Science and Religion in Islam: The Link.: September 2008

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

411)Catching a Microwave Pulse Transitioning from the Quantum-Physics World to the Classical-Physics World, from probability to certainty.

"Our religious leadership must be acutely aware of secular trends, including those generated by this age of science and technology. Equally, our academic or secular elite must be deeply aware of Muslim history, of the scale and depth of leadership exercised by the Islamic empire of the past in all fields"(Aga Khan IV, 6th February 1970, Hyderabad, Pakistan)

"God has given us the miracle of life with all its attributes: the extraordinary manifestations of sunrise and sunset, of sickness and recovery, of birth and death, but surely if He has given us the means with which to remove ourselves from this world so as to go to other parts of the Universe, we can but accept as further manifestations the creation and destructions of stars, the birth and death of atomic particles, the flighting new sound and light waves. I am afraid that the torch of intellectual discovery, the attraction of the unknown, the desire for intellectual self-perfection have left us"(Aga Khan IV,Speech, 1963, Mindanao, Phillipines)

"This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives. Of that I am certain"(Aga Khan IV, Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, August 17th 2007)

"......The Quran tells us that signs of Allah’s Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation - in the heavens and the earth, the night and the day, the clouds and the seas, the winds and the waters...."(Aga Khan IV, Kampala, Uganda, August 22 2007)

".....The famous verse of 'light' in the Qur'an, the Ayat al-Nur, whose first line is rendered here in the mural behind me, inspires among Muslims a reflection on the sacred, the transcendent. It hints at a cosmos full of signs and symbols that evoke the perfection of Allah's creation and mercy"(Aga Khan IV,Speech, Institute of Ismaili Studies, October 2003, London, U.K.)

"Thus Islam's basic principle can only be defined as mono-realism and not as monotheism. Consider, for example, the opening declaration of every Islamic prayer: "Allah-o-Akbar". What does that mean? There can be no doubt that the second word of the declaration likens the character of Allah to a matrix which contains all and gives existence to the infinite, to space, to time, to the Universe, to all active and passive forces imaginable, to life and to the soul."(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)

"In fact this world is a book in which you see inscribed the writings of God the Almighty"(Nasir Khusraw, 11th century Ismaili cosmologist-philosopher-poet)

Kathalika yubayyinu Allahu lakum ayatihi la'allakum ta-'aqiloona: "Allah thus makes clear to you His Signs that you may intellect"(Holy Quran 2:242)

Chapter 30, Verse 27: He originates creation; then refashions it - for Him an easy task. His is the most Sublime Symbol in the heavens and the earth(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)

The above are 9 quotes and excerpts taken from Blogpost Four Hundred:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html

Photons caught in the act

By Davide Castelvecchi
Web edition : Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

Physicists watch a microwave pulse lose its quantum weirdness

Physicists have made the first "movie" of a microwave pulse transitioning from the quantum-physics world to the classical-physics world.

Reporting in the Sept. 25 Nature, the researchers say that their method may help in understanding at what point in nature quantum physics ends and classical physics begins. It could also shed light on how to keep information inside future computers that would take advantage of quantum physics.

Quantum objects — generally, anything that's small enough to be ruled by quantum physics — can exist in multiple forms at the same time. An atom, for example, can be in two places at the same time, as can the crests and troughs of electromagnetic waves, such as in a microwave pulse.

Any disturbance from the outside world can cause a loss of this quantum innocence — loss of coherence, in physics parlance. The state of the object becomes progressively more definite, until the object picks one state, as would be expected from everyday experience. Normally, physicists cannot capture all the information contained in quantum coherence, since a measurement produces an answer that's just one in a range of possible outcomes.

Serge Haroche of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Collège de France in Paris and his collaborators have now observed this transition in a microwave pulse trapped between two mirrors. The researchers probed the pulse by shooting thousands of rubidium atoms across it, one atom at a time. Each atom extracted a small amount of information from the pulse, without destroying its coherence.

The near-perfect mirrors allowed the photons in the microwave pulse to bounce back and forth, establishing a standing wave that lasted several milliseconds. Through the reflections, the pulse, bit by bit, lost coherence, and the position of the peaks and troughs came closer to being definite.

At the same time, the path the pulse follows to lose coherence is also different each time. To obtain the most complete picture of the process, the researchers repeated the measurement thousands of times on identical pulses.

"This is fascinating work," comments physicist Mikhail Lukin of Harvard University. It is unique, he adds, "in that it allows one to look directly, in real time, into what happens with a quantum state of light as it loses coherence."

Haroche says that the team is constantly improving the apparatus so it can preserve the coherence of pulses of higher intensities. Higher-intensity pulses tend to behave more like classical than quantum objects. Thus, the researchers hope to learn more about the boundary between the quantum and the classical world.

Haroche also says that his team might be able to learn how to use the atoms to restore a pulse's coherence before it is completely lost. This ability could help researchers design quantum data storage for future quantum computers. Such machines would use the multiple states of quantum objects to essentially perform myriad calculations all at once.

Easy Nash

The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)

410)Mapping E8(248-dimensional mathematical object); Islam, Mathematics, Reasoning, Symmetry, Dimensions, Symbolism: an Update; Quotes of Aga Khan IV

This post is now part of the following collection of posts:
454)A Collection of Posts on Symmetry in Nature, as a Product of the Human Mind, Geometry and Harmonious Mathematical Reasoning; Quotes of Aga Khan IV
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/03/454a-collection-of-posts-on-symmetry-in.html

Arif Ali's Web Wanderings Site

http://webwanderings.wordpress.com/

is a blog I find myself visiting more often lately and I recently came accross a post about E8, a 248-dimensional mathematical object some call the most complex mathematical object ever:

http://webwanderings.wordpress.com/2008/09/28/breakthrough-in-mapping-248-dimensional-object/ :

Mathematicians and computer scientists from several countries successfully mapped the inner working of E8—one of the most complicated structures in math, a 248-dimensional object.
“E8 was discovered over a century ago, in 1887, and until now, no one thought the structure could ever be understood,”

Underlying symmetrical objects such as spheres and cylinders is something called a Lie group — a mathematical group invented by the 19th century Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie to study symmetry. E8 is an example of a Lie group.

Understanding and classifying the representations of E8 and Lie groups has been critical to understanding phenomena in many different areas of mathematics and science, including algebra, geometry, number theory, physics and chemistry.

The Link to Arif Ali's Web Wanderings site is listed in the upper right hand corner of my blog in the Suggested Links Section.

I have blogged about this E8 structure before and about geometry, symmetry, dimensions, mathematical reasoning and symbolism, especially as it pertains to the religion of Islam: The buzzwords in this vein are Tawhid, One Absolute Reality, Monorealism, Monotheism and how geometrically symmetrical objects both in nature and as created by the mind of man(Islamic Architecture) symbolically represent these fundamental principles and higher realities. Take a trip down my memory lane:

"In this context, would it not also be relevant to consider how, above all, it has been the Qur'anic notion of the universe as an expression of Allah's will and creation that has inspired, in diverse Muslim communities, generations of artists, scientists and philosophers? Scientific pursuits, philosophic inquiry and artistic endeavour are all seen as the response of the faithful to the recurring call of the Qur'an to ponder the creation as a way to understand Allah's benevolent majesty. As Sura al-Baqara proclaims: 'Wherever you turn, there is the face of Allah'.The famous verse of 'light' in the Qur'an, the Ayat al-Nur, whose first line is rendered here in the mural behind me, inspires among Muslims a reflection on the sacred, the transcendent. It hints at a cosmos full of signs and symbols that evoke the perfection of Allah's creation and mercy." (Aga Khan IV, IIS Convocation, October 19th 2003, London, U.K.)

"The Qur’an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God’s creation"(Closing Address by His Highness Aga Khan IV at the "Musée-Musées" Round Table Louvre Museum, Paris, France, October 17th 2007)

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/288symmetry-in-nature-symmetry-as.html

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/309harmonious-mathematical-reasoning.html

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/319the-learning-of-mathematics-was.html

Easy Nash

The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)

Sunday, September 28, 2008

409)The Length and Breadth of Dr. Azim Nanji's Contributions to the IIS, to the Worldwide Shia Ismaili Muslim Community and Muslim Ummah in General

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

408)Celebrating Dr Azim Nanji of the Institute of Ismaili Studies, my all-time Ismaili intellectual hero in the current era; Quote of Azim Nanji.

Dr Azim Nanji’s departure from the IIS(Institute of Ismaili Studies) is a sad one for me. He is my all-time Ismaili intellectual hero in the current era, one of the bright 'stars' in my night sky. A quote from one of his articles even made it to my list of quotes on Blogpost Four Hundred, putting him in some seriously venerated company:

“In sum the process of creation can be said to take place at several levels. Ibda represents the initial level - one transcends history, the other creates it. The spiritual and material realms are not dichotomous, since in the Ismaili formulation, matter and spirit are united under a higher genus and each realm possesses its own hierarchy. Though they require linguistic and rational categories for definition, they represent elements of a whole, and a true understanding of God must also take account of His creation. Such a synthesis is crucial to how the human intellect eventually relates to creation and how it ultimately becomes the instrument for penetrating through history the mystery of the unknowable God implied in the formulation of Tawhid.”(Azim Nanji, Director, Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, U.K., 1998)

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html

The above quote is taken from a seminal article he wrote on Ismaili Philosophy:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/i/ismaili.htm

which, I recently discovered, was a distillation of a much longer article he wrote in 1990:

http://www.iis.ac.uk/view_article.asp?ContentID=109742

Welcome back to North America, Dr. Nanji, and to Stanford University in California, home to Stanford's Linear Particle Accelerator and a good many Science Nobel laureates:

"Our religious leadership must be acutely aware of secular trends, including those generated by this age of science and technology. Equally, our academic or secular elite must be deeply aware of Muslim history, of the scale and depth of leadership exercised by the Islamic empire of the past in all fields"(Aga Khan IV, 6th February 1970, Hyderabad, Pakistan)

The much-visited and wildly popular Ismaili mail website published these two articles on Dr Azim Nanji:
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2008/09/24/stanford-university-welcomes-dr-azim-nanji/
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2008/09/24/iis-director-bids-farewell/

IIS Director Bids Farewell
September 2008

In the autumn of 1998, Professor Nanji became the Director of the IIS. After leading the Institute for ten years, he is now leaving to join the Abbasi Programme in Islamic Studies at Stanford University as a Senior Associate Director. Under his leadership, the IIS expanded its programmes and activities and has emerged as an institution known for its high quality research and publications in areas related to Muslim cultures, particularly in the fields of Ismaili and Shi‘i Studies.

Perhaps the most enduring achievement of his period at the Institute is the creation of a community of scholars resulting in a large number of publications from some of the best names in Shi‘i and Islamic Studies. The Institute’s fellowship programme ensured that many young and upcoming scholars would work with well-established names in the field. During Professor Nanji’s tenure, the Institute also hosted many innovative conferences and seminars, such as Word of God, Art of Man: The Qur’an and its Creative Expressions; Muslim Pluralism; Civil Society in the Muslim World; Nasir Khusraw: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, and Contemporary Islam(s) and Muslims. The Department of Community Relations, the Quranic Studies Unit and the Central Asian Studies Unit were established under his leadership while the Graduate Programme in Islamic Studies and Humanities grew from strength to strength and the new Secondary Teacher Education Programme was launched.

Professor Nanji was also pivotal in furthering the Institute’s intellectual support to the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) and the Ismaili community world over. The secondary curriculum materials are now in advanced stage of publication; a series of training programmes are well established and the IIS supports various AKDN activities on a regular basis. Initiating closer co-operation between the Institute and various organisations in Europe engaged with the educational activities of Muslims was yet another feature of his period.

He leaves his imprints not only through programmes but also through his personal style of leadership that valued empowerment, decentralisation and responsibility. It was during his tenure that the Institute celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. Asked about his experience of working with the Institute, Professor Nanji said: “An opportunity to lead and build further an institution like the IIS is a rare privilege. In this case also, there was a happy coming together of a moment in history, committed colleagues, as well as Imamat and Jamati support. My stay here will remain for my wife Razia and myself, a period full of fond memories and lasting friendships.”

It is poetically apt that Professor Nanji joined this institution and the next one in the season of Fall. For it is said that “Autumn is indeed the crowning glory of the year, bringing us the fruition of months of thought and care and toil”. Professor Nanji’s stay at the IIS did indeed bring to fruition not months but rather years of thought and care. Following his departure, the Associate Director, Dr. Farhad Daftary has been appointed as the Acting Director.

http://iis.ac.uk/view_article.asp?ContentID=109932

Easy Nash

The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

407)Laylat Al-Qadr-The Night of Power: Stirring and Inspiring Poetry by Jalaluddin Rumi; Whither Science and Religion? Quotes of Aga Khans and others.

My very good friend Rosie sent me these two beautiful poetic versions of Jalaluddin Rumi's Ghazal(Ode) 258 about today's observance of the Night of Power-Laylat Al-Qadr. In a blog describing the link between Science and Religion in Islam, what's the connection? Take a look at these quotes and excerpts and see if you can make the connection, then enjoy the poetry:

"The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims. Exchanges of knowledge between institutions and nations and the widening of man's intellectual horizons are essentially Islamic concepts. The Faith urges freedom of intellectual enquiry and this freedom does not mean that knowledge will lose its spiritual dimension. That dimension is indeed itself a field for intellectual enquiry. I can not illustrate this interdependence of spiritual inspiration and learning better than by recounting a dialogue between Ibn Sina, the philosopher, and Abu Said Abu -Khyar, the Sufi mystic. Ibn Sina remarked, "Whatever I know, he sees". To which Abu Said replied," Whatever I see, he knows"."(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University Inauguration Speech, Karachi, Pakistan, November 11th 1985)

"......a true understanding of God must also take account of His creation. Such a synthesis is crucial to how the human intellect eventually relates to creation and how it ultimately becomes the instrument for penetrating through history the mystery of the unknowable God implied in the formulation of Tawhid."(Azim Nanji, Director, Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, U.K., 1995)

"Scientific pursuits, philosophic inquiry and artistic endeavour are all seen as the response of the faithful to the recurring call of the Qur'an to ponder the creation as a way to understand Allah's benevolent majesty. As Sura al-Baqara proclaims: 'Wherever you turn, there is the face of Allah'.The famous verse of 'light' in the Qur'an, the Ayat al-Nur, whose first line is rendered here in the mural behind me, inspires among Muslims a reflection on the sacred, the transcendent. It hints at a cosmos full of signs and symbols that evoke the perfection of Allah's creation and mercy"(Aga Khan IV,Speech, Institute of Ismaili Studies, October 2003, London, U.K.)

"The Divine Intellect, Aql-i Kull, both transcends and informs the human intellect. It is this Intellect which enables man to strive towards two aims dictated by the faith: that he should reflect upon the environment Allah has given him and that he should know himself. It is the Light of the Intellect which distinguishes the complete human being from the human animal, and developing that intellect requires free inquiry. The man of faith, who fails to pursue intellectual search is likely to have only a limited comprehension of Allah's creation. Indeed, it is man's intellect that enables him to expand his vision of that creation"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University Convocation Speech, Karachi, Pakistan, November 11, 1985)

"Indeed, one strength of Islam has always lain in its belief that creation is not static but continuous, that through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University, 16 March 1983, Karachi, Pakistan)

"Thus Islam's basic principle can only be defined as mono-realism and not as monotheism. Consider, for example, the opening declaration of every Islamic prayer: "Allah-o-Akbar". What does that mean? There can be no doubt that the second word of the declaration likens the character of Allah to a matrix which contains all and gives existence to the infinite, to space, to time, to the Universe, to all active and passive forces imaginable, to life and to the soul"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)

"......The Quran tells us that signs of Allah’s Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation - in the heavens and the earth, the night and the day, the clouds and the seas, the winds and the waters...."(Aga Khan IV, Kampala, Uganda, August 22 2007)

"....in Islam, but particularly Shia Islam, the role of the intellect is part of faith. That intellect is what seperates man from the rest of the physical world in which he lives.....This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives. Of that I am certain"(Aga Khan IV, Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, August 17th 2007)

The above are 8 quotes and excerpts from Blogpost Four Hundred:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html

Here, Sunlight offers Rumi's Ghazal (Ode) 258, in two forms -- a poetic translation from Nader Khalili, and a version by Coleman Barks:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1)
if you stay awake
for an entire night
watch out for a treasure
trying to arrive

you can keep warm
by the secret sun of the night
keeping your eyes open
for the softness of dawn

try it for tonight
challenge your sleepy eyes
do not lay your head down
wait for heavenly alms

night is the bringer of gifts
Moses went on a ten-year journey
during a single night
invited by a tree
to watch the fire and light

Mohammed too made his passage
during that holy night
when he heard the glorious voice
when he ascended to the sky

day is to make a living
night is only for love
commoners sleep fast
lovers whisper to God all night

all night long
a voice calls upon you
to wake up
in the precious hours

if you miss your chance now
when your body is left behind
your soul will lament
death is a life of no return

-- Translation by Nader Khalili: "Rumi, Fountain of Fire" Cal-Earth Press, 1994
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

2)
THE VIGIL
Don't go to sleep one night.
What you most want will come to you then.
Warmed by a sun inside, you'll see wonders.
Tonight, don't put your head down.

Be tough, and strength will come.
That which adoration adores
appears at night. Those asleep
may miss it. One night Moses stayed awake
and asked, and saw a light in a tree.

Then he walked at night for ten years,
until finally he saw the whole tree
illuminated. Muhammad rode his horse
through the night sky. The day is for work.
The night for love. Don't let someone
bewitch you. Some people sleep at night.

But not lovers. They sit in the dark
and talk to God, who told David,
"Those who sleep all night every night
and claim to be connected to us, they lie."

Lovers can't sleep when they feel the privacy
of the beloved all around them. Someone
who's thirsty may sleep for a little while,
but he or she will dream of water, a full jar
beside a creek, or the spiritual water you get
from another person. All night, listen
to the conversation. Stay up.
This moment is all there is.

Death will take it away soon enough.
You'll be gone, and this earth will be left
without a sweetheart, nothing but weeds
growing inside thorns.

I'm through. Read the rest of this poem
in the dark tonight.Do I have a head? And feet?

Shams, so loved by Tabrizians, I close my lips.
I wait for you to come and open them.

-- Version by Coleman Barks: "The Essential Rumi" Harper, San Francisco, 1995.

Related posts from the Spirit and Life Blog of the Ismaili Mail website:
http://spiritandlife.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/laylat-al-qadr-the-night-of-power/
http://spiritandlife.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/laylt-ul-qadr/

Easy Nash

The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)

Monday, September 22, 2008

406)'Ismaili Lunar Calendar': An ideal base to unite the 'Ummah'; Quotes of Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan III and Noble Quran.

"That quest for a better life, among Muslims and non-Muslims alike, must lead inevitably to the Knowledge Society which is developing in our time. The great and central question facing the Ummah of today is how it will relate to the Knowledge Society of tomorrow.The fundamental reason for the pre-eminence of Islamic civilizations lay neither in accidents of history nor in acts of war, but rather in their ability to discover new knowledge, to make it their own, and to build constructively upon it. They became the Knowledge Societies of their time."(Aga Khan IV, Speech, 2nd December 2006, Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan)

"Astronomy, the so-called “Science of the Universe” was a field of particular distinction in Islamic civilization-–in sharp contrast to the weakness of Islamic countries in the field of Space research today. In this field, as in others, intellectual leadership is never a static condition, but something which is always shifting and always dynamic"(Aga Khan IV, Convocation, American University of Cairo, Cairo, Egypt, June 15th 2006)

"Islam is fundamentally in its very nature a natural religion. Throughout the Quran God's signs (Ayats) are referred to as the natural phenomenon, the law and order of the universe, the exactitudes and consequences of the relations between natural phenomenon in cause and effect. Over and over, the stars, sun, moon, earthquakes, fruits of the earth and trees are mentioned as the signs of divine power, divine law and divine order(Aga Khan III, April 4th 1952)

Chapter 30, Verse 27: He originates creation; then refashions it - for Him an easy task. His is the most Sublime Symbol in the heavens and the earth(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)

Chapter 21, Verse 30: Do not the unbelievers see that the heavens and the earth were joined together before We clove them asunder, and of water fashioned every thing? Will they not then believe?(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)

Chapter 51, verse 47: We built the heavens with might, and We expand it wide(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)

Chapter79, verse 30: And then he gave the earth an oval form(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)

Chapter 86, verse 11: I swear by the reciprocating heaven.....(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)

The above are 8 quotes taken from Blogpost Four Hundred:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html

'Ismaili Lunar Calendar': An ideal base to unite the 'Ummah' - Part I
Yemen Times
2003

Dr. Qazi Shaikh Abbas Borhany PhD (USA), NDI, Shahadat al A'alamiyyah (Najaf, Iraq), M.A., LLM (Shariah) Member, Ulama Council of Pakistan

The purpose of the following dialogue is to promote tolerance and intellectual understanding among the Muslim community of the global village. The Modern World humiliates the Muslims with the fact that while astronauts have landed the Moon, and other scientists are busy in discoveries of the universe, majority of the Muslims are still following the directions of the clergy, regarding the sighting of the Moon, instead of following the scientific course, upon which religion of Islam is based.

Origin of the Lunar Calendar: Base of the 'Ismaili Lunar Calendar' is Qur'an: "The Sun and the Moon follow exactly computed courses."[1]

This Ayat lays the foundation on which it is permissible to calculate the emergence of new crescent from a Shariah standpoint, and refutes any claim raised by people of limited-understanding who believe that crescent sighting should be followed; because all such erroneous sightings would contradict the findings of this Ayat and at the same time contradict the 'words of Qur'an', explaining the orderly movement of the Moon and other celestial bodies. The precise laws, made by Allah, governing the Universe, bear witness to Hikmat ilahiyyah and Adal and also of His favours to His creatures.

It was Bani Fatimah who realized the need of the Lunar Calendar, and they introduced it to the world at large, as soon as they established their vast Empire, even spreading across Europe. This Lunar Calendar remained in practice officially for more than 225 years, in North Africa and across the Atlantic Ocean. The same calendar is in practice officially by the Ismaili Nizaries & Musta'alavis (Dawoodi, Sulaiymani, & Alavi). The notable powerful dynasty of the Sumrahs of Sindh (Pakistan) followed the Lunar Calendar from 365(A.H) to 974(A.H) for more than 609 years, and without any alteration. As elites of Sindh, the Sumrahs handled the affairs of Al Dawah al Hadiyah as Aa'mil of the Ismaili Fatemi Imams in Sindh, whose jurisdiction extended up to the 'Attock Fort'. Their relationship continued to remain under the command of Al Dai al Mutlaq, one after the other, during the period of Satar. The Ismailis calculate their months according to this Lunar Calendar and least bother(scarcely depend) on the sighting of the Moon for starting a New Year or a New Month, as they have carried out an accurate scientific research on the movements of the Moon. They have a very rich and valuable literature on the subject of 'Lunar Calendar', the glorious origin of which goes to Amir al Mumineen, Ali ibn Abi Talib through the references of Abi Abdillah Imam Jafar Assadiq. An authentic scientific chart of 'Qaran-e-Saghir' and 'Qaran-e-Kabir' is attributed to Ali. [2]

Calculation of the Lunar Cycle: On an average, a lunar month (or lunation) comprises 29 days 12.73 hours, but it can sometimes be as short as 29 days 6_ hours, or as long as 29 days 20 hours. Fluctuations in length are cyclic. There is a fast cycle averaging about 412 days (which is just under 14 lunar months); which is associated with changes in the eccentricity, or shape of the lunar orbit. This rapid cycle is modified by a slower one whose mean wavelength is 8.85 years (equal to one complete revolution of the axis of the Moon's elliptical orbit). In addition, there are other oscillations, some causing variations extending over many hundreds of years – when it may not even make sense to look for an average wavelength. Other factors too contribute to the Moon's complex behavior.

For instance, a longer than normal lunation tends to occur between October and March because of the faster movement by the Earth in its orbit round the sun. In February and March, this delays the instant when the Moon appears to overtake the sun. Also, the sun lies closer to a newborn crescent than it would if the Earth's speed was uniform - thus postponing the onset of New Moon visibility. In October and November, on the other hand, the sun's position on the ecliptic line is "behind schedule" - so the Moon overtakes it earlier. Occasionally, four consecutive lunation will span more than 119 days. Under these circumstances, it is possible to have four successive 30-day months. When that happens, the Moon only just becomes visible at the beginning of the first month in the sequence, and just fails to do so on the 29th of the 4th month. A predetermined calendar would certainly make it easier to plan events. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to predict that a newborn crescent will definitely be visible or invisible from a given location, because of the wide grey area separating the two categories. This uncertainty is caused by day to day fluctuations in atmospheric water vapor and dust content.

A Few Logical Examples: The Ismailis follows a pre-calculated calendar based on a cycle of 30 Muslim years (eleven of which contain 355 days instead of the more common 354–thus totaling 10631 days). The accumulated error in that calendar is about one hour per century. This, together with the cyclic variations in the behavior of the lunar orbit, can bring the Ismaili dates two (or on rare occasions even three) days earlier than those governed strictly by Crescent visibility. In 1412 (A.H), for example, their Ramazan commenced on the morning of 4th March 1992, whereas throughout much of India and the Far East, Sawm did not start till 7th March. There are of course other ways in which a predetermined calendar might be constructed. Mathematical criteria could be laid down – and adopted, regardless of whether or not the crescent happens to be observed. Such guidelines might be based, for example, on the age of the New Moon at dusk (suitably defined), or the lag between sunset and moonset, or the number of degrees separating the sun and moon as they descend. It is then essential to specify either the exact time at which the criteria are to be applied–or the precise location; for example, Makkah would probably be universally acceptable. [3]

Qur'an says:

"Allah enlightens the sun and effulgent moon and created stations for the moon's movement so that you can keep the counting and records of years". [4]

The Circulation of the Moon around the Earth is described in the Qur'an, and on the basis of it the Lunar Calendar was designed. The 19th Al Dai al Fatemi, Syedna Idris Imaduddin(d.872/1468, Shib'am, Yemen) discussed the issue and proved that the Moon circulates one time around earth in 29 _ days and some minutes, and a single circulation is counted as one month. According to calculations, in the Lunar Calendar, a 30 days month is considered complete, and a 29 days month is called incomplete. The first month of Muharram is of 30 days and the second month is of 29 days, so according to this, the last month of Zilhajjah will be of 29 days. At the end of 12 months, some fraction is left between the movement of the Moon and 12 months, and as per calculation 11 leap-years are set in every 30 years in the lunar calendar. That means a leap-year will have 30 days instead of 29 days in the last month, which is Zilhajjah. [5]

Shia Ismaili Point of view: Shia Ismailies argue that Rasulullah (S) always observed Siy'am by particular calculations and commanded the Ummah to do accordingly. A valuable reference of Maaz bin Kasir is available in "Majm'a al Bahraiyn" which has been transmitted by Huzaifah bin Mansur who asked Abi Abdullah Imam Jafar Assadiq that people say: Rasulullh(S) observed some months of Ramazan for 29 days and some for 30 days. Imam Jafar Assadiq spontaneously rejected this allegation and replied:

"These people are telling lies; Rasulullah(S) has always observed 30 days Siy'aam in the month of Ramazan. From the day Allah created the Sky and the Earth, Ramazan has never ended in 29 Naqis (incomplete) days". [6]

As Muslims of the early era were not familiar with calculations at that time, the day on which everyone observed Sawm, and celebrated Eid, used to be announced. Once when Rasulullah(S) was leaving Madinah for expedition of 'Ghazwah Hunain', people behind him questioned, "We observed Sawm of Ramazan with you, and celebrated Eid with you, as you are leaving, how should we observe it?" Rasulullah(S) guided as follow:

"Observe Sawm of Ramazan by watching Him and celebrate your Eid by watching Him too." [7]

Children of the Ismaili Dawah argue that the meaning behind the word of Hadith "Ley Ruyate Hee" was Ali, as Rasulullah (S) had appointed him 'Wali al Amar' on his seat, in his place. Similarly, there is no doubt that Rasulullah(S) is the Sun of Nubuwah while Ali is the Moon of Imamah. Pointing out this divine reality, Syedna al Moayyid al Shirazi (d.470/1078, Qahera, Egypt) says in a couplet, available in his "Diw'aan" as follows:

"Wa Ya Qamaran B'aada Zakas Siraji; Muniran Bada Lid'diyaji Mubira" [8]

(O Moon which appears after the Sun; in order to remove darkness)

Selected Bibliography[1] "Al Qur'an", Surat No.55,Ayat No.5
[2] Alibhai Sharafali, "Sahifat us Sal'aat", Chart of' Qaran al Kabir wa Qaran al Saghir', Mumbai [3] David Mc Naughton,"Crescent- sighting & Islamic Calendars", Hamdard Islamicus, Karachi,January 1997
[4] Al Qur'an
[5] Syedna Idris Imaduddin, "Kit'aab Izah ul Ael'aam", (in explanation of 29 days of Shab'an and 30 days of Ramazan),manuscript.
[6] 1-"Majma al Bahraiyn", 2- 39th Alavi Dai, "Kit'aab al ib'anate wal Hil'aal", Manuscript, (Cross-examination by the learned Shaikh on books like "Kit'aab al Hid'ayah" and "Man La Yahzuruhul Faqih" and established logical scientific approach of the Ismailies)
[7] Syedna Idris Imaduddin, "Kit'aab Izah ul Ael'aam", (in explanation of 29 days of Shab'an and 30 days of Ramazan). Hadith
[8] Syedna al Moayyid al Shirazi, "Diw'aan", QaheraThe writer is Attorney at Law & Religious ScholarEmail address: qazishkborhany@hotmail.com

http://yementimes.com/print_article.shtml?i=1192&p=culture&a=1

Related posts:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/05/358islam-and-astronomy-vestiges-of-fine.html
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/289al-nitak-al-nilam-mintaka-betelgeuse.html
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/273basics-on-vast-distances-and-sizes.html
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/317so-how-old-is-universe-anyway-6000.html

Easy Nash

The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)

Sunday, September 21, 2008

405)Our Sun is a WILD place-doing pesap, oolti, julab, looking like a Picasso painting, having a bad hair day, or just scintillating radiantly........

1) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap040802.html

2) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap021114.html

3) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap040725.html

4) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap971120.html

5) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap051109.html

6) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap061204.html

7) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060807.html

8) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap000403.html

9) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990923.html

10) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap010301.html

11) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap010924.html

12) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060710.html

13) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060611.html

14) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070402.html

15) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap071106.html

16) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap980601.html

17) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap970107.html

18) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap031122.html

19) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060407.html

20) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060331.html

21) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap021206.html

22) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050407.html

23) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070303.html

24) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap051005.html

25) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030530.html

"Islamic doctrine goes further than the other great religions, for it proclaims the presence of the soul, perhaps minute but nevertheless existing in an embryonic state, in all existence in matter, in animals, trees, and space itself. Every individual, every molecule, every atom has its own spiritual relationship with the All-Powerful Soul of God"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)

Imam Hassan has explained the Islamic doctrine of God and the Universe by analogy with the sun and its reflection in the pool of a fountain; there is certainly a reflection or image of the sun, but with what poverty and with what little reality; how small and pale is the likeness between this impalpable image and the immense, blazing, white-hot glory of the celestial sphere itself. Allah is the sun; and the Universe, as we know it in all its magnitude, and time, with its power, are nothing more than the reflection of the Absolute in the mirror of the fountain"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)

"Islam is fundamentally in its very nature a natural religion. Throughout the Quran God's signs (Ayats) are referred to as the natural phenomenon, the law and order of the universe, the exactitudes and consequences of the relations between natural phenomenon in cause and effect. Over and over, the stars, sun, moon, earthquakes, fruits of the earth and trees are mentioned as the signs of divine power, divine law and divine order(Aga Khan III, April 4th 1952, from "What have we forgotten in Islam?")

"In fact this world is a book in which you see inscribed the writings of God the Almighty"(Nasir Khusraw, 11th century Ismaili cosmologist-philosopher-poet)

"......The Quran tells us that signs of Allah’s Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation - in the heavens and the earth, the night and the day, the clouds and the seas, the winds and the waters...."(Aga Khan IV, Kampala, Uganda, August 22 2007)

"In this context, would it not also be relevant to consider how, above all, it has been the Qur'anic notion of the universe as an expression of Allah's will and creation that has inspired, in diverse Muslim communities, generations of artists, scientists and philosophers? Scientific pursuits, philosophic inquiry and artistic endeavour are all seen as the response of the faithful to the recurring call of the Qur'an to ponder the creation as a way to understand Allah's benevolent majesty. As Sura al-Baqara proclaims: 'Wherever you turn, there is the face of Allah'.The famous verse of 'light' in the Qur'an, the Ayat al-Nur, whose first line is rendered here in the mural behind me, inspires among Muslims a reflection on the sacred, the transcendent. It hints at a cosmos full of signs and symbols that evoke the perfection of Allah's creation and mercy"(Aga Khan IV,Speech, 2003, London, U.K.)

"The Quran very often refers to nature as a reflection of Allah's power of creation and says: Look at the mountains, look at the rivers, look at the trees, look at the flowers all as evidence of Allah's love for the people whom He has created. Today I look at this environment and I say that I beleive that Allah is smiling upon you, may His smile always be upon you"(Aga Khan IV, Tajikistan, May 27th 1995)

"Discovery of knowledge was seen by those founders(Fatimids) as an embodiment of religious faith, and faith as reinforced by knowledge of workings of the Creator's physical world"(Aga Khan IV, 27th May1994, Cambridge, Massachusets, U.S.A.)

“Muslims believe in an all-encompassing unit of man and nature. To them there is no fundamental division between the spiritual and the material while the whole world, whether it be the earth, sea or air, or the living creatures that inhabit them, is an expression of God’s creation.”(Aga Khan IV, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, 13 April 1984)

"Indeed, one strength of Islam has always lain in its belief that creation is not static but continuous, that through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation"(Aga Khan IV, AKU, 16 March 1983, Karachi, Pakistan)

"God has given us the miracle of life with all its attributes: the extraordinary manifestations of sunrise and sunset, of sickness and recovery, of birth and death, but surely if He has given us the means with which to remove ourselves from this world so as to go to other parts of the Universe, we can but accept as further manifestations the creation and destructions of stars, the birth and death of atomic particles, the flighting new sound and light waves. I am afraid that the torch of intellectual discovery, the attraction of the unknown, the desire for intellectual self-perfection have left us"(Aga Khan IV,Speech, 1963, Mindanao, Phillipines)

Easy Nash

The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

404)Sorry, Charley: Church Apologizes to Darwin; Natural Selection and a Continuous vs Static Creation; Quotes of Aga Khan IV and Aga Khan III

The Church of England apologising to Charles Darwin and the Catholic Church apologising to Galileo Galilei! Charles Darwin's research in the 19th century showing evolution by natural selection has turned out to be one of the great scientific truths of all time. Galileo Galilei in the 17th century dared to suggest that the earth was not flat but round and that the earth revolved around the sun. In the end these churches are demonstrating a quality that religion is supposed to teach all of us: humility. What about Islam?

Islam had it all and threw it away:

The Death of Science in Islam:
"For a few centuries at the turn of the first millennium, Islam presided over a burst of exuberant scientific and philosophical inquiry. It began with the translation of the treasure of Greek and Roman manuscripts that had lain forgotten for centuries. It then went beyond translation, producing a large body of original work in mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, optics, and philosophy, among other fields. Then this burst of activity died away. Summarizing and simplifying the argument that follows: Islam provided a sense of purpose and vitality that helped power the achievements of its golden age, but Islam could not accomodate itself to the degree of autonomy required to sustain it"

"Why did the burst of activity fade so rapidly? The root cause of its decline is to be found.....in the ability of its orthodox upholders to stifle once-flowering science".

"Those accomplishments of Islamic mathematical and medical science which continue to compel our admiration were developed in areas and in periods where the elites were willing to go beyond and possibly against the basic strains of orthodox thought and feeling"

Charles Murray: "Human Accomplishment: the Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950"

In Islam the creation is considered not to be a static event but a continuous, perpetual and constant event. As such it is compatible with evolution by natural selection. Discoveries during the 20th century especially have borne out that creation is a continuous event. If you look in space there are numerous stellar nurseries inside galaxies that show new, baby stars being born all the time. Stars have their own life cycles and our sun in our solar system is a star that is half way through its life cycle whereas the 3 Arabic-named stars that make up the Belt of Orion, Al-Nitak, Al-Nilam and Mintaka, are almost at the end of their life cycles. There are numerous other examples in nature that show a continuous and not a static creation:

Quotes of Aga Khan IV and Aga Khan III:
"In Islamic belief, knowledge is two-fold. There is that revealed through the Holy Prophet (s.a.s.) and that which man discovers by virtue of his own intellect. Nor do these two involve any contradiction, provided man remembers that his own mind is itself the creation of God. Without this humility, no balance is possible. With it, there are no barriers. Indeed, one strength of Islam has always lain in its belief that creation is not static but continuous, that through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University, 16 March 1983, Karachi, Pakistan)

"The creation according to Islam is not a unique act in a given time but a perpetual and constant event; and God supports and sustains all existence at every moment by His will and His thought. Outside His will, outside His thought, all is nothing, even the things which seem to us absolutely self-evident such as space and time. Allah alone wishes: the Universe exists; and all manifestations are as a witness of the Divine Will"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)

"Of the Abrahamic faiths, Islam is probably the one that places the greatest emphasis on knowledge. The purpose is to understand God's creation, and therefore it is a faith which is eminently logical. Islam is a faith of reason"(Aga Khan IV, Spiegel Magazine interview, Germany, Oct 9th 2006)

“Muslims believe in an all-encompassing unit of man and nature. To them there is no fundamental division between the spiritual and the material while the whole world, whether it be the earth, sea or air, or the living creatures that inhabit them, is an expression of God’s creation.”(Aga Khan IV, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, 13 April 1984)

"Our religious leadership must be acutely aware of secular trends, including those generated by this age of science and technology. Equally, our academic or secular elite must be deeply aware of Muslim history, of the scale and depth of leadership exercised by the Islamic empire of the past in all fields"(Aga Khan IV, 6th February 1970, Hyderabad, Pakistan)

"......The Quran tells us that signs of Allah’s Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation - in the heavens and the earth, the night and the day, the clouds and the seas, the winds and the waters...."(Aga Khan IV, Kampala, Uganda, August 22 2007)

"The second great historical lesson to be learnt is that the Muslim world has always been wide open to every aspect of human existence. The sciences, society, art, the oceans, the environment and the cosmos have all contributed to the great moments in the history of Muslim civilisations. The Qur’an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God’s creation"(Closing Address by His Highness Aga Khan IV at the "Musée-Musées" Round Table Louvre Museum, Paris, France, October 17th 2007)

Thus Islam's basic principle can only be defined as mono-realism and not as monotheism. Consider, for example, the opening declaration of every Islamic prayer: "Allah-o-Akbar". What does that mean? There can be no doubt that the second word of the declaration likens the character of Allah to a matrix which contains all and gives existence to the infinite, to space, to time, to the Universe, to all active and passive forces imaginable, to life and to the soul. Imam Hassan has explained the Islamic doctrine of God and the Universe by analogy with the sun and its reflection in the pool of a fountain; there is certainly a reflection or image of the sun, but with what poverty and with what little reality; how small and pale is the likeness between this impalpable image and the immense, blazing, white-hot glory of the celestial sphere itself. Allah is the sun; and the Universe, as we know it in all its magnitude, and time, with its power, are nothing more than the reflection of the Absolute in the mirror of the fountain"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)

"Islam is fundamentally in its very nature a natural religion. Throughout the Quran God's signs (Ayats) are referred to as the natural phenomenon, the law and order of the universe, the exactitudes and consequences of the relations between natural phenomenon in cause and effect. Over and over, the stars, sun, moon, earthquakes, fruits of the earth and trees are mentioned as the signs of divine power, divine law and divine order. Even in the Ayeh of Noor, divine is referred to as the natural phenomenon of light and even references are made to the fruit of the earth. During the great period of Islam, Muslims did not forget these principles of their religion. Alas, Islam which is a natural religion in which God's miracles are the very law and order of nature drifted away and is still drifting away, even in Pakistan, from science which is the study of those very laws and orders of nature.……Islam is a natural religion of which the Ayats are the universe in which we live and move and have our being………..The God of the Quran is the one whose Ayats are the universe……"(Aga Khan III, April 4th 1952)

The above 9 quotes and excerpts are taken from Blogpost Four Hundred:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html

Sorry, Charley: Church Apologizes to Darwin

By David Waters
Washington Post Blog
September 17th 2008

Proving it's never too late to evolve, the Church of England has apologized to Charles Darwin for vilifying him for having the audacity to question, wonder, and doubt.

Darwin has been dead for 126 years, so it probably doesn't matter much to him, but the apology comes with a fascinating essay that could start a more intelligent conversation between religion and science, especially when it comes to the origin -- or genesis -- of the species.

"Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still," Rev. Malcolm Brown, director of missions and public affairs for the Church of England, wrote in an essay entitled "Good Religion Needs Good Science."

"We try to practice the old virtues of 'faith seeking understanding' and hope that makes some amends."

Brown's amends include a much needed corrective that Sarah Palin, Pat Robertson and other Christian creationists might consider.

"Subsequent generations have built on Darwin's work but have not significantly undermined his fundamental theory of natural selection. There is nothing here that contradicts Christian teaching. Jesus himself invited people to observe the world around them and to reason from what they saw to an understanding of the nature of God (Matthew 6: 25-33)," Brown wrote.

"The anti-evolutionary fervour in some corners of the churches may be a kind of proxy issue for other discontents; and, perhaps most of all, an indictment of the churches' failure to tell their own story - Jesus's story - with conviction in a way which works with the grain of the world as God has revealed it to be, both through the Bible and in the work of scientists of Darwin's calibre."

Though Darwin is a hero to atheists, he was raised in the Anglican church, thought about becoming a clergyman, later attended a Unitarian church and described himself as an agnostic. "In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God," he wrote in 1879. "It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist & an evolutionist."

Darwin's doubts about God weren't just scientific; they were human. As Princeton historian William Howarth told Newsweek, those doubts date to his enounters with slave-owning Christians and the death of his 10-year-old daughter in 1851, eight years before he published "On the Origin of the Species."

The Church of England isn't the first to reconsider its previous views. Earlier this year, the Vatican erected a statue of Galileo, who the Church put on trial for heresy 400 years ago. Pope John Paul II issued a number of apologies for the church's sins against Jews, heretics, women, Gypsies, native peoples and Orthodox Christians. In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention renounced its racist roots and apologized for its past defense of slavery.

As Brown explained, "The trouble with homo sapiens is that we're only human. People, and institutions, make mistakes and Christian people and churches are no exception."
Even the Church evolves.

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/undergod/

Related Posts:
http://webwanderings.wordpress.com/2008/09/17/church-apologises-to-charles-darwin-over-theory-of-evolution/
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/315creation-museum-pooh-poohs-500-years.html
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/316the-debate-rages-onevolutionism.html
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/317so-how-old-is-universe-anyway-6000.html

Easy Nash

The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

403)The Large Hadron Collider and the God Particle: Can Islam be in the middle of this exciting melding of Science and Religion?; Quotes of Aga Khans

I have blogged on a few occasions about the Large Hadron Collider that straddles two countries(France and Switzerland) and which conducted its first successful test yesterday. This mammoth scientific project, many years in the making, promises to have the same or greater short and long term impact on the world of pure science as Albert Einstein's General and Special Relativity did about 100 years ago. What starts of as pure science eventually morphs into practical applications and benefits for humanity but the discoveries have to be made in the realm of pure science first before the benefits can accrue. At the level of pure science it is first and foremost a search for knowledge about the universe in which we live, move and have our being.

In Islamic belief and philosophy the universe made up of matter is part of the structure of truth, the ultimate nature of which it is the goal of religion to reach. "In the Shia Ismaili Muslim formulation the spiritual and material realms are not dichotomous and matter and spirit are united under a higher genus and each realm possesses its own hierarchy"(Azim Nanji, Director of the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, U.K.). Furthermore, in Shia Ismaili Muslim cosmological and philosophical texts of yesteryear, the process of 'tarkib' as outlined in the Quran describes the composition of the material universe by the Universal Soul upon receiving 'tayyid' or divine inspiration from the Universal Intellect; the material composition known as the universe then has Intellect incorporated or wrapped within it and it becomes Intellect materialised. In the divine drama truth is reached when the material universe becomes unincorporated to reveal Intellect in its pure glory: "...... a true understanding of God must also take account of His creation. Such a synthesis is crucial to how the human intellect eventually relates to creation and how it ultimately becomes the instrument for penetrating through history the mystery of the unknowable God implied in the formulation of Tawhid."(Azim Nanji, Director, Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, U.K., 1995).

Quotes of Aga Khan IV and Aga Khan III:

“Muslims believe in an all-encompassing unit of man and nature. To them there is no fundamental division between the spiritual and the material while the whole world, whether it be the earth, sea or air, or the living creatures that inhabit them, is an expression of God’s creation.”(Aga Khan IV, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, 13 April 1984)

"Our religious leadership must be acutely aware of secular trends, including those generated by this age of science and technology. Equally, our academic or secular elite must be deeply aware of Muslim history, of the scale and depth of leadership exercised by the Islamic empire of the past in all fields"(Aga Khan IV, 6th February 1970, Hyderabad, Pakistan)

"Islamic doctrine goes further than the other great religions, for it proclaims the presence of the soul, perhaps minute but nevertheless existing in an embryonic state, in all existence in matter, in animals, trees, and space itself. Every individual, every molecule, every atom has its own spiritual relationship with the All-Powerful Soul of God"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)

".......we find contact, direct and immediate, with the outer universe interpreted as an infinite reality of matter, as a mirror of an eternal spirit, or indeed (as Spinoza later said) an absolute existence of which matter and spirit alike are but two of infinite modes and facets."(Inaugural Lecture Before the Iran Society by Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah Aga Khan III, November 9, 1936 London, United Kingdom.)

"It (Surah of Light from the Quran) tells us that the oil of the blessed olive tree lights the lamp of understanding, a light that belongs neither to the East nor West. We are to give this light to all. In that spirit, all that we learn will belong to the world and that too is part of the vision I share with you"(Aga Khan IV, Speech, 25 Sept. 1979)

"Indeed, one strength of Islam has always lain in its belief that creation is not static but continuous, that through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University, 16 March 1983, Karachi, Pakistan)

"Science is a wonderful, powerful tool and research budgets are essential. But Science is only the beginning in the new age we are entering. Islam does not perceive the world as two seperate domains of mind and spirit, science and belief. Science and the search for knowledge are an expression of man's designated role in the universe, but they do not define that role totally....."(Aga Khan IV, McMaster University Convocation, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, May 15th 1987)

"Education has been important to my family for a long time. My forefathers founded al-Azhar University in Cairo some 1000 years ago, at the time of the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt. Discovery of knowledge was seen by those founders as an embodiment of religious faith, and faith as reinforced by knowledge of workings of the Creator's physical world."(Aga Khan IV, 27th May1994, Cambridge, Massachusets, U.S.A.)

"Of the Abrahamic faiths, Islam is probably the one that places the greatest emphasis on knowledge. The purpose is to understand God's creation, and therefore it is a faith which is eminently logical. Islam is a faith of reason"(Aga Khan IV, Spiegel Magazine interview, Germany, Oct 9th 2006)

"......The Quran tells us that signs of Allah’s Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation - in the heavens and the earth, the night and the day, the clouds and the seas, the winds and the waters...."(Aga Khan IV, Kampala, Uganda, August 22 2007)

"The Qur’an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God’s creation"(Closing Address by His Highness Aga Khan IV at the "Musée-Musées" Round Table Louvre Museum, Paris, France, October 17th 2007)

".....This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives. Of that I am certain"(Aga Khan IV, Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, August 17th 2007)

"Scientific pursuits, philosophic inquiry and artistic endeavour are all seen as the response of the faithful to the recurring call of the Qur'an to ponder the creation as a way to understand Allah's benevolent majesty. As Sura al-Baqara proclaims: 'Wherever you turn, there is the face of Allah'.The famous verse of 'light' in the Qur'an, the Ayat al-Nur, whose first line is rendered here in the mural behind me, inspires among Muslims a reflection on the sacred, the transcendent. It hints at a cosmos full of signs and symbols that evoke the perfection of Allah's creation and mercy"(Aga Khan IV,Speech, Institute of Ismaili Studies, October 2003, London, U.K.)

The above are 13 quotes from "Blogpost Four Hundred":
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html

Smashing Idea

To Leap Forward, Scientists Return to The Big Bang

By William BoothWashington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 11, 2008
MEYRIN, Switzerland

It is the biggest machine ever built. Everyone says it looks like a movie set for a corny James Bond villain. They are correct. The machine is attended by brainiacs wearing hard hats and running around on catwalks. They are looking for the answer to the question: Where does everything in the universe come from? Price tag: $8 billion plus.

The world's largest particle accelerator is buried deep in the earth beneath herds of placid dairy cows grazing on the Swiss-French border. The thing has been under construction for years, like the pyramids. Its centerpiece is a circular 17-mile tunnel that contains a pipe swaddled in supermagnets refrigerated to crazy-low temperatures, colder than deep space.

The idea is to set two beams of protons traveling in opposite directions around the tunnel, redlining at the speed of light, generating wicked energy that will mimic the cataclysmic conditions at the beginning of time, then smashing into each other in a furious re-creation of the Big Bang -- this time recorded by giant digital cameras.

Wednesday, they fired this sucker up, the Associated Press reported.

It will be months before the proton beams reach full power and produce the kinds of exotic collisions that may herald an age of "new physics." But if the machine works -- this most ambitious, expensive, technologically advanced civilian scientific experiment in history -- it would be a happening for humanity.

"I think we may have to rewrite our textbooks," said Fabiola Gianotti, a project leader for Atlas, one of the four huge detectors that will record and analyze the collisions. "There must be something more than we have seen. There is something missing from the puzzle."

The Large Hadron Collider, as it is called by the 8,000 scientists, engineers and technicians from 85 countries who dote on it, will probe the most fundamental mysteries. From the fireballs, there may spring forth black holes and the elusive thing that gives matter its mass. Or not! There may be particles called "strangelets" and evidence of "dark matter" and signs of "supersymmetry" and maybe a little antimatter.

Oh, and they might find some extra dimensions. But this is the delicious part. They. Don't. Exactly. Know.

That accounts for the last-minute legal challenges by opponents who worry that the Large Hadron Collider -- hadrons, by the way, are collections of quarks, which are the particles inside protons and neutrons, which form the nucleus of the atom -- may spark a chain reaction of runaway events that could destroy the planet.

Their greatest concern is that the black holes, the stuff of a hundred "Star Trek" subplots, could grow and suck, grow and suck, which is what black holes do. A retired radiation safety expert in Hawaii sought a restraining order in a U.S. court, but was denied. Another group filed its doomsday appeal with the European Court of Human Rights, which also declined to act.

To calm public anxiety, the proton smashers investigated safety concerns and said any black holes "would be entirely benign" and would decay almost instantly. They would be "mini black holes," just like the ones that occur (the theorists say) whenever a couple of cosmic rays collide in space. Nature has already conducted experiments just like this, the report concludes, "and the planet still exists."

So make your plans accordingly.

* * *

The Large Hadron Collider was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, which on the surface looks like a slightly down-at-the-heels state college in the middle of a cow pasture in the dull suburbs of Geneva. CERN, however, is now the mecca for international physics, where the streets are named for Einstein, Newton and Curie. It is the place where they invented the World Wide Web. The cafeteria also serves wine with lunch.

After the United States stopped construction of the Superconducting Super Collider in 1993, after spending $2 billion and digging 14 miles of a 54-mile tunnel, the center of action for particle physics shifted to Europe.

To see what the excitement is about, you have to put on a hard hat and get into one of the elevator shafts and travel 300 feet below the Earth's surface to the tunnel, which was possible earlier this summer, before they closed the doors.

You drop into towering caverns lined with thick slabs of concrete that hold the detectors. The detectors look like building-size barrels, honeycombed with wafers of silicon and doughnut-shaped magnets. They are crawling, Medusa-like, with blue, red, green cables, like arteries and veins. They look muscular, beautiful, alive.

The tunnel itself is like a subterranean racetrack. Protons stripped from hydrogen atoms will be accelerated to high energies and whizzed around and around the tunnel, through an ordinary-looking blue pipe, which is not ordinary at all but quite extraordinary -- because it is coiled with thousands of superconducting magnets, which bend the proton beam so it can travel in circles. The magnets are superconducting because they are supercooled by superfluid helium, which is superstrange.

"A completely novel engineering material," is how Lyn Evans, the project manager of the collider, describes supercold helium. "For example, if you were to put it into a beaker? It could crawl out."

This is how they talk at CERN. If you stop them, and say, "What do you mean, crawl out?" They may go to a blackboard and begin with the math. You do not want them to do this.

Instead you say: Why underground?

"Cheaper," Evans said. It would cost a fortune to acquire the land in France and Switzerland to build the racetrack on the surface.

And why here? CERN was born in the rubble of postwar European physics. "Switzerland was neutral, and believe it or not, it was cheap," Evans said. "It is still neutral."

These protons whizzing through the pipe and around the track? They travel in bunches. These bunches are inches long and half the width of a human hair. Each bunch contains 100 billion protons, give or take a few. Each beam carries about 3,000 bunches. They travel at 99.9999991 percent the speed of light. So they are able to complete 11,245 laps a second. In 10 hours of operation, the beam could travel to Neptune and back.

The beams will travel on parallel tracks until the moment of truth. Then, at four major intersections along the way, the beams will cross and collide. The crash sites are the business end of the machine. That is where they put the detectors.

"Think of oranges," Evans said. "You collide two oranges together, you get a lot of pulp. We're not so interested in the pulp. What we want to do is see what happens when the pips -- the seeds -- hit each other." The proton is the orange, its component quarks are the pips.

And how many times will these pips collide? That would be 600 million collisions a second. The good head-on-smashup will erupt into a cloud of scattering particles, and the detectors (and their computers) will attempt to record the trajectories, energies, speeds, decays.

That's a lot of data to record.

"Quite," Evans said.

In one of the very useful cartoon books produced by the CERN public relations staff, an illustration shows a stack of 3 million CDs that is equal to the data flow from a year's worth of collider experiments. It is 12 miles tall.

* * *

To understand, deeply, some of the things the scientists here are talking about is not really possible. "I don't understand, fully, the math involved in the string theories," confessed Robert Cousins, a UCLA physics professor working at CERN on the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment.

But the general idea is this. "Humans have always asked, 'Where do we come from?' " Cousins said. "And this is the way that physicists ask that question."

For example, astrophysicists have observed that visible matter accounts for only 4 percent of the universe. By looking at gravitational effects -- for instance, how fast galaxies spin -- they can guess that there is more stuff out there than they can see. But what is this "dark matter?" Could dark matter be composed of "supersymmetric" particles, which might pop up in the collisions at CERN? For this reason, some people have called the Large Hadron Collider the "Hubble telescope of inner space."

And what about the mystery of antimatter? Antimatter is the identical-but-opposite twin of matter, except that for some unknown reason, nature prefers matter. As Cousins explained, if the universe and nature were neat and tidy, then equal amounts of matter and antimatter would be present at the Big Bang. But something is missing. The universe appears to be constructed entirely of matter. Where did all the antimatter go? "There is an imbalance," Cousins said. "So what gives?"

Physicists like balance, elegance and, believe it or not, simplicity, for instance E=mc{+2} -- energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light. The problem, theoretical physicist John Ellis says, "is mass. Where does it come from?"

Scientists' current understanding of the universe and all its particles and forces is called the Standard Model, and it is now 35 years old. It does not explain why some particles, such as protons, are relatively heavy, while others, like photons, have no mass at all. In a theory that dates to the early 1960s, a British physicist named Peter Higgs suggested that there was a mechanism -- alternatively described as a field, a boson, a particle, a whaddayacallit--that makes some things heavy and other things light.

Say what? Exactly.

Ellis, who has long white hair, a Gandalf vibe and a specialty in supersymmetry, lectures worldwide in four or five languages, including math. He expects the supercollider to detect the Higgs particle, but he hopes to see much, much more.

"Simply seeing the boring old Higgs? Or nothing at all?" He shuddered at the thought. "But then again, not seeing anything at all might be very interesting." Still, he bets they will uncover the nature of dark matter, and he has a lot riding on the wager.

For two decades, Ellis said, the Large Hadron Collider has been all about the builders. "For the engineers, the job is over," he said. "For the experimentalists, they're happy to find what they find.

"But for the theorists, for me, it is a bit different, because we have spent 40 years on a theory." He raised an eyebrow.

"There have been thousands of theoretical papers," he continued, "and I've written hundreds of them myself. What if it all turns out to be pile of garbage?"

The first beam completed its first slow lap Wednesday morning to applause from the scientists on site and the popping of champagne corks in labs worldwide, where contributing (and competing) scientists watched via satellite. "There it is," was Evans's simple pronouncement.

The Large Hadron Collider will not operate at full intensity for a year, and so many variables could hold up its work. But the physicists at CERN have reached a milestone. Now that the machine has been turned on, Cousins said, "the trick for us is to be as full of wonder as we can be -- and simultaneously as skeptical as you can get."

All related posts made by me on the Large Hadron Collider and the Higgs Particle:
1) http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/08/387the-large-hadron-collider-in-geneva.html
2) http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/05/360nima-arkani-hamed-theoretical.html
3) http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/04/342excitement-mounts-as-peter-higgs.html
4) http://spiritandlife.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/excitement-mounts-as-peter-higgs-announces-that-the-discovery-of-the-god-particle-is-at-hand/
5) http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/03/334the-science-of-religion-reprint-of.html
6) http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2007/12/2662008the-year-all-rest-of-teensy.html
7) http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2007/11/251symmetry-geometry-and-mathematical.html
8) http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/07/212on-verge-of-discovery-of-elusive.html
9) http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/03/139the-elusive-higgs-particle-which.html
10) http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/02/130if-you-think-of-this-universe-he-is.html
11) http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/03/147finding-most-fundamental-particles.html
12) http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/01/116impending-and-exciting-advances-in.html
13) http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/abdus-salaam-1979-nobel-laureate-in.html
14) http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/superstring-theory.html

Easy Nash

The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

402)Memoirs Of Aga Khan III: Islam, The Religion Of My Ancestors(Extract)

1) Quote from a letter written by Our 48th Imam to a friend in 1952 under the title: “What have we forgotten in Islam?”:Islam is fundamentally in its very nature a natural religion. Throughout the Quran God’s signs (Ayats) are referred to as the natural phenomenon, the law and order of the universe, the exactitudes and consequences of the relations between natural phenomenon in cause and effect. Over and over, the stars, sun, moon, earthquakes, fruits of the earth and trees are mentioned as the signs of divine power, divine law and divine order. Even in the Ayeh of Noor, divine is referred to as the natural phenomenon of light and even references are made to the fruit of the earth. During the great period of Islam, Muslims did not forget these principles of their religion. Alas, Islam which is a natural religion in which God’s miracles are the very law and order of nature drifted away and still drifting away, even in Pakistan, from science which is the study of those very laws and orders of nature.……Islam is a natural religion of which the Ayats are the universe in which we live and move and have our being………..The God of the Quran is the one whose Ayats are the universe……(Aga Khan III, April 4th 1952, Karachi, Pakistan)

2) About Hafiz, the renowned Iranian poet:“Then came Hafiz - by far the greatest singer of the soul of man. In him we can find all the strivings, all the sorrow, all the victories and joys, all the hopes and disappointments of each and every one of us. In him we find contact, direct and immediate, with the outer universe interpreted as an infinite reality of matter, as a mirror of an eternal spirit, or indeed (as Spinoza later said) an absolute existence of which matter and spirit alike are but two of infinite modes and facets.”(Inaugural Lecture Before the Iran Society by Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah Aga Khan, November 9, 1936 London, United Kingdom.)

3) There is a fundamental difference between the Jewish idea of creation and that of Islam. The creation according to Islam is not a unique act in a given time but a perpetual and constant event; and God supports and sustains all existence at every moment by His will and His thought. Outside His will, outside His thought, all is nothing, even the things which seem to us absolutely self-evident such as space and time. Allah alone wishes: the Universe exists; and all manifestations are as a witness of the Divine will (Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954).

4) Islamic doctrine goes further than the other great religions, for it proclaims the presence of the soul, perhaps minute but nevertheless existing in an embryonic state, in all existence in matter, in animals, trees, and space itself. Every individual, every molecule, every atom has its own spiritual relationship with the All-Powerful Soul of God. (Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954).

5) Thus there was an absolute need for the Divine Word’s revelation, to Mohammed himself, a man like the others, of God’s person and of his relations to the Universe which he had created. Once man has thus comprehended the essence of existence, there remains for him the duty, since he knows the absolute value of his own soul, of making for himself a direct path which will constantly lead his individual soul to and bind it with the universal Soul of which the Universe is, as much of it as we perceive with our limited visions, one of the infinite manifestations. Thus Islam’s basic principle can only be defined as mono-realism and not as monotheism. Consider, for example, the opening declaration of every Islamic prayer: “Allah-o-Akbar”. What does that mean? There can be no doubt that the second word of the declaration likens the character of Allah to a matrix which contains all and gives existence to the infinite, to space, to time, to the Universe, to all active and passive forces imaginable, to life and to the soul. Imam Hassan has explained the Islamic doctrine of God and the Universe by analogy with the sun and its reflection in the pool of a fountain; there is certainly a reflection or image of the sun, but with what poverty and with what little reality; how small and pale is the likeness between this impalpable image and the immense, blazing, white-hot glory of the celestial sphere itself. Allah is the sun; and the Universe, as we know it in all its magnitude, and time, with its power, are nothing more than the reflection of the Absolute in the mirror of the fountain (memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954).

http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/300timeless-sayings-of-aga-khan-iii.html
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/10/412blogpost-four-hundred-and-all-its.html

Religion of My Ancestors

ISLAM: THE RELIGION OF MY ANCESTORS

H.R.H. PRINCE AGA KHAN III
(Extract from The Memoirs of the Aga Khan by H.H. The Aga Khan III, 1954)

The origins of man's religious aspirations are to be found in what we nowadays call science. Those who have studied mythology and primitive psychology know that magic in various forms started various trains of thought in primitive man by which he achieved what seemed to him to be rational accounts of the natural phenomena around him. It seemed to him rational that these phenomena, these events like the rising and the setting of the sun, the passage of the seasons, the flowering of the bud and the ripening of the fruit, the wind and the rain, were caused and controlled by deities or superior beings. Primitive religious experience and primitive scientific reasoning were linked together in magic, in wizardry. Thus, at one and the same time mankind's experiences in the realm of sensation and his striving to explain and co-ordinate those experiences in terms of his mind led to the birth of both science and religion. The two remained linked throughout prehistoric and ancient times, and in the life of the early empires of which we have knowledge. It was difficult to separate what I may call proto-religion from proto-science; they made their journey like two streams, sometimes mingling, sometimes separating, but running side by side.

Such is the background to Greek and Roman thought and culture as well as to ancient Iranian and Hindu philosophy before the beginning of the Christian era. Aristotle, however, gave a more scientific turn to this mingling, introducing categories and concepts which were purely reasonable, and shedding those vestiges of religious awe and mystery which are visible even in Plato.

With the decline of the Roman Empire and the break-up of the great and elaborate system of civilization which Roman law and administration had sustained for so many centuries, the Dark Ages enfolded Europe. In the seventh century of the Christian era there was a rapid and brilliant new flowering of humanity's capacity and desire for adventure and discovery in the realms of both spirit and intellect. That flowering began in Arabia; its origin and impetus were given to it by my Holy ancestor, the Prophet Mohammed, and we know it by the name of Islam. From Arabia the tide of its influence flowed swiftly and strongly to North Africa and thence to Spain.

lbn-Rushd, the great Muslim philosopher, known to Europe as Averroes, established clearly the great distinction between two kinds of apprehensible human experience : on the one hand, our experience of nature as we recognize it through our senses, whence comes our capacity to measure and to count (and with that capacity all that it brought in the way of new events and new explanations); and on the other hand, our immediate and imminent experience of something more real, less dependent on thought or on the processes of the mind, but directly given to us, which I believe to be religious experience. Naturally, since our brain is material, and its processes and all the consequences of its processes are material, the moment that we put either thought or spiritual experience into words, this material basis of the brain must give a material presentation to even the highest, most transcendent spiritual experience. But men can study objectively the direct and subjective experiences of those who have had spiritual enlightenment without material intervention.

It is said that we live, move and have our being in God. We find this concept expressed often in the Koran, not in those words of course, but just as beautifully and more tersely. But when we realize the meaning of this saying, we are already preparing ourselves for the gift of the power of direct experience. Roumi and Hafiz, the great Persian poets, have told us, each in his different way, that some men are born with such natural spiritual capacities and possibilities of development that they have direct experience of that great love, that all-embracing, all-consuming love, which direct contact with reality gives to the human soil. Hafiz indeed has said that men like Jesus Christ and Muslim mystics like Mansour and Bayezid and others have possessed that spiritual power of the greater love; that any of us, if the Holy Spirit (*) ever present grants us that enlightenment, can, being thus blessed, have the power which Christ had, but that to the overwhelming majority of men this greater love is not a practical possibility. We can, however, make up for its absence from our lives by worldly, human love for individual human beings; and this will give us a measure of enlightenment attainable without the intervention of the Holy spirit. Those who have had the good fortune to know and feel this worldly, human love should respond to it only with gratitude and regard it as a blessing and as, in its own way, a source of pride. I firmly believe that the higher experience can to a certain extent be prepared for by absolute devotion in the material world to another human being. Thus from the most worldly point of view and with no comprehension of the higher life of the spirit, the lower, more terrestrial spirit makes us aware that all the treasures of this life, all that fame, wealth and health can bring are nothing beside the happiness which is created and sustained by the love of one human being for another. This great grace we can see in ordinary life as we look about us, among our acquaintances and friends.

But as the joys of human love surpass all that riches and power may bring a man, so does that greater spiritual love and enlightenment, the fruit of that sublime experience of the direct vision of reality which is God's gift and grace, surpass all that the finest, truest human love can offer. For that gift we must ever pray.

Now I am convinced that through Islam, through the idea of Allah, as presented by Muslims, man can attain this direct experience................ which no words can explain but which for him are absolute certainties. I have not discussed experience of this order with non-Muslims, but I have been told that Buddhists, Brahmins, Zoroastrians and Christians I have often not heard it of Jews, except perhaps Spinoza-have also attained this direct, mystical vision. I am certain that many Muslims, and I am convinced that I myself, have had moments of enlightenment and of knowledge of a kind which we cannot communicate because it is something given and not something acquired.

To certain extent I have found that the following verse of the Koran, so long as it is understood in a purely nonphysical sense, has given assistance and understanding to myself and other Muslims. However, I must warn all who read it not to allow their material critical outlook to break in with literal, verbal explanations of something that is symbolic and allegorical. I appeal to every reader, whether Muslim or not, to accept the spirit of this verse in its entirety :

Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth; His light is as a niche in which is a lamp, and the lamp is in a glass, the glass is as though it were a glittering star; it is lit from a blessed tree, an Olive neither of east nor of the west, the oil of which would well-nigh give light though no fire touched it,-light upon light;-Allah guides to His light whom He pleases; and Allah strikes out parables for men; and Allah all things doth know.
(CHAPTER XXIV "Light," 35)

From that brief statement of my own personal beliefs, I move on to as concise and as uncontroversial an exposition as I can give of Islam as it is understood and practised today. The present condition of mankind offers surely, with all its dangers and all its challenges, a chance too a chance of establishing not just material peace among nations but that better peace of God on earth. In that endeavour Islam can play its valuable constructive part, and the Islamic world can be a strong and stabilizing factor provided it is really understood and its spiritual and moral power recognized and respected.

I shall try, to give in a small compass a clear survey of the fundamentals of Islam, by which I mean those principles, those articles of faith, and that way of life, all of which are universally accepted among all Muslim sects. First therefore, I shall propound those Islamic tenets which are held in common by the larger community of Sunnis, and by Shias as well. Having thus made as clear as I can the faith which binds us all as Muslims, I shall then give a brief sketch of Shia doctrine and of those special tenets held by that subdivision of the Shias known as the Ismailis, the sect of which I am the Imam.

First it must be understood that, though these fundamental ideals are universally accepted by Muslims, there does not exist in Islam and there has never existed any source of absolute authority; we have no Papal Encyclical to propound and sanction a dogma, such as Roman Catholics possess, and no Thirty-nine Articles like those which state the doctrinal position of the Church of England. The prophet Mohammed had two sources of authority, one religious which was the essential one of his life, and the other secular which, by the circumstances and accidents of his career, became joined to his essential and Divinely inspired authority in religion.

According to the Sunni school the majority of Muslims the Prophet's religious authority came to an end at his death, and he appointed no successor to his secular authority. According to Sunni teaching, the faithful, the companions of the Prophet, the believers, elected Abu Bakr as his successor and his Khalif; but Abu Bakr assumed only the civil and secular power. No one had the authority to succeed to the religious supremacy, which depend on direct Divine inspiration, because the Prophet Mohammed and the Koran declared definitely that he was the final messenger of God, the Absolute. Thus, say the Sunnis, it was impossible to constitute an authority similar to that of the Papacy; it remained for the Faithful to interpret the Koran, the example and the sayings of the Prophet, not only in order to understand Islam but to ensure its development throughout the centuries. Fortunately the Koran has itself made this task easy, for it contains a number of verses which declare that Allah speaks to man in allegory and parable.

Thus the Koran leaves the door open for all kinds of possibilities of interpretation so that no one interpreter can accuse another of being non-Muslim. A felicitous effect of this fundamental principle of Islam that the Koran is constantly open to allegorical interpretation has been that our Holy Book has been able to guide and illuminate the thought of believers, century after century, in accordance with the conditions and limitations of intellectual appreciation imposed by external influences in the world. It leads also to a greater charity among Muslims, for since there can be no cut-and-dried interpretation, all schools of thought can unite in the prayer that the Almighty in His infinite mercy may forgive any mistaken interpretation of the Faith whose cause is ignorance or misunderstanding.

I am trying to put before my Western readers, not the doctrine of the Ismaili sect to which I belong, not Shia doctrine, nor the teachings of the Sufi school of Islamic mysticism, of men such as Jalaleddin Roumi or Bayazid Bostami, nor even the views of certain modern Sunni interpreters who, not unlike certain Christian sects, look for literal guidance in the Koran as Christians of these sects find it in the Old and New Testaments; but the main and central Sunni stream of thought, whose source is in the ideas of the school founded by al-Ghazali and whose influence and teaching have flowed on from century to century.

First, however, we must ask ourselves why this final and consummate appearance of the Divine Will was granted to mankind, and what were its causes. All Islamic schools of thought accept it as a fundamental principle that for centuries, for thousands of years before the advent of Mohammed, there arose from time to time messengers, illumined by Divine Grace, for and among those races of the earth which had sufficiently advanced intellectually to comprehend such a message. Thus Abraham, Moses, Jesus and all the Prophets of Israel are universally accepted by Islam. Muslims indeed know no limitation merely to the Prophets of Israel; they are ready to admit that there were similar Divinely inspired messengers in other countriesGautama Buddha, Shri Krishna and Shri Ram in India, Socrates in Greece, the wise man of China and many other sages and saints among peoples and civilizations, trace of which we have lost. Thus man's soul has never been left without a specially inspired messenger from the soul that sustains, embraces and is the universe. Then what need was there for a Divine revelation to Mohammed ?

The answer of Islam is precise and clear. In spite of its great spiritual strength, Jewish monotheism has retained two characteristics which render it essentially different from Islamic monotheism: God has remained, in spite of all, a national and racial God for the children of Israel, and His personality is entirely separate from its supreme manifestation, the Universe. In far-distant countries such as India and China, the purity of the Faith in the one God had been so vitiated by polytheism, by idolatry and even by a pantheism which was hardly distinguishable from atheism that these popular and folklore religions bore little resemblance to that which emanated from the true and pure Godhead. Christianity lost its strength and meaning for Muslims in that it saw it great and glorious founder not as a man but as God incarnate in man, as God made Flesh. Thus there was an absolute need for the Divine Word's revelation, to Mohammed himself, a man like the others, of God's person and of his relations to the Universe which he had created. Once man has thus comprehended the essence of existence, there remains for him the duty, since he knows the absolute value of his own soul, of making for himself a direct path which will constantly lead his individual soul to and bind it with the universal Soul of which the Universeas much of it as we perceive with our limited visions one of the infinite manifestations. Thus Islam's basic principle can only be defined as mono-realism and not as monotheism. Consider, for example, the opening declaration of every Islamic prayer: "Allah-o-Akbar". What does that mean? There can be no doubt that the second word of the declaration likens the character of Allah to a matrix which contains all and gives existence to the infinite, to space, to time, to the Universe, to all active and passive forces imaginable, to life and to the soul. Imam Hassan has explained the Islamic doctrine of God and the Universe by analogy with the sun and its reflection in the pool of a fountain; there is certainly a reflection or image of the sun, but with what poverty and with what little reality; how small and pale is the likeness between this impalpable image and the immense, blazing, white-hot glory of the celestial sphere itself. Allah is the sun; and the Universe, as we know it in all its magnitude, and time, with its power, are nothing more than the reflection of the Absolute in the mirror of the fountain.

There is a fundamental difference between the Jewish idea of creation and that of Islam. The creation according to Islam is not a unique act in a given time but a perpetual and constant event; and God supports and sustains all existence at every moment by His will and His thought. Outside His will, outside His thought, all is nothing, even the things which seem to us absolutely self-evident such as space and time. Allah alone wishes: the Universe exists; and all manifestations are as a witness of the Divine will. I think that I have sufficiently explained the difference between the Islamic doctrine of the unity of God and, on one side, the theistic ideas, founded upon the Old Testament, and on the other, the patheistic and dualistic ideas of the Indian religion and that of Zoroaster. But having known the real, the Absolute, having understood the Universe as an infinite succession of events, intended by God, we need an ethic, a code of conduct in order to be able to elevate ourselves toward the ideal demanded by God.
Let us then study the duties of man, as the great majority interpret them, according to the verses of the Koran and the Traditions of the Prophet. First of all, the relations of man to God: there are no priests and no monks. There is no confession of sins, except directly to God.

A man who does not marry, who refuses to shoulder the responsibilities of fatherhood, of building up a home and raising a family through marriage, is severely condemned. In Islam there are no extreme renunciations, no asceticism, no maceration, above all no flagellations to subjugate the body. The healthy human body is the temple in which the flame of the Holy Spirit burns, and thus it deserves the respect of scrupulous cleanliness and personal hygiene. Prayer is a daily necessity, a direct communication of the spark with the Universal flame. Reasonable fasting for a month in every year, provided a man's health is not impaired thereby, is an essential part of the body's discipline-through which the body learns to renounce all impure desires. Adultery, alcoholism, slander and thinking evil of one's neighbour are specifically and severely condemned. All men, rich and poor, must aid one another materially and personally. The rules vary in detail, but they all maintain the principle of universal mutual aid in the Muslim fraternity. This fraternity is absolute, and it comprises men of all colours and all races: black, white, yellow, tawny; all are the sons of Adam in the flesh and all carry in them spark of the Divine Light. Everyone should strive his best to see that this spark be not extinguished but rather developed to that full "Companionship- on-High" which was the vision expressed in the last words of the Prophet on his deathbed, the vision of that blessed state which he saw clearly awaiting him. In Islam the Faithful believe in Divine justice and are convinced that the solution of the great problem of predestination and free will is to be found in the compromise that God knows what man is going to do, but that man is free to do it or not.

Wars are condemned. Peace ought to be universal. Islam means peace, God's peace with man and the peace of men one to another. Usury is condemned, but free and honest trade and agriculturein all its formsare encouraged, since they manifest a Divine service, and the welfare of mankind depends upon the continuation and the intensification of these legitimate labours. Politically a republican form of government seems to be the most rightful; or in Islamic countries, which have witnessed the development of absolute monarchies with a great concentration of power within them, the election of the monarch has always remained a lifeless formula which has simply legitimized the usurpation of power.

After death Divine justice will take into consideration the faith, the prayers and the deeds of man. For the chosen there is eternal life and the spiritual felicity of the Divine vision. For the condemned there is hell, where they will be consumed with regret for not having known how to merit the grace and the blessing of Divine mercy.

Islamic doctrine goes further than the other great religions, for it proclaims the presence of the soul, perhaps minute but nevertheless existing in an embryonic state, in all existence in matter, in animals, trees, and space itself. Every individual, every molecule, every atom has its own spiritual relationship with the All-Powerful Soul of God. But men and women, being more highly developed, are immensely more advanced than the infinite number of other beings known to us. Islam acknowledges the existence of angels, of great souls who have developed themselves to the highest possible planes of the human soul and higher, and who are centres of the forces which are scattered throughout the Universe. Without going as far as Christianity, Islam recognizes the existence of evil spirits which seek by means of their secret suggestions to us to turn us from good, from that straight way traced by God's finger for the eternal happiness of the humblest as of the greatest-Abraham, Jesus, Mohammed.

Thus far I have described those tenets of Islam which are professed and held in common by all Muslims of any and every sect or subsect. I now come to the divergence of the streams of thought. The Sunnis are the people of the Sunna or tradition. Their Kalama or profession of faith is "There is no God but God and Mohammed is the Apostle of God." To this the Shias add: "And Ali, the companion of Mohammed, is the Vicar of God." Etymologically the word "Shia" means either a stream or a section.

The Prophet died without appointing a Khalif or successor. The Shia school of thought maintains that although direct Divine inspiration ceased at the Prophet's death, the need of Divine guidance continued and this could not be left merely to millions of mortal men, subject to the whims and gust of passion and material necessity, capable of being momentarily but tragically misled by greed, by oratory, or by the sudden desire for material advantage. These dangers were manifest in the period immediately following our Holy Prophet's death. Mohammed had been, as I have shown, both a temporal and a spiritual sovereign. The Khalif or successor of the Prophet was to succeed him in both these capacities; he was to be both Emir-al-Momenin or "Commander of the true believers" and Imam-al-Muslimin or "spiritual chief of the devout." Perhaps an analogy from the Latin, Western world will make this clearer: he would be Supreme Pontiff as well as Imperator or temporal ruler.

Ali, the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law, the husband of his beloved and only surviving child, Fatimah, his first convert, his bold champion in many a war, who the Prophet in his lifetime said would be to him as Aaron was to Moses, his brother and right-hand man, in the veins of whose descendants the Prophet's own blood would flow, appeared destined to be that true successor; and such had been the general expectation of Islam. The Shias have therefore always held that after the Prophet's death, Divine power, guidance and leadership manifested themselves in Hazrat Ali as the first Imam or spiritual chief of the devout. The Sunnis, however, consider him the fourth in the succession of Khalifs to temporal power.

The Imam is thus the successor of the Prophet in his religious capacity; he is the man who must be obeyed and who dwells among those from whom he commands spiritual obedience. The Sunnis have always held that this authority is merely temporal and secular, and is exerted only in the political sphere; they believe therefore that it appertains to any lawfully constituted political head of a state, to a governor or to the president of a republic. The Shias say that this authority is all-pervading and is concerned with spiritual matters also, that it is transferred by inherited right to the Prophet's successors of his blood.

How this came about is best described in the words of Mr. Justice Arnold in his judgment delivered in the High Court of Bombay on November 12, 1866, in the great lawsuit brought against my grandfather, to which I later refer.

"The influence of Ayesha, the young and favourite wife of Mohammed, a rancorous enemy of Fatima and of Ali, procured the election of her own father Abu Bakr; to Abu Bakr succeeded Omar, and to him Osman, upon whose death, in the year 655 of the Christian era, Ali was at last raised to the Khalifat. He was not even then unopposed; aided by Ayesha, Moawiyah of the family of the Unimayads, contested the Khalifat with him, and while the strife was still doubtful, in the year A.D. 660, Ali was slain by a Kharegite, or Muslim fanatic, in the mosque of Cufa, at that time the principal Muslim city on the right or west bank of the Euphrates-itself long since a ruin, at no great distance from the ruins of Babylon."

Mr. Justice Arnold's judgment gives -a lucid and moving account of the effect on Muslim life and thought of this assassination and of the subsequent murders-nine years and twenty years after their fatherof Ali's two sons, Hassan and Hussein, the Prophet's beloved grand children whom he himself had publicly hailed as "the foremost among the youths of Paradise"; of the tragic and embittered hostility and misunderstanding that developed between the two main Muslim seats, and all the sorrow and the strife that afflicted succeeding generations.

Of the Shias there are many subdivisions; some of them believe that this spiritual headship, this Imamat which was Hazrat Ali's, descended through him in the six generation to Ismail from whom I myself claim my descent and my Imamat. Others believe that the Imamat is to be traced from Zeid, the grandson of Imam Hussein, the Prophet's grandson martyred at Kerbela. Still others, including the vast majority of the people of Persia, and Indian Shias, believe that the Imamat is now held by a living Imam, the twelfth from Ali, who has never died, who is alive and has lived thirteen hundred years among us, unseen but seeing; those who profess this doctrine are known as the Asna Asharis. The Ismailis themselves are divided into two parties, a division which stems from the period when my ancestors held the Fatimite Khalifat of Egypt. One party accepts my ancestor, Nizar, as the rightful successor of the Khalif of Egypt, Mustansir; whereas the other claims as Imam his other son, the Khalif Mustalli.

Thenceforward the story of the Ismailis, of my ancestors and their followers, moves through all the complexities, the ebb and flow, of Islamic history through many centuries. Gibbon, it has been said, abandoned as hopeless the task of clearing up the obscurities of an Asiatic pedigree; there is, however, endless fascination in the study of the web of characters and of events, woven across the ages, which unites us in this present time with all these far-distant glories, tragedies and mysteries. Often persecuted and oppressed, the faith of my ancestors was never destroyed; at times it flourished as in the epoch of the Fatimite Khalifs, at times it was obscure and little understood.

After the loss of the Fatimite Khalifat in Egypt, my ancestors moved first to the highlands of Syria and the Lebanon, thence they journeyed eastward to the mountains of Iran. They established a stronghold on the craggy peak of Alamut in the Elburz Mountains, the range which separates from the rest of Persia the provinces lying immediately to the south of the Caspian. Legend and history intertwine here in the strange tale of the Old Man of the Mountains, and of those hereditary Grand Masters of the Order of the Assassins who held Alamut for nearly two hundred years. In this period the Ismaili faith was well known in Syria, in Iraq, in Arabia itself, and far up into Central Asia. Cities such as Samarkand and Bokhara were then great centres of Muslim learning and thought. A little later in the thirteenth century of the Christian era, Ismaili religious propaganda penetrated into what is Sinkiang and Chinese Turkestan. There was a time in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when the Ismaili doctrine was the chief and most influential Shi'ite school of thought; but later with the triumph of the Saffevi Dynasty in Iran (particularly in its northwest province, Azerbaijan) the Asna Ashari, or Twelfth Imam, sect established its predominance. Remnants of the Ismaili faith remained firm and are still to be found in many parts of Asia, North Africa and Iran. The historical centres of Ismailism indeed are scattered widely over all the Islamic world. In the mountainous regions of Syria, for example, are to be found the Druzes, in their fastness in the Jebel Druze. They are really Ismailis who did not originally follow my family in their migration out of Egypt but remained with the memory of my ancestor, AI Hakem, the Fatimite Khalif of Egypt, but they established their doctrines on lines very similar to those of the Syrian Ismailis, who, in present times, are my followers. Similar Ismaili "islands" exist in southern Egypt, in the Yemen and of course in Iraq. In Iran the centres are around Mahalat, westward toward Hamadan and to the south of Tehran; others are in Khorassan to the north and east around about Yezd, around Kerman and southward along the coast of the Persian Gulf from Bandar Abbas to the borders of Pakistan and Sind, and into Baluchistan. Others are in Afghanistan, in Kabul itself; there are many in Russia and Central Asia, around Yarkand, Kashgar and in many villages and settlements in Sinkiang. In India certain Hindu tribes were converted by missionaries sent to them by my ancestor, Shah Islam Shah, and took the name of Khojas; a similar process of conversion occurred in Burma as recently as the nineteenth century.

Now that I have brought this brief record of Ismaili origin, vicissitudes and wanderings within sight of the contemporary world, it may be timely to give an account in some detail of the life and deeds of my grandfather, the first to be known as the Aga Khan, who emerged into the light of history early in the nineteenth century of the Christian era. His life was (as Mr. Justice Arnold observed) "adventurous and romantic." He was the hereditary chieftain of the important city of Kerman and the son-in-law of the powerful and able Persian monarch, Fateh Ali Shah, holding considerable territorial possessions in addition to his inherited Imamat of the Ismailis.

In 1838 he was involved in conflict with the then ruling Emperor Mohammed Shah, for reasons of which Mr. Justice Arnold gave the following account: "Hadji Mirza Ahasi, who had been the tutor of Mohammed Shah, was during the whole reign of his royal pupil (from 1834 to 1848) the Prime Minister of Persia. A Persian of very low origin formerly in the service of the Aga Khan, had become the chief favourite and minion of the all-powerful minister. This person, though his patron, had the impudence to demand in marriage for his son one of the daughters of the Aga Khan, a granddaughter of the late Shah-in-Shah! This, says the Persian historian, was felt by the Aga Khan to be a great insult; and the request, though strongly pressed by the Prime Minister, was indignantly refused. Having thus made the most powerful man in Persia his deadly enemy, the Aga Khan probably felt that his best chance of safety was to assert himself in arms-a course not uncommon with the great feudatories of disorganized Persia. Making Kerman his headquarters, he appears to have kept up the fight with varying fortunes through the years 1838-1839 and part of 1840. In the latter year, overpowered by numbers, he was forced to flight and with difficulty made his escape, attended by a few horsemen, through the deserts of Baluchistan to Sind.

In his wanderings of the next few years my grandfather encountered and rendered stout assistance to the British in their process of military and imperial expansion northward and westward from the Punjab. In Sind he raised and maintained a troop of light horse (the descendants of whose survivors were so grave an anxiety to me many years later) and during the latter stages of the first Afghan War, in 1841 and 1842, he and his cavalry were of service to General Nott in Kardahar and to General England when he advanced out of Sind to join Nott. For these services and for others which he rendered to Sir Charles Napier in his conquest of Sind in 1843-1844, my grand father received a pension from the British Government.

In 1845 my grandfather reached Bombay where-as Mr. Justice Arnold expressed it -"he was received by the cordial homage of the whole Khoja population of this city and its neighbourhood." For a year or two from 1846 he was in Calcutta as a political prisoner because Mohammed Shah had remonstrated to the British Government about his presence in a port of such ready access to Persia as Bombay. However, in 1848 Mohammed Shah's reign came to an end, and my grandfather settled peaceably in Bombay and there established his durkhana or headquarters.

Not only was this a wise and happy personal decision, but it had an admirable effect on the religious and communal life of the whole Ismaili world. It was as if the heavy load of persecution and fanatical hostility, which they had to bear for so long, was lifted. Deputations came to Bombay from places as remote as Kashgar, Bokhara, all parts of Iran, Syria, the Yemen, the African coast and the then narrowly settled hinterland behind it.

Since then there has been no fundamental or violent change in the Ismaili way of life or in the conditions in which my followers can pursue their own religion. At present no deputations come from Russia, but Ismailis in Russia and in Central Asia are not persecuted and are quite free in their religious life; they cannot of course send the tribute, which is merely a token tribute and never has been the sort of mulcting which a few fanatical enemies of the Ismailis have alleged it to be.

With Sinkiang, Kashgar and Yarkand we have no communication at present, since the frontier is closed -no more firmly against Ismailis than against anyone else-but we know that they are free to follow their religion and that they are firm and devoted Ismailis with a great deal of self-confidence and the feeling that they constitute by far the most important Ismaili community in the whole world. From Iran representatives and commissions come and go; from Syria they used to come to India regularly, but now from time to time members of my family go to Syria, or my Syrian followers come and visit me in Egypt. Not long ago I went to Damascus where a great number of my followers came to pay their respects. In nearly all those countries the greater part of the tribute to the Imam is spent on schools, or prayer houses, and on the administration of various religious and social institutions. A considerable measure of local responsibility prevails; questions of marriage and divorce, for example, are entirely the concern of the local representative of the Imam. At times prosperous communities among the Ismailis help less prosperous ones in respect to similar institutions. I issue general instructions and orders; but the actual day-to-day administrative work of each local community is done by the Imam's representative and local chief. Many of these local headships throughout Central Asia, for example, are hereditary. But we have no general, regular system. Sometimes a son succeeds, sometimes a grandson. Sometimes he is known as Vizir, or Kamdar (a title which by constant use has degenerated into Kamria). Sometimes he is Rais or Rai. In Syria the Imam's representatives are known as Amirs; in some parts of Central Asia such as Hunza, the word "Amir" has been coloquialized and shortened to Mir.

The headship of a religious community spread over a considerable part of the world surface-from Cape Town to Kashgar, from Syria to Singapore -cannot be sustained in accordance with any cut-and-dried system. Moral conditions, material facilities, national aspirations and outlook and profoundly differing historical backgrounds have to be borne in mind, and the necessary mental adjustments made.

There is, therefore, great variety and great flexibility of administration. In the British, Portuguese and French colonies of East Africa, in Uganda, Portuguese East Africa, Madagascar, Natal and Cape Colony, there is a highly developed and civilized administrative system of councils. Educational administrators, property agents, executive and judicial councils all perform an immense amount of day-to-day administrative work, and under my general order, vast financial administration as well.

In India and Pakistan, there is a similar technique of administration but in a less developed and looser form. In Burma and Malaya the organization closely resembles that of the Ismailis in Africa. Syria, Iran and the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan are all countries with their strongly marked individuality, historical background and traditions. These historical variations over centuries, the accessibility, or lack of it, for many of the more isolated communities, and the development of communications between my family and my followers have all had their effect.
In Central Asia the leadership of the Ismailis is by inheritance in the hands of certain families and has been handed down in continuous line through centuries. This is true of my followers in Afghanistan, and in Russia and Chinese Turkestan, where certain families have been, since their conversion to Islam, administrators and representatives of the Imam. The local leadership passes down in a close connection of kinship from one generation to another. Sometime it is the hereditary chieftain and occasionally-as in the case of Hunza-the secular kind, himself an Ismaili, who is the administrator of the religious brotherhood.

The correspondence which I maintain with all these far-scattered communities is affected by local circumstances. In Baghdad I have special representatives who deal with Arabian matters; in Iran I have special representatives in every province who deal with Ismaili affairs, who are also generally members of families that have as a matter of inheritance supplied local Ismaili leaders for probably as long as these people have been linked with my family. In Syria, one such family of representatives has retained an unbroken connection with my family for more than a thousand years.

Ismailism has survived because it has always been fluid. Rigidity is contrary to our whole way of life and outlook. There have really been no cut and dried rules; even the set of regulations known as the Holy Laws are directions as to method and procedure and not detailed orders about results to be obtained. In some countries-India and Africa for example-the Ismailis have a council system, under which their local councillors are charged with all internal administrative responsibility, and report to me what they have done. In Syria, Central Asia and Iran, leadership, as I have said, is vested in hereditary recommended leaders and chiefs, who are the Imam's representatives and who look after the administration of the various jamats, or congregations.

From all parts of the Ismaili world with which regular contact is politically possible a constant flow of communications and reports comes to me. Attending to these, answering them, giving my solutions of specific problems presented to me, discharging my duties as hereditary Imam of this far-scattered religious community and association-such is my working life, and so it has been since I was a boy.

Much of the work of the Ismaili councils and of the Imam's representatives nowadays is purely social, and is concerned with the proper contractual arrangement of matters such as marriage and divorce. On the subject I should perhaps say that nowhere in the world where Ismailis are now settled is there any persecution of them or interference with their faith and customs, except if and when the general laws of the country are contrary to institutions, such as plurality of wives. It is generally overlooked that among Ismailis no one can take a second wife or divorce his first wife for a whim or-as is sometimes falsely imagined in the West-some frivolous or erratic pretext. There are usually, to our way of thinking, some very good reasons for either action. To beget children is a very proper need and desire in every marriage; if after many years of married life there is still no issue, often a wife herself longs to see her home brightened by the presence of children with all the laughter, hope, joy and deep contentment that they bring with them. In other instances there is so profound a difference of character that a divorce is found to be the best solution for the happiness of both parties. But in every case whether a second wife is taken or a divorce is granted-the various councils or (where there are no councils) the representatives of the Imam have an absolute duty to safeguard the interests of the wife; if a second wife is taken, it is a matter of seeing that full financial protection is assured to the first wife, or if there is a divorce, of seeing that there is a generous, adequate and seemly monetary settlement. It is important that it should be realized among non-Muslims that the Islamic view of the institution of marriage-and of all that relates to it, divorce, plurality of wives and so on-is a question solely of contract, of consent and of definite and mutually accepted responsibilities. The sacramental concept of marriage is not Islam's; therefore except indirectly there is no question of its religious significance, and there is no religious ceremony to invest it with the solemnity and the symbolism which appertain to marriage in other religions like Christianity and Hinduism. It is exactly analogous to-in the West -an entirely civil and secular marriage in a registry office or before a judge. Prayers of course can be offered-prayers for happiness, prosperity and good health-but there can be no religious ritual beyond these, and they indeed are solely a matter of personal choice. There is therefore no kind of marriage in Islam, or among the Ismailis, except the marriage of mutual consent and mutual understanding. And as I have indicated, much of the work of the Ismaili councils and of the Imam's representatives in all our Ismaili communities is to see that marriages are properly registered and to ensure that divorce, though not a sin, is so executed that the interests of neither party suffer from it, that as much protection as possible is given to women, and most of all, that the maintenance of young children is safeguarded.

The past seventy years have witnessed steady, stable progress on the part of the Ismailis wherever they have settled. Under the Ottoman Empire, in the reign of Abdul Hamid, there was a considerable degree of persecution. A minority, like several other minorities in his empire, they suffered hardship, and many of their leaders endured imprisonment in the latter years of his despotic rule. With the Young Turk revolution, however, the period of persecution ended. And now, in spite of all the vast political shifts and changes which the world has undergone, I think it may reasonally be claimed that the lot of the Ismailis in general throughout the world is a fairly satisfactory one; wherever they are settled, their communities compose a happy, self-respecting, law-abiding and industrious element in society.

What has been my own policy with my followers? Our religion is our religion, you either believe in it or you do not. You can leave a faith but you cannot, if you do not accept its tenets, remain within it and claim to "reform" it. You can abandon those tenets, but you cannot try to change them and still protest that you belong to the particular sect that holds them. Many people have left the Ismaili faith, just as other have joined it throughout the ages. About a score of people out of many millions-a small group in Karachi and in India-pretended to be Ismailis but called themselves "reformers". The true Ismailis immediately excommunicated them. There has never been any question of changing the Ismaili faith; that faith has remained the same and must remain the same. Those who have not believed in it have rightly left it; we bear them no ill-will and respect them for their sincerity.

What about political guidance? It has been the practice of my ancestors, to which I have strictly adhered, always to advise Ismailis to be absolutely loyal and devoted subjects of the State-whatever its constitution, monarchical or republican-of which they are citizens. Neither my ancestors nor I have ever tried to influence our followers one way or another, but we have told them that the constituted legal authority of any country in which they abide must have their full and absolute loyalty. Similarly if any government approaches me and asks me for my help and my advice to its subjects, this advice is invariably-as was my father's and my grandfather's-that they must be loyal and law-abiding, and if they have any political grievances they must approach their government as legally constituted, and in loyalty and fidelity to it. All my teaching and my guidance for my followers has been in fulfilment of this principle: render unto God the things which are God's and to Caesar those which are Caesar's.

In matters of social reform I have tried to exert my influence and authority sensibly. and progressively. I have always sought to encourage the emancipation and education of women. In my grandfather's and my father's time the Ismailis were far ahead of any other Muslim sect in the matter of the abolition of the strict veil, even in extremely conservative countries. I have absolutely abolished it; nowadays you will never find an Ismaili woman wearing the veil.

Everywhere I have always encouraged girls' schools, even in regions where otherwise they were completely unknown. I say with pride that my Ismaili followers are, in this matter of social welfare, far in advance of any other Muslim sect. No doubt it is possible to find individuals equally advanced, but I am convinced that our social conditions as a body-education for both boys and girls, marriage and domestic outlook and customs, the control over divorce, the provision for children in the event of divorce, and so forth-are far ahead. We were pioneers in the introduction of midwifery, and long before any other Muslim community in the Middle East, we had trained nurses for childbirth. With the support and help of Lady Dufferin's nursing association in India, I was able-at a time when normal conditions in these matters were terribly unsanitary-to introduce a modern outlook on childbirth, with trained midwives, not only in India and Burma, but in Africa and, so far as general conditions permitted in Syria and Iraq.

In Africa, where I have been able to give active help as well as advice, we have put the finances of individuals and of the various communities on a thoroughly safe basis. We established
an insurance company-the Jubilee Insurance-whose shares have greatly increased in value. We also set up what we called an investment trust, which is really a vast association for receiving money and then putting it out on loan, at a low rate of interest, to Ismaili traders and to people who want to buy or build their own houses.

About my own personal wealth a great of nonsense has been written. There must be hundreds of people in the United States with a larger capital wealth than mine; and the same is true of Europe. Perhaps not many people, in view of the incidence of taxation, even in the United States, have the control over an income that I exercise; but this control carries with it-as an unwritten law-the upkeep of all the various communal, social and religious institutions of my Ismaili following, and in the end only a small fraction of it, if any, is left for members of my family and myself.

When I read about the "millions of pounds a year" I am supposed to possess, I know only that if I had an income of that size I should be ashamed of myself. There is a great deal of truth in Andrew Carnegie's remark: "The man who dies rich, dies disgraced." I should add: The man who lives rich, lives disgraced. By "lives rich", I mean the man who lives and spends for his own pleasure at a rate and on a scale of living in excess of that customary among those called nowadays "the upper income group" in the country of which he is a citizen. I am not a communist, nor do I believe that a high standard of private life is a sin and an affront to society. I feel no flicker of shame at owning three or four cars; in India, where a great many people from outside come and go, I always have more cars for their use.

Nor am I ashamed of being the owner of a big racing stable, about which I propose to say something in a later chapter. My family, as I have indicated, have had a long, honorable and affectionate association with horsemanship in all its forms. Had I to contemplate either giving up a considerable number of horses in training or turning the stable into a paying concern, I have no doubt that by selling a considerable proportion of my stock, I could turn it into a paying business any day of the week. Neither my grandfather, my father nor I have ever looked on our racing as simply a money-making matter, but as a sport which, by careful attention and thoughtful administration, could become self-supporting and a permanent source of pleasure not only for ourselves as owners, but for thousands-indeed for millions-who follow our colors on the turf; and we have considered our studs and our training stables as sources of wealth for the countries in which they are maintained and of practical usefulness from the point of view of preserving and raising the standard of bloodstock.

A specific charge of extravagance against our family related to the period in which some two thousand people a day were living and feeding at our expense. These two thousand were, after all, descendants and dependants of people who had exiled themselves from Iran with my grandfather and had given up their homes and estates, and in the conditions of the time, we, as heads of the Ismaili community, were responsible for their welfare and maintenance. As soon as I could, and as thoroughly as I could, I dealt with that problem, so that now their descendants are far happier and far more self-reliant than they were, and I have nothing on my conscience about the way in which I dealt with it.

I would have been a profoundly unhappy man if I had possessed one-tenth of the fabulous amount of wealth which people say that I have at my disposal, for then indeed I should have felt all my life that I was carrying a dead weight-useless alike to my family and my friends or, for that matter, to my followers. Beyond a certain point wealth and the material advantages which it brings, do more harm than good, to societies as to individuals.

So far as their way of life is concerned, I have tried to vary the advice which I have given to my followers in accordance with the country or state in which they live. Thus in the British colony of East Africa I strongly urge them to make English their first language, to found their family and domestic lives along English lines and in general to adopt British and European customs-except in the matter of alcohol and slavery to tobacco. I. am convinced that living as they must in a multiracial society, the kind of social life and its organization which gives them the greatest opportunities to develop their personalities and is the most practically useful is the one which they ought to follow. On the other hand, to those who live in Burma I have given the same sort of advice-but that they should follow a Burman way of life rather than any other. In Muslim countries like Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Iran of course there are no difficulties at all. My own family's home and social life has always followed an Iranian-Muslim pattern; this has involved no violent or radical readjustment wherever I have lived, so that the European ladies whom I have married, one after the other, have in fact easily and happily acquired an Iranian-Muslim outlook and rhythm of life.

In Africa, however, my followers faced a much more acute problem. They arrived there with Asiatic habits and an Asiatic pattern of existence, but they encountered a society in process of development which is, if anything, EuropeanAfrican. To have retained an Asiatic outlook in mattrers of language, habits and clothing would have been for them a complication and socially a dead weight of archaism in the Africa of the future. In Pakistan and modern Bharat the Ismailis are likely in the future to assume two totally different patterns of culture.In West Pakistan they will probably speak Urdu or what used to be called Hindustani, and their social habits and customs will be molded accordingly. In East Pakistan Bengali dress and language will play a major part in Ismaili life. In Bharat the languages which thev will speak will probably be Gujerati and Marathi, and their outlook and way of life similarly will take on a Gujerati-Marathi shape. Yet I am certain that so long as they retain their faith, the brotherhood of Islam will unite all these people of varying social outlook and patterns of behaviour and will keep them together in spirit.

(*) It must be realized that the Muslim concept of the Holy Spirit differs profoundly from the Christian idea of the Third Person of the Trinity.

Related Posts:

Blogpost Five Hundred IS Blogpost Four Hundred, The High-Octane Fuel That Powers My Blog On The Link Between Science And Religion In Islam
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html

Timeless sayings of Aga Khan III, Consolidated:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/300timeless-sayings-of-aga-khan-iii.html

Easy Nash
http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/science_and_religion_in_islam_the_link/
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/08/500blogpost-five-hundred-is-blogpost.html
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/03/453a-blog-constructed-within.html

In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God: Aga Khan IV(2008)
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims: Aga Khan IV(1985)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)

Science and Religion in Islam: The Link.