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I have some interesting topics to finish and post.. just bear with me I’m building a new computer tonight for myself.

An interesting article I found referenced on the ID blog, Uncommon Descent:

Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history

By Dinesh D’Souza

RANCHO SANTA FE, CALIF. - In recent months, a spate of atheist books have
argued that religion represents, as “End of Faith” author Sam Harris puts
it, “the most potent source of human conflict, past and present.”

Columnist Robert Kuttner gives the familiar litany. “The Crusades
slaughtered millions in the name of Jesus. The Inquisition brought the
torture and murder of millions more. After Martin Luther, Christians did
bloody battle with other Christians for another three centuries.”

In his bestseller “The God Delusion,” Richard Dawkins contends that most of
the world’s recent conflicts - in the Middle East, in the Balkans, in
Northern Ireland, in Kashmir, and in Sri Lanka - show the vitality
of religion’s murderous impulse.

The problem with this critique is that it exaggerates the crimes attributed
to religion, while ignoring the greater crimes of secular fanaticism. The
best example of religious persecution in America is the Salem witch trials.
How many people were killed in those trials? Thousands? Hundreds? Actually,
fewer than 25. Yet the event still haunts the liberal imagination.

It is strange to witness the passion with which some secular figures rail
against the misdeeds of the Crusaders and Inquisitors more than 500 years
ago. The number sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition appears to be
about 10,000. Some historians contend that an additional 100,000 died in
jail due to malnutrition or illness.

These figures are tragic, and of course population levels were much lower
at the time. But even so, they are minuscule compared with the death tolls
produced by the atheist despotisms of the 20th century. In the name of
creating their version of a religion-free utopia, Adolf Hitler, Joseph
Stalin, and Mao Zedong produced the kind of mass slaughter that no
Inquisitor could possibly match. Collectively these atheist tyrants
murdered more than 100 million people.

Moreover, many of the conflicts that are counted as “religious wars” were
not fought over religion. They were mainly fought over rival claims to
territory and power. Can the wars between England and France be called
religious wars because the English were Protestants and the French were
Catholics? Hardly.

The same is true today. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not, at its
core, a religious one. It arises out of a dispute over self-determination
and land. Hamas and the extreme orthodox parties in Israel may
advance theological claims - “God gave us this land” and so forth - but the
conflict would remain essentially the same even without these religious
motives. Ethnic rivalry, not religion, is the source of the tension in
Northern Ireland and the Balkans.

Yet today’s atheists insist on making religion the culprit. Consider Mr.
Harris’s analysis of the conflict in Sri Lanka. “While the motivations of
the Tamil Tigers are not explicitly religious,” he informs us, “they are
Hindus who undoubtedly believe many improbable things about the nature of
life and death.” In other words, while the Tigers see themselves as
combatants in a secular political struggle, Harris detects a religious
motive because these people happen to be Hindu and surely there must be
some underlying religious craziness that explains their fanaticism.

Harris can go on forever in this vein. Seeking to exonerate secularism and
atheism from the horrors perpetrated in their name, he argues that
Stalinism and Maoism were in reality “little more than a political
religion.” As for Nazism, “while the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed
itself in a predominantly secular way, it was a direct inheritance from
medieval Christianity.” Indeed, “The holocaust marked the culmination of
… two thousand years of Christian fulminating against the Jews.”

One finds the same inanities in Mr. Dawkins’s work. Don’t be fooled by this
rhetorical legerdemain. Dawkins and Harris cannot explain why, if Nazism
was directly descended from medieval Christianity, medieval Christianity
did not produce a Hitler. How can a self-proclaimed atheist ideology,
advanced by Hitler as a repudiation of Christianity, be a “culmination” of
2,000 years of Christianity? Dawkins and Harris are employing a transparent
sleight of hand that holds Christianity responsible for the crimes
committed in its name, while exonerating secularism and atheism for the
greater crimes committed in their name.

Religious fanatics have done things that are impossible to defend, and some
of them, mostly in the Muslim world, are still performing horrors in the
name of their creed. But if religion sometimes disposes people to
self-righteousness and absolutism, it also provides a moral code that
condemns the slaughter of innocents. In particular, the moral teachings of
Jesus provide no support for - indeed they stand as a stern rebuke to - the
historical injustices perpetrated in the name of Christianity.

Atheist hubris

The crimes of atheism have generally been perpetrated through a hubristic
ideology that sees man, not God, as the creator of values. Using the latest
techniques of science and technology, man seeks to displace God and create
a secular utopia here on earth. Of course if some people - the Jews, the
landowners, the unfit, or the handicapped - have to be eliminated in order
to achieve this utopia, this is a price the atheist tyrants and their
apologists have shown themselves quite willing to pay. Thus they confirm
the truth of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s dictum, “If God is not, everything is
permitted.”

Whatever the motives for atheist bloodthirstiness, the indisputable fact is
that all the religions of the world put together have in 2,000 years not
managed to kill as many people as have been killed in the name of atheism
in the past few decades.

It’s time to abandon the mindlessly repeated mantra that religious belief
has been the greatest source of human conflict and violence. Atheism, not
religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history.

* Dinesh D’Souza is the Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution. His new
book, “The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for
9/11,” will be published in January.

SOURCE: http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1121/p09s01-coop.html

Provided by Tahir Hakkani - Sheykh Abdul Kerim of the Naksibendi Hakkani tarikat speaks about controlling egoistic desires and working on ourselves first before judging others. He explains that we must also associate ourselves with the righteous in order to prepare for the arrival of Mehdi aleyhis selam.

–

Shaykh speaks about how all the religions are dividing into those who are holding truth and will stand with Jesus (Alayhewassalam) and those who are against it.

Tassawuf (Sufism) is the spiritual science of Islam, while Fiqh is the Legal science, and Aqida is the science of Theology.

Found via SufiNews

The Three Pillars of Sufism: Humility, Charity, Truth

Discourse: OSHO - Times of India - India
Saturday, August 5, 2006

The Qur’an says three basic qualities have to be in the heart of the seeker. The first is khushu or humility. The second is karamat or charity, and what this means is sharing, to experience the joy of giving. And the third is sijd or truthfulness, which means authenticity. That is, recognising that which you are. These are the three pillars of Sufism.

Humility does not mean the ordinary so-called humbleness. The humble person is not egoless. He carries a new kind of ego, of being humble. He thinks he is humble, “Nobody is as humble as I am”. He goes on comparing. The ego has not changed, the ego has only taken a new posture, more subtle. First the ego was very gross.

That’s when you go on bragging about your money. One day you renounce all your money and then you start bragging that you have renounced all. This is subtle, but the bragging continues. The claim was for somebody, now it is for nobody.

The claim is still there. Now it has taken a subtle form. Humility, khushu, means a man who has understood all the ways of the ego. And by understanding all the ways of the ego, the ego has disappeared.

This is one of the most essential qualities for those who want to move towards godliness — because if you are too much you will not be moving. You have to be liquid, you have to melt; you cannot remain frozen in your ego.

The second is charity, karamat. Charity does not mean that you give and you feel very good that you have given, that you give and you oblige the person to whom you have given. Then it is not karamat; then it is not charity.

Charity is when you give and you feel obliged that the other has taken it; when you give with no idea that you are obliging anybody in any way; when you give because you have too much. It is not that the other needs.

Charity is when you give out of your abundance. The flower has blossomed and the words spread the fragrance to the winds — what else can the flower do? The lamp has been lit and it shares its light, it spreads its light. The cloud is full of water and it showers — what else can it do?

The third is truthfulness. It does not mean saying the truth, it means being the truth. Saying is only half-way; being is the true thing.

You can say truth a few times when it doesn’t harm you — that’s what people go on doing. When truth is not going to harm them they become truthful. And if sometimes truth is going to harm others they persist in being very truthful.

But when the truth is not going to help you then you drop it, then it is no more meaningful. That’s why people say “Honesty is the best policy”. Policy? The very word is dishonest.

Truth cannot be a policy and honesty cannot be a policy. They can only be your very heart — not policies. Policies can be used and dropped. Policies are political. When honesty pays, you are honest — that’s what it means.

When it does not pay, you become dishonest. You have no relationship with honesty. You use it. Sijd means to be truthful, to be true. It is not only a question of policy.

Whatsoever happens, whatsoever the result, not thinking of the result but just to be true, to risk all for truth — that’s what sijd is. It is to risk everything for truth — because if truth is saved, all is saved, and if truth is lost, all is lost.

*Profanity, Violence - Viewer Discretion advised

From HAhmed, MujahadeenRyder

A News report:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emEK7t2m35Q&NR

The actual video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emEK7t2m35Q&NR

Two promising books that I found in my searches, both to-be-released within the next few months.
They are quite expensive, but they may be worth it!

From al-Andalus to Khurasan
Documents from the Medieval Muslim World
Edited by Petra M. Sijpesteijn, Lennart Sundelin, Sofía Torallas Tovar and Amalia Zomeño

Description from Publisher:

As in many areas of pre-modern history, the study of medieval Islamic history has been critically hindered by the lack of available evidence. Unlike many parallel fields, however, the shortage of contemporary documentary evidence for medieval Islam has less to do with the survival of documents and archives as with their accessibility.
A rich documentary legacy survives, but because of its inaccessibility and unfamiliarity to all but the most specialised scholars in the field, it has remained sadly underutilised. This volume contributes to the redressing of that problem. It collects papers given at the conference “Documents and the History of the Early Islamic Mediterranean World,” including editions of unpublished documents and historical studies, which make use of documentary evidence from al-Andalus, Sicily, Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, Syria and Khurasan.

Till God Inherits the Earth
Islamic Pious Endowments in al-Andalus (9-15th Centuries)
Alejandro García Sanjuán

Description from Publisher:

Till God Inherits the Earth deals with the origins and evolution of the Islamic institution of pious endowments in al-Andalus, analysing its juridical basis and its social-economic role.
Evidence is primarly drawn from Andalusi Maliki jurisprudence and from narrative and biographical traditional sources as well.
Separate chapters examine private and public donations and special importance is given to the analysis of the public goals of the institution, namely, charitative, religious (mosques, rabitas), educational and for the jihad. The book is completed with several appendices including complementary information, translations of Arabic texts and figures.
This study provides us with a complete knowledge of several and important issues such as the relevance of Islamic jurisprudence as an historical source, the structure of economic property, the idea of charity, the Islamic concept of general or common interest and the social and juridical role of men of religion.

Some time ago, I debated a particularly hard-headed group of atheists who seemed to think that Islamic traditionalist writings which discuss slavery were meant for the graveyard. I offered the idea that traditionalist interpretations on how to deal with poverty and the subclasses far outweigh ‘democratic alternatives’.

What is funny about certain forms of idealists is that they don’t even know they are idealists. Atheists such as these believe in an idealic vision where the weak are simply eliminated by the virtue of human goodness.

It’s not happening:

Two hundred years after the abolition of the slave trade by the UK Parliament in 1807, there are more slaves in the world than ever before; some estimate as many as 27 million.* It is easier and cheaper to buy and sell humans today than it was at the height of the transatlantic slave trade; in the 1800s, slaves were precious commodities, now they can be traded for just a few British pounds. Slavery may be forgotten, but it is not yet gone.

TurbanTip to Seekers Digest:

OpenDemocracy - Slavery in the 21st Century
March 2007 marks the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade. openDemocracy presents the first of a series of five photo-essays documenting contemporary forms of slavery around the world.