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The Failure of the West and The Triumph of Al-Islam
The Failure of the West and The Triumph of Al-Islam
The uncomfortable truth that the peoples, and especially the governments, of the West have to face is that all the culture of the West - from Homer, to Aeschylus, to Sophocles, to Shakespeare, to Dufay, to JS Bach, to Haydn, to Schubert, to Jane Austen, to EM Foster to TS Eliot to Solzhenitsyn (et al), and all the compulsory education of Western nations for over a hundred years - has not led to the emergence of societies where peace, tolerance, and a civilized attitude, reign.
Instead, all the societies of the modern West are infested with crime, drugs, violence, domestic abuse, poverty, inequality, personal debt, crippling taxation, and a burgeoning underclass who possess little or no hope. In addition, the much vaunted and idealized democracy of the West is in fact a system where a privileged elite, an oligarchy, con the people into believing that every four years (or whatever), every election, there is a chance for them to "vote for change" when all that happens is some minor tinkering with some aspects of the system, lots of promises made, lots of rhetoric and propaganda, but never any significant change that improves the lot of the majority, or which and importantly solves the problems of crime, violence, poverty, domestic abuse and the drug and alcohol addiction that are rife in all Western societies. Instead, while life for the privileged elite (the members of the government especially and politicians and business tycoons in general) gets better and they get more money and enjoy their elitist privileges, life for millions of people tends to get worse - more taxation, but less public spending; more crime; more drug and alcohol abuse; more debt, more domestic abuse.
The Continuing Problems of The West
For instance, around 100,000 women per year seek treatment in the British city of London alone for violent injuries received in their own homes, and, on average, in Britain, two women per week are killed by a male partner or former partner - that is over 100 women a year. Also, in England and Wales alone, in one year, there are over 600,000 recorded incidents of domestic violence, and every minute of every day the British Police are called by a woman who has been subject to violent domestic abuse. [Footnote 1]
For instance, cocaine use in England and Wales is the highest in Europe, indulged in by over four million people - and Scotland's rate of cocaine use is among the highest in the whole world. [Footnote 2]
For instance, America has the highest number of people in prison, per capita, in the whole world - over 1.7 million people, with well over half of all prisoners in America there for drug related offenses [Footnote 3]. In addition nearly 22 million Americans aged 12 or older are illicit drug users [Footnote 4].
In respect of alcohol, an estimated 15 to 20 million Americans are addicted to alcohol or regularly abuse alcohol for personal or social reasons. [Footnote 5] Furthermore, in America, alcohol use is involved in: (a) one-half of all murders, accidental deaths, and suicides; (b) one-third of all drowning, boating and aviation deaths; (c) one-half of all crimes; and (d) almost half of all fatal automobile accidents.
That is an immense number of unhappy and dysfunctional people in the West, for whom the much vaunted "culture and philosophy of the West" is at best irrelevant and at worst considered as something that the ruling elite and their savants indulge themselves with.
For the truth is that the governments of the West have no solution to the unhappiness, despair and hopelessness of tens upon tens of millions of their own citizens who resort to drugs, alcohol, violence and crime in, for example, an attempt to make their lives bearable, or to provide them with some temporary escape from themselves and their everyday dreary depressive situation and their problems, such as personal debt.
All the culture, all the philosophy of the West - which the champions of the West laud and proudly proclaim represent the pinnacle of human achievement - and a hundred or more years of compulsory State education, has not been able to produce a majority of people who are cultured, well-mannered, and civilized. Instead, the reverse is the reality - evident on the drug and crime infested streets of the cities and towns of every Western nation where you will find hordes of foul-mouthed, arrogant, human beings in thrall to their emotions and pursuing lives of crime, drug-abuse, violence, intimidation and domestic abuse.
So, while the West - and in particular America and Britain - seek to export their failed, dysfunctional way of life by force and murder to Muslim lands such as Iraq and Afghanistan, they cannot even solve basic problems in their own lands.
Thus, the hypocritical British government has the arrogance to kill, and imprison, Muslims - in places such as Afghanistan - who seek to live in a different, non-Western way, while British cities are rife with crime, violence, drugs, poverty, hopelessness, and domestic abuse.
For example, given below is an account - from a serving British Police officer (with place names changed to protect his identity) - which captures the reality of Britain today, a reality the politicians and their minions either ignore or gloss over because this reality exposes their complete and utter failure to deal with their own problems. Indeed, one might say that their adventures, their killing sprees, in foreign lands - their hue and cry about "terrorism" - allow them divert attention from their own abject domestic failure.
But, of course, as long as the sheeple can be distracted and entertained and convinced and tricked into believing that every four years, or every "general election", they can "vote for change" (which never occurs in any significant way) then the privileged elite - the oligarchy - can maintain the status quo, which means they get to earn lots of money, live in fine houses in exclusive neighbourhoods, and generally indulge and enjoy themselves, while millions upon millions of ordinary citizens struggle with debt, live in poverty, or languish in prison, or are unemployed, or find solace in drugs, alcohol, or turn to crime in an attempt to live like the oligarchy and the manufactured vapid "celebrities" who serve as an additional distraction. Then of course there is always the government-sponsored hope that one might "win the lottery" and be able to live as the privileged elite live.
The reality is that Western democracy is a fraud. It is not really government by the people for the people, but rather government by an oligarchy in the interests of that oligarchy or in the interest of some vested often hidden lobby group. It is not even a fair and reasonable vote, since topics the oligarchy, the privileged elite, and the Media and the vested interests do not want to discus are not discussed, and voters are shamelessly manipulated, lied to, and shameless appeals are made to their instincts, their prejudices, their fears, with the elected government seldom if ever being truly representative of the people it governs.
In reality, no politician, no member of the government - no member of the privileged elite - would ever dare walk alone at night, night after night, among the streets of the dozens upon dozens of "ruraltowns" that exist in their own lands. No politician, no member of the government - no member of the privileged elite - would ever dare, for months on end, be a front-line Police officer on the streets of their land on a Friday or a Saturday night when drunken louts infest almost every city and town. No politician, no member of the government - no member of the privileged elite - would ever dare, for months on end, to be a paramedic on the streets of their land and so have to deal with the human consequences of crime, of alcohol and drug abuse, of violence - domestic and otherwise - and put up with the offensive loutish behaviour that is now so commonplace in the lands of the West.
No politician, no member of the government - no member of the privileged elite - would ever be able to live, for months, years, on end as a wage slave or as a member of the unemployed.
Instead, the politicians - and the privileged elite in general - remain safe in their unreality, and, like First World War Generals far away from the troops on the front-line, make grandiose plans, give grandiose speeches, concern themselves with propaganda, try to implement their out-of-touch ideologies and political programmes, and distract people by rhetoric about the need to "fight terrorism" and the need to invade and occupy other lands.
The harsh, brutal reality is that despite its claims - despite its much vaunted thousand years of culture and philosophy - the West really has no answer to fundamental social and personal problems. It has failed to create societies where people can walk the streets at night without fear of being attacked or robbed. It has failed to create societies where millions upon millions of people do not need drugs and alcohol to escape from their grim hopeless lives. It has failed to create societies where women can be free of domestic abuse. It has failed to create societies where the majority of people have hope and are happy.
The Muslim Alternative
But there is an alternative to all this. There is an alternative to the failed, the dysfunctional, ways of the West. This is the Way of Al-Islam, a Way which works and which has produced, in the past and for over a thousand years - and can produce again - cultured, civilized, societies which are examples of genuine equality, justice, stability, and internal peace.
What is quite startling is that, for well over a century, the West has been brutally determined to prevent the re-emergence of a Muslim society. For every attempt to re-establish such a Muslim society has been undermined or destroyed by the West. From Egypt, to Sudan, to As-Shams, to Palestine, to Algeria, to Afghanistan, and elsewhere, the West - using its military forces - has insisted that the Muslims of the world imitate the West, implement so-called Western democracy (instead of bayah and Khalifah), use Western jurisprudence (instead of Shariah), establish Western-style nation-States (instead of a Khilafah) with an economy based on Western-style planning and on loans and debt, and accept Western military superiority and the establishment of Western military bases in their lands.
Why is this? Because the West does not want any modern comparison which would expose its own failure; because a Muslim society where Shariah is the only law would expose the fraud, failure and utter hypocrisy of the West.
For the truth is that Shariah works. Would, for example, the thieves of Ruraltown continue thieving if they knew that punishment for theft was the loss of a hand? Would, for example, the swaggering youths of Ruraltown swagger around, intimidating and being abusive and violent and vandalizing property, if they knew that fierce fighters like the Taliban were waiting for them round the next corner? Would, for example, the drug dealers be dealing in drugs if they knew that what awaited them was execution? And so on...
The reality is that the Way of Al-Islam - through Adab Al-Islam - proves us with the most noble, the best, guidelines for personal behaviour that we human beings have ever had. These guidelines, when followed, produce cultured, civilized, well-mannered, people - in total contrast to the products of the modern West: the louts, the arrogant chavs, the self-perpetuating criminal and drug-and-alcohol dependent classes, the feckless ill-mannered un-cultured young whose world revolves around indulging themselves and fulfilling their own personal desires, regardless of the cost to others.
The reality is that the Way of Al-Islam provides people with genuine hope - beyond the vain hope of winning the lottery; beyond the hope of getting a better job, or even getting any job at all; beyond the hope of escaping from the cycle of drug and alcohol induced violence and crime. Beyond the hope of change occurring at the next election.
This is the hope, the promise, the perspective, of Jannah, of Paradise - born from a re-discovery of our true nature as human beings. For it is this hope, this un-worldly perspective, that restores to us the numinous: to that feeling for humility which is the essence of civilized living and a feeling which the West, in its materialistic, self-indulgent, arrogant, hubris-like, individualistic-loving way, has forgotten, or more truthfully, rarely knew, except in moments and then in only a a few cultured individuals, and which numinosity [7] the profane West, most importantly, was never able to fully understand or appreciate or, more crucially, make as a basis for a social way of living.
In contrast, Islam is a numinous way of living; its expresses that need for, that awareness of, the sacred which is the essence of our humanity, manifest as this humanity is in personal dignity and a certain personal humility. A numinosity so evident in Namaz where there is a personal awareness that our true nature, as human beings, is that we are but fragile beings whose temporary mortal life is an opportunity - never to arise again - to attain Paradise, and that we are but creations of a Creator. A numinosity evident in Adab Al-Islam - in those noble guidelines that enable to behave as civilized human beings in public and in private.
The fundamental mistakes of the West were and are to have believed, and to believe, that (1) we human beings, unaided, can find or manufacture their own solutions; (2) that "the civilizing process" is a product of the West, makes the West the originator, home, and guardian of "civilized values"; and (3) that this so-called "civilizing process" involves constant change and continuing development.
These mistakes - this Western arrogance - are so evident in the brutal truth that the peoples of the West are the most bloodthirsty in human history, and have a habit of trying to enforce some fallible solution they have manufactured on their own people and on the peoples of the world, and which solutions they constantly change or continually update. For example, in their attempt implement some solution or other - or force one of their manufacture solutions upon others, around the world - the West has, in the last one hundred and fifty years, killed an estimated 160 million people. Their First World War alone killed an estimated 37 million people, while their Second World War killed an estimated 59 million people.
In the last nine years alone, the West has been responsible for - in its desire to enforce one of its fallible solutions upon others - the deaths of well over a million Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their killing - in the name of one of their fallible solutions - continues today; indeed, every day the West kills Muslims, in its arrogant and hypocritical desire to impose one of its fallible solutions upon us.
The fundamental mistakes of the West are also so evident in the failed, dysfunctional, societies of the modern West - where tens of millions of people are addicted to drugs and alcohol, where suicide is rampant, where violence and intimidation are so common that millions of ordinary people live in constant fear and dread.
In contrast to the arrogance of this mistaken Western belief, Muslims accept the reality of their fallible mortality - and which reality is that we are error-prone arrogant beings, susceptible to addictions and to our emotions, who need some supra-personal guidance, and which guidance we possess, or rather we have been given, in the noble Quran and in the example of the Prophet, Muhammad (salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam).
For we know that such guidance - as our Muslim history has proved - can produce a civilized way of life, and a way of life which is far superior to that of the modern dysfunctional West with its societies rife with crime, violence, and drug and alcohol addiction.
This superiority of Al-Islam as a way of life, as an expression of the numinous, is so evident in the fundamental failure of the West in Afghanistan where, despite its vast military and economic superiority and despite its hordes of apostate collaborators, it has - even after nine years of war and the killing of hundreds of thousands of Muslims - failed to defeat a small number of poorly equipped Mujahideen.
Why has the West - with its vast resources, its complete military superiority, on land, in the air, and the vast sums of money it has spent to bribe people to support it - failed to defeat a small number of poorly equipped Mujahideen? Why has its arrogant and murderous desire to impose one of its fallible solutions on Muslims in Afghanistan failed even after nine years of war and the almost daily murder, by the West, of the leaders of the Muslim resistance?
Is it because those Muslims know the societies of the West for the failures they are? Is it because those Muslims, in Afghanistan who are resisting the Western occupiers and their collaborators, have experienced there the reality of Al-Islam, of Shariah, and know that it works, that it produces a balanced, civilized, numinous way of life? Yes, and yes.
For the truth that the conflict in Afghanistan reveals is the truth of Al-Islam - which is the truth about how and why Al-Islam is superior to each and every way of the West, and why, ultimately, it will triumph. This is the truth of what Al-Islam provides for us and reveals to us - a truth which no amount of military force nor any amount of money offered as a bribe can obscure or conceal.
It is the truth that Al- Islam - that Shariah, and Adab al-Islam - work. The truth that Islam produces noble civilized human beings who stand in stark contrast to the arrogant denizens of the West: the truth that Islam provides us with that awareness of the numinous - that awareness of our true, fallible nature - which brings us dignity, self-respect, manners, and that humility, which are the mark of civilized human beings. The truth that Shariah is the basis, the only basis, for functional, just, societies where there is a sense of purpose and hope provided by us acknowledging that this brief mortal life of ours is only an opportunity, never to arise again,
It is the truth that, in the end, the fallible cultural creations of individuals - which the West so esteems - do not and cannot, over time, lead to the manufacture of civilized societies or even cause a majority of people to change, and that true wisdom lies not in such ephemeral, fallible, things, but instead in accepting that we are but error-prone weak beings created by Allah - Al-Hakim, As-Salam, Al-Alim, As-Samad - who need unchanging guidance.
For, as Allah says in the noble Quran:
Abdul-Aziz
Zul al-Hijjah 1431
Footnotes:
[1] Source: (a) Punching Judy, BBC TV Documentary, 1989 CE; (b) Crime in England and Wales (Home Office annual publication); (c) Women's Aid Federation of England.
[2] Source: European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction.
[3] Source: (a) Drug Policy Information Clearinghouse (White House Office of National Drug Control Policy); (b) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (The Department of Health and Human Services).
[4] Source: (a) Foundation for Social Improvement; (b) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (The Department of Health and Human Services).
[5] Source: (a) National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism; (b) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (The Department of Health and Human Services).
[6] Source: Inspector Gadget blog.
[7] By the term numinous, I mean “the sacred” and what is revered; what manifests, or what re-presents (uncovers), what is sacred, and divine. What places us in a Cosmic (a supra-personal) perspective, and which reveals our true human nature, our fitrah - or real human character - and thus what enables us to live in a respectful, natural, and balanced way with other human beings.
Bismillah Ar-Rahman Ar-Raheem
The Failure of the West and The Triumph of Al-Islam
The Failure of the West and The Triumph of Al-Islam
The uncomfortable truth that the peoples, and especially the governments, of the West have to face is that all the culture of the West - from Homer, to Aeschylus, to Sophocles, to Shakespeare, to Dufay, to JS Bach, to Haydn, to Schubert, to Jane Austen, to EM Foster to TS Eliot to Solzhenitsyn (et al), and all the compulsory education of Western nations for over a hundred years - has not led to the emergence of societies where peace, tolerance, and a civilized attitude, reign.
Instead, all the societies of the modern West are infested with crime, drugs, violence, domestic abuse, poverty, inequality, personal debt, crippling taxation, and a burgeoning underclass who possess little or no hope. In addition, the much vaunted and idealized democracy of the West is in fact a system where a privileged elite, an oligarchy, con the people into believing that every four years (or whatever), every election, there is a chance for them to "vote for change" when all that happens is some minor tinkering with some aspects of the system, lots of promises made, lots of rhetoric and propaganda, but never any significant change that improves the lot of the majority, or which and importantly solves the problems of crime, violence, poverty, domestic abuse and the drug and alcohol addiction that are rife in all Western societies. Instead, while life for the privileged elite (the members of the government especially and politicians and business tycoons in general) gets better and they get more money and enjoy their elitist privileges, life for millions of people tends to get worse - more taxation, but less public spending; more crime; more drug and alcohol abuse; more debt, more domestic abuse.
The Continuing Problems of The West
For instance, around 100,000 women per year seek treatment in the British city of London alone for violent injuries received in their own homes, and, on average, in Britain, two women per week are killed by a male partner or former partner - that is over 100 women a year. Also, in England and Wales alone, in one year, there are over 600,000 recorded incidents of domestic violence, and every minute of every day the British Police are called by a woman who has been subject to violent domestic abuse. [Footnote 1]
For instance, cocaine use in England and Wales is the highest in Europe, indulged in by over four million people - and Scotland's rate of cocaine use is among the highest in the whole world. [Footnote 2]
For instance, America has the highest number of people in prison, per capita, in the whole world - over 1.7 million people, with well over half of all prisoners in America there for drug related offenses [Footnote 3]. In addition nearly 22 million Americans aged 12 or older are illicit drug users [Footnote 4].
In respect of alcohol, an estimated 15 to 20 million Americans are addicted to alcohol or regularly abuse alcohol for personal or social reasons. [Footnote 5] Furthermore, in America, alcohol use is involved in: (a) one-half of all murders, accidental deaths, and suicides; (b) one-third of all drowning, boating and aviation deaths; (c) one-half of all crimes; and (d) almost half of all fatal automobile accidents.
That is an immense number of unhappy and dysfunctional people in the West, for whom the much vaunted "culture and philosophy of the West" is at best irrelevant and at worst considered as something that the ruling elite and their savants indulge themselves with.
For the truth is that the governments of the West have no solution to the unhappiness, despair and hopelessness of tens upon tens of millions of their own citizens who resort to drugs, alcohol, violence and crime in, for example, an attempt to make their lives bearable, or to provide them with some temporary escape from themselves and their everyday dreary depressive situation and their problems, such as personal debt.
All the culture, all the philosophy of the West - which the champions of the West laud and proudly proclaim represent the pinnacle of human achievement - and a hundred or more years of compulsory State education, has not been able to produce a majority of people who are cultured, well-mannered, and civilized. Instead, the reverse is the reality - evident on the drug and crime infested streets of the cities and towns of every Western nation where you will find hordes of foul-mouthed, arrogant, human beings in thrall to their emotions and pursuing lives of crime, drug-abuse, violence, intimidation and domestic abuse.
So, while the West - and in particular America and Britain - seek to export their failed, dysfunctional way of life by force and murder to Muslim lands such as Iraq and Afghanistan, they cannot even solve basic problems in their own lands.
Thus, the hypocritical British government has the arrogance to kill, and imprison, Muslims - in places such as Afghanistan - who seek to live in a different, non-Western way, while British cities are rife with crime, violence, drugs, poverty, hopelessness, and domestic abuse.
For example, given below is an account - from a serving British Police officer (with place names changed to protect his identity) - which captures the reality of Britain today, a reality the politicians and their minions either ignore or gloss over because this reality exposes their complete and utter failure to deal with their own problems. Indeed, one might say that their adventures, their killing sprees, in foreign lands - their hue and cry about "terrorism" - allow them divert attention from their own abject domestic failure.
" In Ruraltown, the elderly are like dirty, damaged vultures. They converge at awful jumble sales. They rummage and fight for socks and underpants that have been torn from the stiff corpses of their previous ancient occupiers. In Ruraltown, I have seen a woman die in the doctor’s surgery. No one noticed until 3.00 pm.
It is always cold and dark. Unemployment in Ruraltown is, of course, staggeringly high. This part of Ruralshire is so divided along class and racial lines that it is hardly the old shire at all but a collection of tribal groupings.
Some of its outlying towns are concrete wastelands too terrible to describe. People travel miles to jump from our multi-storey carpark...
The crowning glory of Ruraltown, though, is its people. They will happily kill you with an axe while you wait outside the local chippie for a deep-friend Mars bar...
Black Lace refused to play here. Burger King actually closed down their High Street store because they had more trouble than any other town in England. Pre-pubescent skiprats and abusive old women in Kappa track suit bottoms hurl insults and beg for shrapnel from passers-by. The urban decay, the rot, the complete absence of any hope at all, really set in when the railway freight business deserted the town 50 years ago...
Our covert OP occupies a most convenient position in a cul-de-sac in the centre of this unpopular estate, which is within a few hundred intimidating yards of abandoned local shops. The Swamp Estate, strewn with broken glass and needles, is set on the Ruralshire/Eastshire borders with surrounding countryside affording easy escape routes to foot and bridle paths. Central Ruraltown is 2 and 1/4 miles joyride away, and provides comprehensive shoplifting and binge drinking amenities together with a variety of state schools for all age groups to play truant from. A railway station providing commuter services to Metrocity and a convenient location for graffiti, is available in the town centre...
Residents of The Swamp Estate are justifiably proud of their award-winning children’s play area, named ‘County Regeneration Project of the Year 2009′ (now burned out and used as a toilet by Staffordshire Bull Terriers), set in the heart of this vibrant community, adjacent to Robert Mugabe Avenue. Cultural and religious communities are served by the burned out Mosque, derelict Anglican church and the popular ‘alcohol and drug rehabilitation and outreach centre’, membership of which was free before the cuts.
The easy availability of broadband allows the residents to Facebook death threats and witness intimidation messages to each other, and the placement of three mobile phone masts within 200 years of the primary school provides excellent coverage for those sneaky threats to burn down your former ‘partner’s’ house, because ‘she told Tracey that you slept with her sister before you had a baby with Charlene, and she was sure you were seeing her at that time like’....
There are a few decent working families on The Swamp. They struggle to learn English because the library only opens two mornings a week due to the number of assaults on staff, the constant thefts of Tony Blair’s free computers and the aggressive begging outside the front entrance. Staff gave up parking nearby after so many vehicle thefts and damage. They used to park two miles away and walk, until they started getting robbed...
As a Sergeant once, towards the end of my afternoon shift, I sat with the library manager as she wept for close to an hour at the hopelessness of it all. I called the ‘on-call doctor’ service for her. They told me that they didn’t attend the estate after twilight due to the number of thefts of drugs from their teams. ‘Can I bring her to the minor injuries unit in the next town?‘ After a quick phone call asking for permission to do this, with my request for overtime refused and all the oncoming units already at a domestic where the husband had a knife and some petrol, I left her alone to cry...
Back on The Swamp, there is a car on fire... and Ruralshire Fire and Rescue are asking desperately for a police escort before they attend...
Mugabe Close hangs on grimly to its reputation for decay, depression, violence and misery. It is always cold and damp here, the grass refuses to grow, pissed on as it is by a thousand drunken bladders. The kiddies playground surface is made of mud, bull-terrier **** and broken glass. If you are lucky, you will find the odd blood stained syringe by the fence. Lucky because evidence of drug use brings funding. Once, years ago, the drug problem moved to a neighbouring estate, and the funding for Mugabe Close ended. It is not in the resident’s interests to try and end the drug problems here. For more than a third of them it is their primary source of income, and for the remainder their primary source of recreation, apart from procreation, which is their secondary source of income.
Mugabe Close soaks up redevelopment money like a five dollar crack *****. It only takes a few months of exposure for the feckless Ruraltown underclass to [destroy] any new building, fence or pathway. The Ruraltown Borough Council anti-social behaviour officer once told me that giving funding to Mugabe Close was like standing in the street burning £50 notes. I saw my first widescreen HD TV in this close, and my first Blue ray DVD. Waiting in the front room of these houses you see TV channels you have never seen before. I can’t afford the Sky TV packages they have.
I spoke to the ASB officer yesterday. Two boys have been released from custody after threatening to burn her house down because she served them with a nuisance noise order. It took her a year of adjournments and threats to end the 3.00am Drum and Bass beat which enforced insomnia on every school age child in the close. The adults hear nothing. Heroin, alcohol and domestic arguments drown out the sound for them. Her boss moved her family to the other side of Ruraltown. She has seen the boys celebrate their release after just twelve weeks inside by hanging around near the school where she picks her kid up. When they see her, the older one slowly draws his finger across his throat and winks at the child.
A combination of the sheer effort involved in bringing the original issue to court, the months of fear and nerves as the boy’s solicitor forced adjournment after adjournment, the threats of a petrol fire attack at her home and the final insult of their early release has stripped her of any appetite for further enforcement action. In other words, even though she is part of the Crime Reduction Partnership, she will not give me a statement or support a prosecution. My only offering is to say that a court may enforce a longer sentence the next time they are convicted, but before the words are out of my mouth we both know that I am as full of s*** as the playground..." [Footnote 6]
Such is a grim reality of life for millions upon millions of people in the so-called civilized land of Britain - a land whose government exports its failed, dysfunctional, way of life by force and murder. In America, the reality, on the streets, is even worse and even more bleak than it is in Britain.It is always cold and dark. Unemployment in Ruraltown is, of course, staggeringly high. This part of Ruralshire is so divided along class and racial lines that it is hardly the old shire at all but a collection of tribal groupings.
Some of its outlying towns are concrete wastelands too terrible to describe. People travel miles to jump from our multi-storey carpark...
The crowning glory of Ruraltown, though, is its people. They will happily kill you with an axe while you wait outside the local chippie for a deep-friend Mars bar...
Black Lace refused to play here. Burger King actually closed down their High Street store because they had more trouble than any other town in England. Pre-pubescent skiprats and abusive old women in Kappa track suit bottoms hurl insults and beg for shrapnel from passers-by. The urban decay, the rot, the complete absence of any hope at all, really set in when the railway freight business deserted the town 50 years ago...
Our covert OP occupies a most convenient position in a cul-de-sac in the centre of this unpopular estate, which is within a few hundred intimidating yards of abandoned local shops. The Swamp Estate, strewn with broken glass and needles, is set on the Ruralshire/Eastshire borders with surrounding countryside affording easy escape routes to foot and bridle paths. Central Ruraltown is 2 and 1/4 miles joyride away, and provides comprehensive shoplifting and binge drinking amenities together with a variety of state schools for all age groups to play truant from. A railway station providing commuter services to Metrocity and a convenient location for graffiti, is available in the town centre...
Residents of The Swamp Estate are justifiably proud of their award-winning children’s play area, named ‘County Regeneration Project of the Year 2009′ (now burned out and used as a toilet by Staffordshire Bull Terriers), set in the heart of this vibrant community, adjacent to Robert Mugabe Avenue. Cultural and religious communities are served by the burned out Mosque, derelict Anglican church and the popular ‘alcohol and drug rehabilitation and outreach centre’, membership of which was free before the cuts.
The easy availability of broadband allows the residents to Facebook death threats and witness intimidation messages to each other, and the placement of three mobile phone masts within 200 years of the primary school provides excellent coverage for those sneaky threats to burn down your former ‘partner’s’ house, because ‘she told Tracey that you slept with her sister before you had a baby with Charlene, and she was sure you were seeing her at that time like’....
There are a few decent working families on The Swamp. They struggle to learn English because the library only opens two mornings a week due to the number of assaults on staff, the constant thefts of Tony Blair’s free computers and the aggressive begging outside the front entrance. Staff gave up parking nearby after so many vehicle thefts and damage. They used to park two miles away and walk, until they started getting robbed...
As a Sergeant once, towards the end of my afternoon shift, I sat with the library manager as she wept for close to an hour at the hopelessness of it all. I called the ‘on-call doctor’ service for her. They told me that they didn’t attend the estate after twilight due to the number of thefts of drugs from their teams. ‘Can I bring her to the minor injuries unit in the next town?‘ After a quick phone call asking for permission to do this, with my request for overtime refused and all the oncoming units already at a domestic where the husband had a knife and some petrol, I left her alone to cry...
Back on The Swamp, there is a car on fire... and Ruralshire Fire and Rescue are asking desperately for a police escort before they attend...
Mugabe Close hangs on grimly to its reputation for decay, depression, violence and misery. It is always cold and damp here, the grass refuses to grow, pissed on as it is by a thousand drunken bladders. The kiddies playground surface is made of mud, bull-terrier **** and broken glass. If you are lucky, you will find the odd blood stained syringe by the fence. Lucky because evidence of drug use brings funding. Once, years ago, the drug problem moved to a neighbouring estate, and the funding for Mugabe Close ended. It is not in the resident’s interests to try and end the drug problems here. For more than a third of them it is their primary source of income, and for the remainder their primary source of recreation, apart from procreation, which is their secondary source of income.
Mugabe Close soaks up redevelopment money like a five dollar crack *****. It only takes a few months of exposure for the feckless Ruraltown underclass to [destroy] any new building, fence or pathway. The Ruraltown Borough Council anti-social behaviour officer once told me that giving funding to Mugabe Close was like standing in the street burning £50 notes. I saw my first widescreen HD TV in this close, and my first Blue ray DVD. Waiting in the front room of these houses you see TV channels you have never seen before. I can’t afford the Sky TV packages they have.
I spoke to the ASB officer yesterday. Two boys have been released from custody after threatening to burn her house down because she served them with a nuisance noise order. It took her a year of adjournments and threats to end the 3.00am Drum and Bass beat which enforced insomnia on every school age child in the close. The adults hear nothing. Heroin, alcohol and domestic arguments drown out the sound for them. Her boss moved her family to the other side of Ruraltown. She has seen the boys celebrate their release after just twelve weeks inside by hanging around near the school where she picks her kid up. When they see her, the older one slowly draws his finger across his throat and winks at the child.
A combination of the sheer effort involved in bringing the original issue to court, the months of fear and nerves as the boy’s solicitor forced adjournment after adjournment, the threats of a petrol fire attack at her home and the final insult of their early release has stripped her of any appetite for further enforcement action. In other words, even though she is part of the Crime Reduction Partnership, she will not give me a statement or support a prosecution. My only offering is to say that a court may enforce a longer sentence the next time they are convicted, but before the words are out of my mouth we both know that I am as full of s*** as the playground..." [Footnote 6]
But, of course, as long as the sheeple can be distracted and entertained and convinced and tricked into believing that every four years, or every "general election", they can "vote for change" (which never occurs in any significant way) then the privileged elite - the oligarchy - can maintain the status quo, which means they get to earn lots of money, live in fine houses in exclusive neighbourhoods, and generally indulge and enjoy themselves, while millions upon millions of ordinary citizens struggle with debt, live in poverty, or languish in prison, or are unemployed, or find solace in drugs, alcohol, or turn to crime in an attempt to live like the oligarchy and the manufactured vapid "celebrities" who serve as an additional distraction. Then of course there is always the government-sponsored hope that one might "win the lottery" and be able to live as the privileged elite live.
The reality is that Western democracy is a fraud. It is not really government by the people for the people, but rather government by an oligarchy in the interests of that oligarchy or in the interest of some vested often hidden lobby group. It is not even a fair and reasonable vote, since topics the oligarchy, the privileged elite, and the Media and the vested interests do not want to discus are not discussed, and voters are shamelessly manipulated, lied to, and shameless appeals are made to their instincts, their prejudices, their fears, with the elected government seldom if ever being truly representative of the people it governs.
In reality, no politician, no member of the government - no member of the privileged elite - would ever dare walk alone at night, night after night, among the streets of the dozens upon dozens of "ruraltowns" that exist in their own lands. No politician, no member of the government - no member of the privileged elite - would ever dare, for months on end, be a front-line Police officer on the streets of their land on a Friday or a Saturday night when drunken louts infest almost every city and town. No politician, no member of the government - no member of the privileged elite - would ever dare, for months on end, to be a paramedic on the streets of their land and so have to deal with the human consequences of crime, of alcohol and drug abuse, of violence - domestic and otherwise - and put up with the offensive loutish behaviour that is now so commonplace in the lands of the West.
No politician, no member of the government - no member of the privileged elite - would ever be able to live, for months, years, on end as a wage slave or as a member of the unemployed.
Instead, the politicians - and the privileged elite in general - remain safe in their unreality, and, like First World War Generals far away from the troops on the front-line, make grandiose plans, give grandiose speeches, concern themselves with propaganda, try to implement their out-of-touch ideologies and political programmes, and distract people by rhetoric about the need to "fight terrorism" and the need to invade and occupy other lands.
The harsh, brutal reality is that despite its claims - despite its much vaunted thousand years of culture and philosophy - the West really has no answer to fundamental social and personal problems. It has failed to create societies where people can walk the streets at night without fear of being attacked or robbed. It has failed to create societies where millions upon millions of people do not need drugs and alcohol to escape from their grim hopeless lives. It has failed to create societies where women can be free of domestic abuse. It has failed to create societies where the majority of people have hope and are happy.
The Muslim Alternative
But there is an alternative to all this. There is an alternative to the failed, the dysfunctional, ways of the West. This is the Way of Al-Islam, a Way which works and which has produced, in the past and for over a thousand years - and can produce again - cultured, civilized, societies which are examples of genuine equality, justice, stability, and internal peace.
What is quite startling is that, for well over a century, the West has been brutally determined to prevent the re-emergence of a Muslim society. For every attempt to re-establish such a Muslim society has been undermined or destroyed by the West. From Egypt, to Sudan, to As-Shams, to Palestine, to Algeria, to Afghanistan, and elsewhere, the West - using its military forces - has insisted that the Muslims of the world imitate the West, implement so-called Western democracy (instead of bayah and Khalifah), use Western jurisprudence (instead of Shariah), establish Western-style nation-States (instead of a Khilafah) with an economy based on Western-style planning and on loans and debt, and accept Western military superiority and the establishment of Western military bases in their lands.
Why is this? Because the West does not want any modern comparison which would expose its own failure; because a Muslim society where Shariah is the only law would expose the fraud, failure and utter hypocrisy of the West.
For the truth is that Shariah works. Would, for example, the thieves of Ruraltown continue thieving if they knew that punishment for theft was the loss of a hand? Would, for example, the swaggering youths of Ruraltown swagger around, intimidating and being abusive and violent and vandalizing property, if they knew that fierce fighters like the Taliban were waiting for them round the next corner? Would, for example, the drug dealers be dealing in drugs if they knew that what awaited them was execution? And so on...
The reality is that the Way of Al-Islam - through Adab Al-Islam - proves us with the most noble, the best, guidelines for personal behaviour that we human beings have ever had. These guidelines, when followed, produce cultured, civilized, well-mannered, people - in total contrast to the products of the modern West: the louts, the arrogant chavs, the self-perpetuating criminal and drug-and-alcohol dependent classes, the feckless ill-mannered un-cultured young whose world revolves around indulging themselves and fulfilling their own personal desires, regardless of the cost to others.
The reality is that the Way of Al-Islam provides people with genuine hope - beyond the vain hope of winning the lottery; beyond the hope of getting a better job, or even getting any job at all; beyond the hope of escaping from the cycle of drug and alcohol induced violence and crime. Beyond the hope of change occurring at the next election.
This is the hope, the promise, the perspective, of Jannah, of Paradise - born from a re-discovery of our true nature as human beings. For it is this hope, this un-worldly perspective, that restores to us the numinous: to that feeling for humility which is the essence of civilized living and a feeling which the West, in its materialistic, self-indulgent, arrogant, hubris-like, individualistic-loving way, has forgotten, or more truthfully, rarely knew, except in moments and then in only a a few cultured individuals, and which numinosity [7] the profane West, most importantly, was never able to fully understand or appreciate or, more crucially, make as a basis for a social way of living.
In contrast, Islam is a numinous way of living; its expresses that need for, that awareness of, the sacred which is the essence of our humanity, manifest as this humanity is in personal dignity and a certain personal humility. A numinosity so evident in Namaz where there is a personal awareness that our true nature, as human beings, is that we are but fragile beings whose temporary mortal life is an opportunity - never to arise again - to attain Paradise, and that we are but creations of a Creator. A numinosity evident in Adab Al-Islam - in those noble guidelines that enable to behave as civilized human beings in public and in private.
The fundamental mistakes of the West were and are to have believed, and to believe, that (1) we human beings, unaided, can find or manufacture their own solutions; (2) that "the civilizing process" is a product of the West, makes the West the originator, home, and guardian of "civilized values"; and (3) that this so-called "civilizing process" involves constant change and continuing development.
These mistakes - this Western arrogance - are so evident in the brutal truth that the peoples of the West are the most bloodthirsty in human history, and have a habit of trying to enforce some fallible solution they have manufactured on their own people and on the peoples of the world, and which solutions they constantly change or continually update. For example, in their attempt implement some solution or other - or force one of their manufacture solutions upon others, around the world - the West has, in the last one hundred and fifty years, killed an estimated 160 million people. Their First World War alone killed an estimated 37 million people, while their Second World War killed an estimated 59 million people.
In the last nine years alone, the West has been responsible for - in its desire to enforce one of its fallible solutions upon others - the deaths of well over a million Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their killing - in the name of one of their fallible solutions - continues today; indeed, every day the West kills Muslims, in its arrogant and hypocritical desire to impose one of its fallible solutions upon us.
The fundamental mistakes of the West are also so evident in the failed, dysfunctional, societies of the modern West - where tens of millions of people are addicted to drugs and alcohol, where suicide is rampant, where violence and intimidation are so common that millions of ordinary people live in constant fear and dread.
In contrast to the arrogance of this mistaken Western belief, Muslims accept the reality of their fallible mortality - and which reality is that we are error-prone arrogant beings, susceptible to addictions and to our emotions, who need some supra-personal guidance, and which guidance we possess, or rather we have been given, in the noble Quran and in the example of the Prophet, Muhammad (salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam).
For we know that such guidance - as our Muslim history has proved - can produce a civilized way of life, and a way of life which is far superior to that of the modern dysfunctional West with its societies rife with crime, violence, and drug and alcohol addiction.
This superiority of Al-Islam as a way of life, as an expression of the numinous, is so evident in the fundamental failure of the West in Afghanistan where, despite its vast military and economic superiority and despite its hordes of apostate collaborators, it has - even after nine years of war and the killing of hundreds of thousands of Muslims - failed to defeat a small number of poorly equipped Mujahideen.
Why has the West - with its vast resources, its complete military superiority, on land, in the air, and the vast sums of money it has spent to bribe people to support it - failed to defeat a small number of poorly equipped Mujahideen? Why has its arrogant and murderous desire to impose one of its fallible solutions on Muslims in Afghanistan failed even after nine years of war and the almost daily murder, by the West, of the leaders of the Muslim resistance?
Is it because those Muslims know the societies of the West for the failures they are? Is it because those Muslims, in Afghanistan who are resisting the Western occupiers and their collaborators, have experienced there the reality of Al-Islam, of Shariah, and know that it works, that it produces a balanced, civilized, numinous way of life? Yes, and yes.
For the truth that the conflict in Afghanistan reveals is the truth of Al-Islam - which is the truth about how and why Al-Islam is superior to each and every way of the West, and why, ultimately, it will triumph. This is the truth of what Al-Islam provides for us and reveals to us - a truth which no amount of military force nor any amount of money offered as a bribe can obscure or conceal.
It is the truth that Al- Islam - that Shariah, and Adab al-Islam - work. The truth that Islam produces noble civilized human beings who stand in stark contrast to the arrogant denizens of the West: the truth that Islam provides us with that awareness of the numinous - that awareness of our true, fallible nature - which brings us dignity, self-respect, manners, and that humility, which are the mark of civilized human beings. The truth that Shariah is the basis, the only basis, for functional, just, societies where there is a sense of purpose and hope provided by us acknowledging that this brief mortal life of ours is only an opportunity, never to arise again,
It is the truth that, in the end, the fallible cultural creations of individuals - which the West so esteems - do not and cannot, over time, lead to the manufacture of civilized societies or even cause a majority of people to change, and that true wisdom lies not in such ephemeral, fallible, things, but instead in accepting that we are but error-prone weak beings created by Allah - Al-Hakim, As-Salam, Al-Alim, As-Samad - who need unchanging guidance.
For, as Allah says in the noble Quran:
"The words of your Rabb are complete, perfect - manifesting truth, justice - and nothing shall ever abrogate them." 6:115 Interpretation of Meaning
"It is through remembrance of Allah that the heart discovers rest." 13:28 Interpretation of Meaning
"And those who have been given al-ilm [insightful knowledge] have been given it so that they may know that it (this Quran) is the truth from their Rabb, and that they may believe therein, and also that their hearts may submit to it with humility. For, in truth, Allah is the Guide, of those who believe, to the Correct Path." 22:54 Interpretation of Meaning
Allah (alone) has power over - and is the (sole) master of - all things. The creations in Heaven and Earth, the very change of Night to Day, are Signs for those gifted with intelligence, those who whether sitting, standing or reclining on their sides, give praise to Allah and who frequently recall these creations in Heaven and Earth, (saying): 'You who are our Rabb - You created all these things for a purpose; the achievement is Yours alone.' " 3:189-191 Interpretation of Meaning
"It is through remembrance of Allah that the heart discovers rest." 13:28 Interpretation of Meaning
"And those who have been given al-ilm [insightful knowledge] have been given it so that they may know that it (this Quran) is the truth from their Rabb, and that they may believe therein, and also that their hearts may submit to it with humility. For, in truth, Allah is the Guide, of those who believe, to the Correct Path." 22:54 Interpretation of Meaning
Allah (alone) has power over - and is the (sole) master of - all things. The creations in Heaven and Earth, the very change of Night to Day, are Signs for those gifted with intelligence, those who whether sitting, standing or reclining on their sides, give praise to Allah and who frequently recall these creations in Heaven and Earth, (saying): 'You who are our Rabb - You created all these things for a purpose; the achievement is Yours alone.' " 3:189-191 Interpretation of Meaning
Abdul-Aziz
Zul al-Hijjah 1431
Footnotes:
[1] Source: (a) Punching Judy, BBC TV Documentary, 1989 CE; (b) Crime in England and Wales (Home Office annual publication); (c) Women's Aid Federation of England.
[2] Source: European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction.
[3] Source: (a) Drug Policy Information Clearinghouse (White House Office of National Drug Control Policy); (b) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (The Department of Health and Human Services).
[4] Source: (a) Foundation for Social Improvement; (b) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (The Department of Health and Human Services).
[5] Source: (a) National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism; (b) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (The Department of Health and Human Services).
[6] Source: Inspector Gadget blog.
[7] By the term numinous, I mean “the sacred” and what is revered; what manifests, or what re-presents (uncovers), what is sacred, and divine. What places us in a Cosmic (a supra-personal) perspective, and which reveals our true human nature, our fitrah - or real human character - and thus what enables us to live in a respectful, natural, and balanced way with other human beings.