Category Archives: Books

A Young Muslim’s Guide to the Greater Jihad, the War Against the Passions

Introducing a brand new shiny online bookshop focusing on sufi literature – Sufi Books. From whence:

The Virtues of the Prophet: A Young Muslim’s Guide to the Greater Jihad, the War Against the Passions by Charles Upton.

The Islamicists want to reduce Islam to a heartless political ideology; the globalists want to turn it into a ‘licensed’ religion for use in pacifying, and ultimately secularizing, the populations of dar al-Islam. Under such damaging blows, young Muslims need to remember not just the Holy Book, but the man whose character was the perfect mirror of that Book.

And a review by Huston Smith:

In the religion of Islam the character of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, is the model of human virtue.

Also posted in Sufism | 14 Comments

The Political Mastery of Tony Blair

Stopping to smell the roses

Andrew Gilligan’s superb ‘review’ of Tony Blair’s new book A Journey is well worth the read. Gilligan himself played a fundamental role in the undoing of the ’45-minute claim’, on which Blair goes into some detail.

But it is, of course, Iraq where the trust issue reached crisis point. Fascinatingly, Blair admits that even by the tests of his own stated criteria for liberal interventionism, as set out in a speech in Chicago, the case for war was “finely balanced”. Again, not something you’d have known from his campaigning certainty at the time.

The disaster that unfolded post-war is described in those Blairish sentences lacking active verbs – implying that it was almost a force of nature, over which we had no control. Evil outsiders, such as
al-Qaeda and Iran, are blamed – with no mention of who created the vacuum for them to fill. The British reconstruction effort is described as “adequate”, and all problems are blamed on the US – a straightforwardly false claim.

Posted in Books | 2 Comments

Won’t somebody please think of the children

Here we go again. The Times reports that there are “fears of Muslim anger” because an academic book critical of Muhammad’s marriage to A’isha, his third wife who was six or seven years old at the time of the marriage (according to traditional reports, although consummation did not occur until she was nine) is to be published soon.

This matter, questioning the sexual behaviour of a man held to be a prophet by 1.2 billion people, is unsurprisingly fraught: it is only a few weeks since the conviction of three men for attempting to diesel bomb the UK publisher of ‘Jewel of Medina’.

But it is not just historical novelists and academics who discuss Muhammad’s marriage to A’isha, some people who are not very keen on Islam also tend to focus on it. Here are a couple of examples taken from the comments threads at Harry’s Place.

Also posted in Anti Muslim bigotry, Freedom of Expression | Tagged , , | 76 Comments

Diesel bombers convicted

Beheshti, Mirza, Taj

Beheshti, Mirza, Taj

Three men, Ali Beheshti (41), Abrar Mirza (23) and Abbas Taj (31) who conspired to firebomb the residence of publisher Martin Rynja in September 2008, have been found guilty of recklessly damaging property and endangering life.

Rynja had been planning to publish a novel by US author Shelley Jones called the Jewel of Medina.

Fortunately all three men, who possessed the collective IQ of a cabbage, had been under police surveillance. Officers followed them on the night of the attack and arrested Beheshti, a former member of al-Mouhajiroun and Mirza at the scene. The fire was quickly put out. Taj was the driver of the getaway car.

The men were under surveillance by police who had warned Martin Rynja, 43, and his partner, to move out of their four-storey townhouse, which had an office in the basement.

Also posted in Crime, Freedom of Expression | 8 Comments
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