The Most Impertinent Gift of All - life, love, children and the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.s.)

1.      A Clear blue sky, Qasidah Burdah!

I am standing beneath

A clear blue sky,

As the night clouds part

To reveal stars that twinkle

And wink at me,

Trying to winkle from me

A little sigh, a little tear,

A little chuckle,

As I, Taufiq,

Take delight in God’s apparentness,

In the burning fire of stars countless

Light years away from me,

And in the delight of God’s covertness,

In the burning heart of the Prophet’s Companions

So near to me, that I can feel

Their breath upon my cheek,

Their hand upon my hand,

And they are saying,

“O’ Taufiq! What do you desire?”

And I am replying now,

“O’ Stars of my Twilight Sky,

It is your Master that I covet!

.................................

Really I do declare that I am the most greedy person I know. Not happy enough with the delights of this world and the birth of my son some 8 years ago, I still want more. I want the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.s.), of all the most impertinent desires that mortal men can hide in the folds of their hearts. 

But the point about divine gifts is that it comes with a qualification, for each thing which we receive, whether it is money and wealth, breath and health, land and friends, has a flip side. With great gifts come great responsibility - For what are we spending our money on? With each breath are we making this world better or worse? If we have health, what are doing with our bodies? And what are we allowing to be built on our lands? And do we take care of our friends, or do we neglect them?

And when it comes to the gift of children, come on... let's face it. We have never been properly trained and educated to fulfill our responsibilities towards them. For Muslims, they would therefore ask for the most impertinent divine gift to help them manage their responsibilities in this life, and that boon is the gift of access and intimacy with the best guide to all Mankind - God's anointed Mercy to the world(s), the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.s.).

Of course, he has passed away a long, long time ago. But if you really wanna know, the nature of death and the reality of the after life makes this a wholly technical issue which can be dealt with easily...

Attending to the Prophet(s.a.w.s.)

Attend to the Prophet

And the Prophet will attend to you

Direct your attention to the Prophet

And the Prophet will direct his attention to you

Listen to the Prophet, for he is already speaking to you,

Turn to the Prophet, for he is already gazing to you,

From a place far,  far away

But very, very near.

.........................

wa min Allah at-taufiq

Hate has no place in Islam

Love will show the Way

Saving the Earth - Have we turned from the House of Trust into a Band of Thieves?

End of the World. I have labels in this almanac (see the label cloud on the right column) called 'end of time', 'Antichrist', 'Dajjal' and 'Armageddon'. Under this vague tags I dumped all postings related to the end of the world (obviously), Armageddon and that sort of flurry of furious activities anticipated by believers to occur when the world ends. There are not many postings, about 5 I think. This is very few considering that I have written 644 postings for 2011.

Something got me thinking... I do not write a lot about the end of the world, because I am kinda busy living. Writing and reading. And in the course of one reading, I have come across this little gem of information. It is of course up to you whether to believe it or not. But being the sort of person that I am, I believe it (and have in fact posted about it earlier in 'God is a Good Book Without End - Adam brought Heaven to Earth' - Click Here)- basically what this nugget of spiritual lore says is that the Earth was a barren world, devoid of life. And it was Adam, who was exiled from Heaven, who brought with him the divine elements of Heaven to Earth, and thus creating on our world, an earthly copy of Heaven. And that got me thinking...

Earth, a barren world. When God says that mankind is suppose to be His representative, His viceregent on Earth, it is not simply a Divine Whim (even though He can do that, of course, being your know... God). It is more importantly because of our common ancestors, Adam and Eve who brought a little bit of Heaven to Earth. It is by their exile and establishment of a new home on Earth, that Earth as we know it now exists. If our grandma Eve did not eat that forbidden fruit, if our grandpa Adam did not chock on it, the Earth would have remained changed. It would still be a barren old brown planet, floating purposeless in the empty void of space. And we would not have been born at all. Not our parents, not our friends... no one.

Divine plan and mortal agency. But as God fated it, the Devil did trick the First Couple, and so triggered the sequence of events leading eons in future to the present. To the right here and now, to me writing this post, and (hopefully) you reading it. It was through the divine plan of God and mortal agency of Adam and Eve that the Earth was recreated, reborn in a beautiful and utterly diverse mirror image of Heaven. The Earth which we have now inherited, the God-given gift for each and every child of humanity.

Ownership is Trusteeship. So I look at the world differently now. I look to the sky and say, it is my inheritance. I look to the earth and the birds and the animals, and proclaim, you are my inheritance. As far as my eye and vision can behold, all of it is my inheritance. But the tiny quirk of inheritance in Islam is that the property is not for your sole use or abuse. In Islam, as how I perceive it, ownership is tantamount to trusteeship, for ownership without the obligation of responsibility and trust for the future generation is not ownership at all - It is theft. Claiming something permanently, when we ourselves are not permanent, for soon we will die. But how many amongst us who still remember this?

O' Believers. Wake up. The Earth needs you to remember your obligations. To be a believer is to be a conservationist. To be a believer is to be sensible about things. Not to take this world for granted, and certainly not to pollute and create great waste and devastation upon this Earth, this Heaven, this Paradise...

The end of the World is coming. But is it coming by Divine Plan alone or through mankind's manifestation of our carelessness, negligence, hubris, greed and selfishness? Have we turned from the House of Trust into a Band of Thieves? And when that day comes, and we stand before the Throne and are asked by the Lord of the Throne -

The Owner questions the Trustees

"O' Mankind. You ask for My Heaven. 

But a Fascimile of Heaven was already given to you on your World. 

How have you treated the Earth while I left it awhile in your custody and trust? 

Did you remember your responsibilities? 

Did you remember that you hold the Earth only for the briefest moments that you are alive? 

Did you remember to be fair, equitable and just? Or did your rape your own world? 

What answers do you have to these questions? 

So, now I ask again. 

Do you deserve My Heaven at all?

Have a thoughtful day, sunshine.

wa min Allah at-taufiq

Hate has no place in Islam

Love will show the Way

Subprime Bust Part 2 - INSIDE JOB the Movie

INSIDE JOB. At 5.14am earlier this morning I was still awake. And guess what, I only dozed off at about 9.30am. For this loss of sleep I must blame INSIDE JOB, a movie which according to the tagline, costs $20,000,000,000,000.00 to make. The movie was in fact a documentary, directed by Charles Ferguson, about the subprime bust in the USA which almost tipped the entire global economic structure into chaos. In my earlier posting entitled 'Michael Lewis (Wall Street Insider) Mikhail Taufiq (Venture Capitalist) and the Subprime Bust"(Click Here) , I touched a little about this scandal.

AMAZING MOVIE. If you wish to know just how close the world came to a financial tsunami of biblical scale, you MUST see this movie. The list of luminaries alone (both the villains and heroes of this Wall Street escapade) which were interviewed is a good reason enough to watch it - Willem Buiter – Chief economist for Citigroup. John Campbell – Department chair of Harvard University’s Department of Economics. Kristin Davis – Best known as the “Madam” to countless investment bankers. Martin Feldstein – The George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University and President Emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Jerome Fons –Served as Managing Director of Credit Policy at Moody’s Investor Services. Barney Frank – Democratic Representative for the state of Massachusetts. Samuel Hayes – Hayes holds the Jacob H. Schiff Chair in Investment Banking Emeritus at the Harvard Business School. Glenn Hubbard – Chief Economic Advisor during the Bush Administration and current Dean of the Columbia University Business School. Christine Lagarde – The French Minister of Finance, Economic Affairs, Industry and Employment. Jeffrey Lane – CEO of Modern Bank, and former Chairman and CEO of Bear Stearns Asset Management. Lee Hsien Loong – The current Prime Minister of Singapore. Frederic Mishkin – American economist and professor at Columbia Business School, Mishkin was a member of the Board of Governors at the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2008. Charles Morris – Author of The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers and the Great Credit Crash. Raghuram Rajan – An economist and Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago. Andrew Sheng – Chief Advisor to the China Banking Regulatory Commission. George Soros - is a Hungarian-American currency speculator, stock investor, businessman, philanthropist, and political activist. Dominique Strauss-Kahn – Current Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and former Minister for Finance, Economy and Industry, France. Paul Volcker – An American economist who served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve under Presidents Carter and Reagan from 1979 – 1987. Scott Talbott – Top lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable. Nouriel Roubini – Professor of Economics at the Stern School of Business at New York University. (write-up extracted from the movie's PressKit)

MATT DAMON TURNS UP THE HEAT. The narrator and interviewer was none other than Mr. Bourne Ultimatum himself, Matt Damon. I wonder just how many of the super-bosses interviewed thought "Hey, I am going to be interviewed by Matt Damon. The kids are gonna love this. I bet Matt haven't a clue and will throw me easy questions to answer... this is going to be a walk in the park". Or so they thought.See bankers, regulators and acadamicians (under pay of the financial industry) squirm in the interview chair, looking like they rather be a million miles away from the interview and Matt Damon. See grown men (the villians are all men) lie to the camera and asking for a break in the interview to regain their composure. See one particular guy lose his cool and insult Matt. Hehehe.

MOVIE ACCOLADES. The movie is brilliant and already recognised so, winning the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature recently in February 2011, and before that the Writers Guild of America Award AND the Directors Guild of America Award for Best Documentary Screenplay and Best Documentary. Sunshine, if you are an American, I suggest you spend some quality time to watch the movie. It is very enlightening, to say the least. I am not saying that the sinner predicted the subprime catastrophe, but in 2004 I recorded this prose...

188. Paper Promises
Paper money make poor substitute
For gold and silver,
A mode of transaction
On human promises.
And oh, how well
We know of man
And his paper promises!

OUT! OUT! OUT! When Jesus, the Prince of Peace, kicked out the money-lenders out of the Temple, I don't think it is because he disliked how they smelled. The economy, for those in the know (and I know you are in the know, sunshine), is not only a temporal issue - it is a spiritual issue of great significance not only because you have frauds and monopolies, but how such crimes and social injustice affect a great swath of humanity if something goes wrong. And in 2008, oh boy, did it go wrong!

Have a nice day, sunshine. And if you have the vote in America, please make you vote count. As I said, if your country has a cold, it's the rest of the world that will be sneezing. Help us.

Pax Taufiqa.

Relevant Links - 'Inside Job' Official Website / 'Inside Job' Sony Pictures Website / Wikipedia on 'Inside Job'

Rumi, Irony, Time and Money.

IRONY. If there is one thing which any aspirant of the inner path shall pass through it is Irony. Indeed, there is little in life which we cannot label as ironic. I don't think Irony is a bad thing. Even Alanis Morissette sang about it. And I for one always take a tablet of irony each morning to maintain my supple mind and laugh off as much as possible the (sometimes) bitter darts that fate habitually shoots at me on a fairly regular basis.

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MONEY. I don't think it is a bad idea to have money. Like all things, it is really what you do with it that matters. Take your lips for instance. You can use it to praise God, to compliment your waiter, to remember the wonderful things that your father has done for you, and of course you can use your lips to kiss someone (which I think is always a very good idea). Alternatively, from your lips can pour words of scorn and anger, full of sarcastic remarks intended to hurt. Just like money, you can use it for good, or you can use it for bad. It is up to you really. But like all things entrusted to you, just like your body - you are responsible for the good use of it. So don't be like me, use it well!

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SUFIS. Rumi himself said that (the disease of) WORLDLINESS is not simply about you having property, wealth and family. It is as I said - its all about how you put what you have to good use. After all, even if you don't have a bean in this world and the trousers you are wearing is borrowed, you still have the most precious commodity in this world, which is valuable beyond measure and can never be hoarded or purchased - TIME.

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TIME. So you are rich already. Use the time you have on this planet well, my love. For it is as precious as the blood that flows through your vein. Perhaps even more so.

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Have a timely Tuesday, sunshine. Endeavour to be punctual. After all, God the Most Loving always is.

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Pax Taufiqa!

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Footnote: Toons are from my old archives. As yet to be published.