Six months ago, in an attempt to stop the disengagement, an Israeli soldier, Natan Eden Zada, used his army rifle to spray a bus with bullets, killing two Christians and two Muslims, in the neighbouring community of Shafa’amr. He apparently believed he was following in the footsteps of another soldier, Baruch Goldstein, who opened fire at the mosque in the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994. Other Jewish religious extremists have tried, so far unsuccessfully, to blow up the Haram al-Sharif complex of mosques in Jerusalem in the hope of building the Third Temple in its place. Read more...

Quran Quote of the Day on Peace

The Muslims say "hello" with the phrase "as-Salamu `alaykum"-- "peace be upon you." Once the pagan, polytheistic Meccan tribes started attacking the Muslims and trying to wipe them out, the question was raised of how to repond when a pagan not connected to the Meccans greeted a Muslim. The instinct was to refuse to accept the sincerity of the greeting, "peace be upon you," which was also a pledge of non-violence toward the person greeted. That tendency was reinforced by greed, since if the Muslims fought these pagan strangers and won, they would legitimately be able to demand loot from them. (This was a tribal, often nomadic society, and that was the custom when tribes raided each other). The Quran settles this dilemma. It says that Muslims are not to taunt pagans who greet them with "peace be upon you" by shouting, "You're not a Muslim!" They are to accept the sincerity of the greeting, and are not to get so greedy for spoils that they let it affect their judgment of others. When you are offered peace, take it. Quran 4:94: . . . Do not say to one who offers you peace, "You are not a believer," seeking the spoils of this life. For God has abundant treasure. You used to be like them, after all, and then God blessed you. Neither 4:94, nor 4:90, quoted on Friday, imply that pagans must give up their paganism in order to be at peace with, and treated well by Muslims. Rather, the Quran takes a two-track approach. As a monotheistic scripture, it condemns idol worship and warns its practitioners of hell-fire in the afterlife. But as a matter of everyday, this-worldly practice, the Quran commands Muslims to live in peace with pagans who do not make war on them and who approach them in peace. This is the answer to the reader who asked about the Quran's attitude to atheists. The Quran condemns unbelief as spiritually wrong and as leading to perdition in the next life. But the Quran says Muslims should live in peace with nonviolent pagans in this world, if the pagans are inclined to coexistence with the Muslims. Readers asked me about the long list of militant verses collected by polemicists against Islam. The answer is that those verses refer to the Meccan power elite in the 620s AD, who were waging a determined military, political and economic war to defeat the Muslims holed up in nearby Medina, and wipe them and the new religion out. It is frankly dishonest to take a verse about, say, the battle of Badr against the militant Meccan pagans ("unbelievers") and imply that it refers to contemporary American Christians or American atheists for that matter. What was objectionable to the Quran in practical terms about the Meccan unbelievers was their murderousness toward Muslims, not their attachment to their star goddesses. Muslims are instructed to be nice to unbelievers who don't share that murderousness. Note that I am explicating the Quran itself. Later Muslim commentators have interpreted it in many ways, and much Muslim law and practice are based on later customs and traditions. I am here deploying the technique of the hermeneutical circle, using texts from the book to illuminate other texts from the book. This strategy makes sense because we don't have any works we can be sure are as early as, and contemporaneous with the Quran. The biographies of the Prophet were produced nearly two centuries later and more. Much later Quran interpretation was done by persons who lived in militaristic, feudal societies, or who lived in empires where Muslims were a ruling caste, and their interpretations were shaped by these circumstances. They also tended to lack the techniques of contextual and causal thinking typical of contemporary academic writing. The Quran was produced at a time when the Muslims were a small group, and persecuted by the richer and more powerful Meccan pagans, and the Quran is not picky about the beliefs of the friendly tribes willing to be at peace with the Muslims.

Quran Verse of the Day on Peace

Chapter 25 of the Quran, "The Criterion" (al-Furqan), came to the Prophet Muhammad when he was still a preacher in Mecca (circa 610-622 AD), before the Meccans became so hostile and bloodthirsty that the Muslims had to leave for the nearby city of Yathrib, which became known as the City of the Prophet (Madinat an-Nabi) or Medina.The Criterion lays out toward the end of its 77 verses a vision of the pious believer. That has to do first of all with wishing others peace.

25:63:The worshippers of the All-Merciful are they who tread gently upon the earth, and when the ignorant address them, they reply, "Peace!"

The small Muslim community in Mecca faced much harassment and persecution. The "ignorant" in this verse are the militant polytheists who hate the monotheistic message of Islam. What they "speak" to the Muslims is abuse and taunts. The early Muslims viewed the times of pagan dominance as the Age of Ignorance (al-Jahiliyyah).One name for God in Islam is al-Rahman, or the All-Merciful. This verse chooses that epithet for the divine, it seems to me quite deliberately in this context. The Muslims are the worshippers of the All-Merciful. It is implied that they are expected to exemplify this divine attribute in their own lives, and to show mercy, compassion and forebearance to others. (The root r*h*m from which al-Rahman derives implies all of these characteristics).So what do they do when the "ignorant" Meccans curse them, taunt them, and harass them?They reply, "Peace be upon you." They wish their tormentors peace, and in so doing they pledge their own nonviolence toward them.In this phase of the development of the Islamic community, in Mecca, the pagans have not yet taken up arms against the Muslims. And the Muslims, in turn, are turning the other cheek, behaving with extreme restraint, and greeting harsh treatment with compassion and wishes of peace.The subsequent verses go on to sketch out elements of the spiritual life before coming back to issues of peace and violence: The verses describe the ideal Muslims:

2564. They pass the night in adoration of their Lord, prostrating themselves and then rising.65. They say, "Our Lord, avert from us the torment of hell. Its torture is ruinous.66. It is an evil place and abode."67. When they spend, they are neither spendthrifts nor miserly, but keep to a golden mean.68. They do not call on any deity other than the one God. They do not kill a person, the taking of whose blood God has forbidden, except for just cause. They do not commit adultery. Those who commit these acts must pay. Their torment on the Judgment Day will be doubled, and they will be consigned to eternal abasement--69. Unless they repent, have faith, and do righteous works. For such as these, God changes their evil deeds into good works. God is forgiving and compassionate.

These verses recommend nighttime prayer, fear of hellfire, balanced spending habits, and belief in only one God. They forbid murder and adultery. Since both of these are torts, the Quran recognizes that they must be punished. Typically in seventh-century Mecca, the wrongdoer would pay blood money or guilt money to the aggrieved party. But the Quran requires more than just the retirement of a debt to the injured family. It demands repentance, faith, and good works in redemption. These reorientations of the will can have a transformative effect, and lead to divine forgiveness.These verses from The Criterion define the Muslim community as peaceful, as wishing even enemies peace, and as forbidding bloodshed except in self-defense.

Folding t-shirt

If anyone knows how obsessed i am with ironing they'll understand why i appreciate this so much.... click here...