420)Cyclical Time and Sacred History in Medieval Ismaili Thought, By Farhad Daftary; From the Academic Papers Section of the IIS website.

Quotes from the article:
"In the Fatimid period (297-567 AH/909-1171 CE), when the Ismailis possessed a flourishing state of their own, they elaborated a diversity of intellectual traditions and institutions of learning, making important contributions to Islamic thought and culture."

"In elaborating their religious system, the early Ismailis emphasised a fundamental distinction between the exoteric (zahir) and the esoteric (batin) dimensions of the sacred scriptures and the religious commandments and prohibitions. Accordingly, they held that the revealed scriptures, above all the Qur'an, and the laws laid down in them, had their apparent or literal meaning, the zahir, which had to be distinguished from their inner meaning or the true spiritual reality, hidden in the batin. They further held that the zahir, or the religious laws enunciated by the messenger-prophets, underwent periodical changes while the batin, containing the spiritual truths (haqa'iq), remained immutable and eternal."

From the Academic Papers Section of the Institute of Ismaili Studies website:

Cyclical Time and Sacred History in Medieval Ismaili Thought
Dr Farhad Daftary

This is an edited version of an article that was originally published in Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, eds. K. D'Hulster and J. Van Steenbergen, Uitgeverij Peeters en Department Oosterse Studies Leuven- Paris- Dudley, MA 2008, Vol. 171, pp.151-158.

Abstract
It was in 148 AH/765 CE that the earliest groups identifiable as Ismailis separated from the rest of the Imami Shi'is, centred in Kufa in southern Iraq.[1] By the early 260s AH/870s CE, when numerous da'is appeared in many regions of the Muslim world, the Ismailis had organised a dynamic movement. The Ismailis now referred to their religio-political campaign simply as al-da'wa (the mission) or al-da'wa al-hadiya (the rightly-guiding mission). The central aim of the early Ismaili da'wa was to install the 'Alid imam recognised by the Ismaili Shi'is to the position of leadership over all Muslims, in rivalry with the 'Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. The rapid success of the early Ismaili da'wa culminated in the foundation of the Fatimid caliphate in 297 AH/909 CE in North Africa. The religio-political da'wa of the Ismailis had finally led to the establishment of a state or da'wa headed by the Ismaili imam. In the Fatimid period (297-567 AH/909-1171 CE), when the Ismailis possessed a flourishing state of their own, they elaborated a diversity of intellectual traditions and institutions of learning, making important contributions to Islamic thought and culture.

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Key words: da'wa, Fatimid, Qarmati, batin, Haqa'iq, ta'wil, wasi, adwar, samit, asas, mutimm, mahdi, dawr al-kashf, al Nasafi, kitab al-islah, al Sijistani, dawr al-fitra, yawm al-qiyama, cosmology, satr, Nizaris, ta'lim, taqiyya.

The basic framework of an Ismaili system of religious thought was, however, already laid down during the pre-Fatimid phase of Ismaili history. In fact, the Ismaili intellectual traditions had acquired their distinctive forms and expressions by 286 AH/899 CE when the Ismaili da'wa and community were split into rival Fatimid Ismaili and Qarmati factions? [2] The distinctive teachings of the early Ismailis were further developed by the Fatimid Ismailis who also modified certain aspects of early Ismailism, while the Qarmatis followed a separate course in the doctrinal field.

In elaborating their religious system, the early Ismailis emphasised a fundamental distinction between the exoteric (zahir) and the esoteric (batin) dimensions of the sacred scriptures and the religious commandments and prohibitions. Accordingly, they held that the revealed scriptures, above all the Qur'an, and the laws laid down in them, had their apparent or literal meaning, the zahir, which had to be distinguished from their inner meaning or the true spiritual reality, hidden in the batin. They further held that the zahir, or the religious laws enunciated by the messenger-prophets, underwent periodical changes while the batin, containing the spiritual truths (haqa'iq), remained immutable and eternal.

The hidden truths could be made apparent through ta'wil, esoteric exegesis, the process of educing the batin from the zahir. Similar processes of exegesis or hermeneutics existed in early Judaeo-Christian as well as Gnostic traditions, but the immediate antecedents of Isma'ili ta'wil, also known as batini ta'wil, may be traced to the Shi'i milieus of the 2nd/3rd century AH in southern Iraq, the cradle of Shi'ism.

The Ismailis also taught that in every age, the esoteric world of spiritual reality could be accessible only to the elite (khawass) of mankind, as distinct from the common people ('awamm) who were merely capable of understanding the zahir, the apparent meaning of the revelations. In the era of Islam, the eternal truths of religion could be revealed only to those who had been properly initiated into the Isma'ili da'wa and community and recognised the teaching authority of the Prophet Muhammad's wasi or legatee, Imam 'Ali b. Abi Talib, and the imams who succeeded him in the Husaynid 'Alid line. They alone, collectively designated as the ahl al-ta'wil or 'people of ta'wil', represented the sources of knowledge and authoritative teaching (ta'lim) in the era of Islam. These authorised guides were, in fact, the very same people referred to in the Qur'an (3:7) by the expression al-rasikun fi'l-'ilm or 'those possessing firm knowledge'.[3] The centrality of ta'wil for the early Isma'ilis is attested by the fact that the bulk of their literature is comprised of the ta'wil genre of writing, which seeks justification for Isma'ili doctrines in Qur'anic verses.

The Isma'ilis taught that the eternal truths, the haqa'iq, hidden in the batin, represented the true message common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. However, the truths of these monotheistic Abrahamic religions recognised in the Qur'an had been veiled by different exoteric laws as required by changing circumstances. Fully aware of their 'ecumenical' approach, the early Isma'ilis developed the broader implications of these truths in terms of a gnostic system of thought, a system that represented a distinctly Isma'ili esoteric worldview. The two main components of this system were a cyclical history of revelation and a cosmological doctrine with its integral soteriology.

By the early 280s AH/890s CE, the Ismailis had already developed a cyclical interpretation of time and the sacred history of mankind, which they applied to the Judaeo-Christian revelations as well as a variety of pre-Islamic religions such as Zoroastrianism, Mazdakism and Manichaeism. They conceived of time as a progression of cycles or eras, dawrs (Arabic plural, adwar), with a beginning and an end. On the basis of their eclectic temporal view, reflecting Greek, Judaeo-Christian and Gnostic influences as well as Shi'i eschatological ideas, the Ismailis elaborated a view of sacred history in terms of eras of different prophets recognised in the Qur'an. The prophetic interpretation of the religious history of mankind was moreover combined with the Ismaili doctrine of the imamate, which had been inherited from the earlier Imami Shi'is.

According to their cyclical view, the Ismailis believed from early on that the sacred history of mankind proceeded through seven prophetic eras of various durations, each one inaugurated by a speaker-prophet or enunciator (natiq) of a divinely revealed message which in its exoteric (zahir) aspect contained a religious law (shari'a). The natiqs of the first six eras of human history were Adam, Noah (Nuh), Abraham (Ibrahim), Moses (Musa), Jesus ('Isa) and Muhammad, respectively. These natiqs had enunciated the outer (zahir) aspects of each revelation with its rituals, commandments and prohibitions, without explaining details of its inner (batin) meaning. For that purpose, each natiq was succeeded by a legatee (wasi), also called the 'silent one' (samit) and later the 'foundation' (asas), who revealed to the elite the esoteric truths (haqa'iq) contained in the inner (batin) dimension of that era's message. The first six wasis of sacred history were Seth (Shith), Shem (Sam), Ishmael (Isma'il), Aaron (Harun), Simon Peter (Sham'un al-Safa') and Imam 'Ali b. Abi Talib. In every era (dawr), each wasi was, in turn, succeeded by seven imams, also called atimma' (singular, mutimm, completer), who guarded the true meaning of the divine scriptures and laws in both their zahir and batin aspects. The seventh imam (or mutimm) of every dawr would rise in rank to become the natiq of the following era, abrogating the shari'a of the previous era and proclaiming a new one. This pattern would change only in the seventh, final dawr of hierohistory.[4]

In the sixth dawr, the era of the Prophet Muhammad and Islam, the seventh imam was Imam Muhammad b. Isma'il b. Jafar al-Sadiq who, according to the bulk of the early Ismailis, had gone into concealment as the Mahdi. On his reappearance, as the Mahdi or qa'im, the restorer of justice on earth and true Islam, he would become the seventh natiq, initiating the final era. However, unlike the previous speakers, Imam Muhammad b. Isma'il would not bring a new shari'a to replace the sacred law of Islam. Instead, as is expected in the final eschatological age, his own mission would consist of fully revealing to all mankind the hitherto hidden esoteric truths (haqa'iq) concealed in all the preceding revelations, the immutable truths of all religions which had previously been accessible only to the elite (khawass) of mankind. In this final, messianic age, there would be no need for religious laws. Imam Muhammad b. Isma'il would, thus, unite in himself the ranks of natiq and wasi, also being the last of the imams, the eschatological Imam Mahdi. In the final, millenarian age of pure spiritual knowledge, the haqa'iq would be completely freed from all their veils and symbolism. In the messianic era of the Mahdi, there would no longer be any distinction between the zahir and the batin, the letter of the law and its inner spirituality. On his advent, heralding the end of time and human history, Imam Muhammad b. Isma'il would rule in justice as the eschatological qa'im before the consummation of the physical world.[5] The whole cycle from Adam to the advent of the qa'im as the seventh natiq was also called the 'era of concealment' (dawr al-satr), because the spiritual truths (haqa'iq) were then concealed in the laws. By contrast, the seventh era, when the truths would be fully revealed to mankind by the qa'im, was designated as the 'era of manifestation or unveiling' (dawr al-kashf).

The Ismaili cyclical view of sacred history was evidently first committed to writing by the da'is of the Iranian lands, notably Muhammad b. Ahmad al-Nasafi (d. 332 AH/943 CE), whose major work Kitab al-mahsul has not survived, and Abu Hatim (d. 322 AH/934 CE), whose ideas on the subject are mainly expounded in his Kitab al-islah. However, these authors and their early successors, especially Abu Ya'qub al-Sijistani (d. after 361 AH/971 CE), disagreed on certain details of the seven prophetic eras. Al-Nasafi and al-Razi also devoted much energy and creative thinking to accommodating a number of pre-Islamic religions, notably those of the Zoroastrians, Manichaeans and Sabaeans, within their scheme of the seven revelational eras of sacred history, assigning these religions to specific dawrs and natiqs. Abu Hatim al-Razi also introduced the concept of an 'interim period' (dawr al-fatra), marked by the absence of imams and occurring at the end of each prophetic dawr, between the disappearance of the seventh imam of that era and the advent of the natiq of the following era. According to him, the Zoroastrians, for example, belonged to the fourth era, the dawr of Moses, and Zoroaster himself had appeared during the interim period at the end of that dawr.[6] It was in the light of such doctrines, rooted in a syncretic and ecumenical worldview, that the Ismailis began to develop their system of thought, a system that appealed not only to Muslims belonging to different communities of interpretation and social strata but also to adherents of a diversity of non-Islamic religious traditions. Of all the Muslim communities, only the Ismailis accommodated in so comprehensive and overt a fashion, in their cyclical scheme of sacred history, the Judaeo-Christian traditions as well as a variety of other pre-Islamic Iranian religions, which were at the time still enjoying some prominence in Persia and Central Asia.

The cyclical prophetic view of sacred history elaborated by the early Ismailis was retained by the Fatimid Ismailis, who refined or modified certain aspects of it, especially in connection with the duration of the sixth dawr, the era of Islam.[7] In the aftermath of the schism of the year 286 AH/899 CE in the Ismaili movement, the dissident Qarmatis of Bahrayn and elsewhere continued to adhere to the earlier scheme, and awaited the return of Imam Muhammad b. Isma'il who as the Mahdi and the seventh natiq was expected to end the era of Islam and the validity of its shari'a. The Qarmatis remained intensely preoccupied with prophesies on the advent of the Mahdi and the circumstances of the seventh dawr, which would supersede the era of Islam. The sacrilegious acts of the Qarmatis of Bahrayn in Mecca in 317 AH/930 CE, when they also dislodged the Black Stone (al-hajar al-aswad) from the corner of the Ka'ba and then kept it for some twenty years at their new capital al-Ahsa', should be viewed in this context.

On the other hand, the Fatimid Ismailis, who now upheld continuity in the imamate, allowed for more than one heptad of imams in the era of Islam. For them, the seventh dawr, earlier defined as the spiritual age of the Mahdi, had now completely lost its messianic appeal. The final age, whatever its nature, was henceforth postponed indefinitely into the future; and the functions of the eschatological Mahdi or qa'im, who would initiate the Day of Resurrection (yawm al-qiyama) at the end of time, were similar to those envisaged by other Muslim communities. Meanwhile, Imam Muhammad b. Isma'il himself was not expected to return as the Mahdi; his functions in its original sense had been taken over by his khulafa', vicegerents, who eventually ruled as the Fatimid caliph-imams. Furthermore, some da'i-authors of the Fatimid period introduced new concepts into the cyclical scheme. Nasir-i Khusraw (d. after 462 AH/1070 CE), the chief da'i in Khurasan, for instance, distinguished between a grand cycle (dawr-i mihin), encompassing the entire sequence of the seven prophetic eras, and a small cycle (dawr-i kihin), coinciding with the latter part of the grand cycle and including the era of Islam and thereafter.[8]

Later Ismailis introduced further innovations into the earlier interpretation of sacred history expressed in terms of seven prophetic dawrs. On the basis of astronomical calculations, the Tayyibi Musta'lian Isma'ilis of Yemen, who essentially retained the Fatimid traditions in the doctrinal field and the earlier Ismaili interest in cyclical hierohistory and cosmology, conceived of a grand aeon (kawr a'zam) comprised of countless cycles, each divided into seven dawrs, which would be consummated in the qa'im of the 'great resurrection' (qiyamat al-qiyamat). The grand aeon, estimated to last 360,000 times 360,000 years (or 130 billion years), was held to progress through successive cycles of concealment (satr) and manifestation (kashf or zuhur), each composed of seven dawrs. An unknown number of successive cycles of concealment and manifestation had occurred until the present cycle of satr, which was initiated by the historical Adam of the Qur'an, the first natiq of the present age. When this cycle is closed by the seventh natiq and the expected qa'im of the current cycle, there will begin another cycle of manifestation, inaugurated by a partial Adam (Adam al-juz'i), and so on. The countless alternations of these cycles will continue until the appearance of the final qa'im, proclaiming the final qiyama, the Resurrection of the Resurrections (qiyamat al-qiyamat), at the end of the grand cycle. The consummation of the grand aeon will also mark the end of the Tayyibi Ismaili mythohistory.[9]

The early Nizari Ismailis under the initial leadership of Hasan-i Sabbah (d. 518 AH/1124 CE) established a principality in Persia, with a branch in Syria. The Nizaris, who enjoyed political prominence during the Alamut period of their history (487-654 AH/1094-1256 CE), followed a religious and political path of their own and they, unlike the Tayyibi Ismailis, were not particularly concerned with the earlier cyclical view of religious history, though they generally continued to adhere to the earlier scheme of seven prophetic dawrs. Confronting the enmity of the Saljuq Turks and others, the Nizaris of Persia, who were more preoccupied with their survival, did not produce many learned scholars. Nevertheless they did maintain a sophisticated outlook and elaborated their teachings revolving around the central Shi'i doctrine of ta'lim, or authoritative teaching by the imam of the time.

In the year 559 AH/1164 CE, the Nizari imam proclaimed the qiyama or Resurrection symbolically for his community. Thereafter, the implications of this declaration were elaborated in terms of the doctrine of the qiyama that also introduced a further element into the cyclical sacred history in the form of the figure of the imam-qa'im, the imam inaugurating the era of qiyama, also making every Nizari imam potentially a qa'im. In elaborating the doctrine of the qiyama, the Nizaris allowed for transitory eras of resurrection during the dawr of Prophet Muhammad who, like the preceding five natiqs, had initiated an era of concealment (dawr al-satr). In the era of Islam, and in especial honour of Prophet Muhammad's greatness, there could be occasional partial eras of resurrection, at the discretion of the current Nizari imams, each offering a foretaste of the Great Resurrection that would occur at the end of the sixth era initiated by Prophet Muhammad. The Great Resurrection would inaugurate the final, seventh era in the sacred history of mankind. As noted, the condition of qiyama could in principle be granted at any time by the current Nizari imam, who was potentially also a qa'im. Consequently, in the era of Islam and Prophet Muhammad, life could alternate, at the will of the current imam, between eras of qiyama and satr, the normal condition of human life. And using Ismaili ta'wil, the Nizaris interpreted the qiyama spiritually as the manifestation of the unveiled truths (haqa'iq) in the person of the Nizari imam, while satr meant the concealment of the true spiritual reality of the imam, when truths were again hidden in the batin of the laws, requiring the strict observance of the shari'a and taqiyya (precautionary dissimulation).[10]

With the destruction of the Nizari Ismaili state in Persia by the Mongol hordes in 654 AH/1256 CE, the Nizaris lost their political prominence. For centuries thereafter they lived in scattered communities, disguising themselves under the covers of Sufism, Sunnism and Twelver Shi'ism. During the Anjudan revival in Nizari da'wa and literary activities, lasting some two centuries until around 1100 AH/1688 CE, the Nizaris essentially reiterated the doctrines elaborated during the earlier Alamut period of their history, with only occasional references to cyclical time and sacred history.[11]


[1] On the earliest of the Ismaili movement, see al-Hasan b. Musa al-Nawbakhti, Firaq al-Shi'a, ed. H. Ritter (Istanbul, 1931), pp. 57-58, 60-6; Sa'd b. 'Abd Allah al-Qummi, Kitab al-maqalat wa l-firaq, ed. M. J. Mashkur (Tehran, 1963), pp. 80-81, 83, and F. Daftary, "The Earliest Isma'ilis", Arabica, 38 (1991): 220ff.; reprinted in E. Kohlberg, Shi'ism (Aldershot, 2003), pp.235ff.

[2] See F. Daftary, "A Major Schism in the Early Isma'ili Movement", Studia Islamica, 77 (1993): 123-139; reprinted in revised form in his Ismailis in Medieval Muslim Societies (London, 2005), pp.45-61

[3] See al-Mu'ayyad fi l-Din al-Shirazi, al-Majalis al-Mu'ayyadiyya, vol. 1, ed. M. Ghalib (Beirut, 1974), pp, 347-351.

[4] Al-Nawbakhti, 61-63; al-Qummi, 83-85, and W. Madelung, "Das Imamat in der fruhen ismailitischen Lehre", Der Islam, 37 91961); 48ff.

[5] Ibn Hawshab Mansur al-Yaman, Kitab al-rushd wa l-hidaya, ed. M. Kamil Husayn, in Collectanea, ed. W. Ivanow (Leiden, 1948), pp. 189, 191-192, 197ff.; Ja'far b. Mansur al-Yaman, Kitab al-kashf; ed. R. Strothmann (London, etc., 1952), pp. 14ff., 50, 97, 103-104, 109, 113-114, 132-133, 138, 150, 169-170; Abu Hatim al-Razi, Kitab al-islah, ed. H. Minuchihr and M. Muhaqqiq (Tehran, 1377/1998), pp. 211-220 and elsewhere; Abu Ya'qub al-Sijistani, Ithbat al-nubuwwat (al-nubu'at), ed.'Arif Tamir (Beirut,1966), pp. 181-193; idem, Kitab al-iftikhar, ed. I. K. Poonawala (Beirut, 2000), pp. 123-137, and H. Corbin, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis (London, 1983), pp. 1-58.

[6] Abu Hatim al-Razi, 148-167; al-Sijistani, 82-83; Corbin, 187-193; S. M. Stern, Studies in Early Isma'ilism (Leiden-Jerusalem, 1983), pp. 30-46, and F. Daftary, The Ismailis: Their History and Doctrines (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 234-239.

[7] See al-Qadi Abu Hanifa al-Nu'man b. Muhammad, Asas al-ta'wil, ed. 'Arif (Beirut, 1960), pp. 40-368; S. M. Stern, "Heterodox Isma'ilism at the Time of al-Mu'izz", Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 17 (1955): 10-33; reprinted in his Studies, 257-288, and Daftary, The Isma'ilis, pp. 176-179, 218-220, 234.

[8] Nasir-i Khusraw, Wajh-i din, ed.G.R. A'vani (Tehran, 1977), pp. 62-64, 126-127, 169-170, 245, 256,331.

[9] Those ideas are expounded in the metaphysical system of the Tayyibi da'is who articulated their gnostic haqa'iq system in numerous treatises. See, for instance, Ibrahim b. al-Husayn al-Hamidi (d. 557 AH/1162 CE), Kitab kanz al-walad, ed. M. Ghalib (Wiesbaden, 1971), pp. 149ff., 205-227, 232ff., 258-272; al-Husayn b. 'Ali Ibn al-Walid (d.667 AH/1268 CE), Risalat al-mabda' wa'l-ma'ad, ed. H. Corbin in his Trilogie Ismaelienne (Tehran-Paris,1961), text pp. 100ff., 121-128, and Corbin, Cyclical Time, 37-58.

[10] Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, Rawdat al-taslim, ed. and tr. W. Ivanow (Leiden, 1950), text pp. 56-63, 67-68. 83-84, 101-102, 110, 117-119, 128-149; ed. and tr. S.J. Badakhchani as Paradise of Submission: A Medieaval Treatise on Ismaili Thought (London, 2005), text pp. 75-83, 87-89, 108-110, 134-135, 146, 156-159, 169-197.

[11] See, for example, Abu Ishaq Quhistani (d. after 904 AH/1498 CE), Haft bab, ed. and tr. W. Ivanow (Bombay, 1959), pp. 38-44.

http://www.iis.ac.uk/view_article.asp?ContentID=109987



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)

419)Qatar's Quest to Build a Knowledge Society; from "The Ismaili" Website; Quotes of Aga Khan IV and others.

"All human beings, by their nature, desire to know."(Aristotle, The Metaphysics, circa 322BC)

"Seek knowledge, even in China"(Prophet Muhammad, circa 632CE)

"Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave"(Prophet Muhammad, circa 632CE)"

"Here is a relevant verse from the Noble Qur'an, cited by Nasir-i Khusraw, hujjat-i Khurasan in his Khawaan al-Ikhwaan : "It is He who created you from dust, then from a sperm drop, then from a blood clot, then He brings you forth as a child, then lets you reach your age of full strength, then lets you become old - though some of you die before - and then lets you reach the appointed term; and that haply you may find the intellect (la'allakum ta'qilun)."(Nasir Khusraw, 11th century Fatimid Ismaili cosmologist-philosopher-poet)

"No belief is like modesty and patience, no attainment is like humility, no honour is like knowledge, no power is like forbearance, and no support is more reliable than consultation"(Hazrat Ali, the first Imam of Shia Islam, circa 650CE)

"My profession is to be forever journeying, to travel about the Universe so that I may know all its conditions."(Ibn Sina, aka Avicenna, 11th century Muslim Philosopher, Physician and Scientist, author of the Canon of Medicine, circa 1037CE)

"The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being"(Aga Khan III, April 4th 1952, 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)

"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)

"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)

"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"(Aga Khan IV, 16 March 1983, Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan)

"Above all, following the guidance of the Holy Quran, there was freedom of enquiry and research. The result was a magnificent flowering of artistic and intellectual activity throughout the ummah" (Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University, 16 March 1983, Karachi, Pakistan)

"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. The form of universities has changed over those 1000 years, but that reciprocity between faith and knowledge remains a source of strength"(Aga Khan IV, 27th May1994, Cambridge, Massachusets, U.S.A.)

"From the seventh century to the thirteenth century, the Muslim civilizations dominated world culture, accepting, adopting, using and preserving all preceding study of mathematics, philosophy, medicine and astronomy, among other areas of learning. The Islamic field of thought and knowledge included and added to much of the information on which all civilisations are founded. And yet this fact is seldom acknowledged today, be it in the West or in the Muslim world, and this amnesia has left a six hundred year gap in the history of human thought"(Aga Khan IV, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA, 1996)

"First, the globalisation of the knowledge of the cultures of the Umma is critical. We have to make known the cultural inheritance of the Muslims to the non-Muslim as well as the Muslim parts of the world because we will never succeed in building the respect and recognition that the Umma deserves unless we present the Umma as a remarkable carrier of civilisation.The misconceptions about Islam and Muslims in the West exist because we are, even today, absent from the global civilisation. We should encourage the Western education system to bring in knowledge of the civilisation of Islam into the secondary education system.I am thrilled with the initiative that Dubai and other states in the Gulf are taking by creating museums. Retracing our historical legacies and bringing them back in the modern world is extremely important."(Aga Khan IV, Interview with Gulf News, Dubai, UAE, April 2008)

The above are 15 quotes and excerpts from Blogpost Four Hundred:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html




Qatar’s Quest to Build a Knowledge Society

"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."— Mawlana Hazar Imam, Aga Khan University Convocation,Karachi, Pakistan, 2 December 2006

The State of Qatar, an emirate in the Persian Gulf region, is reinventing itself into a knowledge society. Dependant on gas and oil as its main resources, the future prosperity of the emirate’s population of 1.4 million will rely less on natural resources and more on its people. The need for an academic infrastructure was therefore evident.

The leadership of the country has spared no effort in its quest for excellence in education. With a literacy rate already in the top percentiles for both men and women, Qatar is in a hurry — and is well on its way — to meet the challenges of a dynamically changing world.

In 1995 the Emir of Qatar, His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, established the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development. Subsequently several of the world’s leading universities were invited to establish campuses in the capital city of Doha. A unique hub covering some 2 500 acres called Education City arose, enabling both undergraduates and postgraduates to pursue high quality education and research in fields such as Medicine, Art, Design, Engineering, Business, Foreign Service, Islamic Studies and Computer Science.

The commitment to education, and in particular the study of medicine is exemplified in the establishment of an endowment of USD $7.9 billion for a specialised teaching hospital due for completion by 2011, aptly named the Sidra Medical and Research Centre. The sidra tree — an icon of Qatari history and culture — is a beacon of learning and comfort in the desert.

Traditionally the shade of the tree was a retreat for poets and scholars, who gathered beneath its branches to discuss and impart knowledge. The fruit, flowers and leaves of the sidra, whose deep roots allow it to flourish in harsh desert climates, were components in many traditional medicines.

In 2001, the medical college of Cornell University in New York established the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar in Education City. It admits students to a six year medical course on a needs blind basis. The first graduates received their MD degrees in May 2008. Classes are growing in size with a future upper limit of 50 students in each year. Entrance standards are in keeping with the expectations of an Ivy League School. The main campus is based in Ithaca, New York.

The college’s undergraduate medical education curriculum in Qatar is run in parallel with that of its New York campus, with state of the art technology. Live videoconferencing links students and faculty, ensuring consistency and efficiency, while on-the-ground faculty members teach students directly. The instruction promotes family medicine, community care and patient-centred care. In addition to their teaching roles, clinical faculty are active in the Qatari medical community.

The learning environment is shaped around problem solving, self-managed learning and mentorship. Cultural differences are respected and treated with sensitivity appropriate to a traditional Muslim society. Emphasis is also placed on volunteerism, and students have contributed to many local causes including Habitat for Humanity and health promotion at fairs for local working communities.

Qatar also signalled its commitment to arts and culture with the establishment of a new Museum of Islamic Art. Due to open in November 2008, it will house artwork dating from the 7th to the 19th centuries. The museum was designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect I. M. Pei, who found inspiration in the design of the 9th century Mosque of Ahmad Ibn Tulun in Cairo.

From a modest desert land that was relatively tranquil 40 years ago, Qatar has transformed itself into a thriving state that seeks to make a significant impact on the Gulf community. With a vision of a future built on the intellect of its people, the country is prepared to gracefully adapt to global change while maintaining its values and Islamic heritage.

Dr Mohamud A. Verjee, BSc (Hons), MBChB, DRCOG, CCFP, formerly a Clinical Associate Professor in family medicine at the University of Calgary, Alberta, became the inaugural Director of Primary Care at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar in July 2007. Upon joining Cornell, he was invited to assume leadership as the Director of Clinical Skills, and overall Course Director for Medicine, Patients and Society in the second year MD curriculum. He is the first Ismaili Muslim on faculty at the College in Doha. Dr Verjee was also the recipient of a Continuing Achievement and Recognition of Excellence (CARE) Award in 2006, and a national Award of Excellence in 2007, both from the College of Family Physicians of Canada.

http://www.theismaili.org/cms/204/Qatars-quest-to-build-a-knowledge-society



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)

418)The Wonders of Blood: the Foundation of our Existence as Multi-Cellular Creatures; Quotes of Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan III and Abu Yakub Al-Sijistani.

"Tarkib' is composition as in the compounding of elements in the process of making more complex things, that is, of adding together two things to form a synthesis, a compound. Soul composes in the sense of 'tarkib'; it is the animating force that combines the physical elements of the natural universe into beings that move and act. Incorporating is an especially apt word in this instance. It means to turn something into a body, as in 'composing'. But it is actually the conversion of an intellectual object, a thought, into a physical thing. Soul acts by incorporating reason into physical objects, the natural matter of the universe and all the things composed of it"(Abu Yakub Al-Sijistani,10th century Fatimid Ismaili cosmologist, d971CE, from the book, 'Abu Yakub Al-Sijistani: Intellectual Missionary', by Paul Walker)

"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)

"Allah alone wishes: the Universe exists; and all manifestations are as a witness of the Divine Will"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)

"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)

"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'."(Aga Khan IV, Speech, Institute of Ismaili Studies, October 2003, London, U.K.)

"....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 6 quotes and excerpts from Blogpost Four Hundred:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html


October 21, 2008

The Wonders of Blood

By NATALIE ANGIER

You’re born with a little over a pint of it, by adulthood you’re up to four or five quarts, and if at any point you suddenly shed more than a third of your share, you must either get a transfusion or prepare to meet your mortician.

Human cultures have long recognized that blood is essential to life and have ascribed to it a vast array of magical powers and metaphorical subroutines. Blood poultices and blood beverages were said to cure blindness, headaches, gout, goiter, worms and gray hair. The Bible mentions blood more than 400 times, William Shakespeare close to 700. It’s “all in the blood,” your temperament, your fate. Are you a blue-blooded Mesopotamian princess or a red-blooded American male?

Yet to scientists who study blood, even the most extravagant blood lore pales in comparison to the biochemical, evolutionary and engineering marvels of the genuine article.

The fluid tissue we call blood not only feeds us and cleans us, delivering fresh oxygen and other nutrients to all 100 trillion cells of the body and flushing out carbon dioxide, ammonia and other metabolic trash. It not only houses the immune system that defends us against the world.

Our blood is the foundation of our very existence as multicellular animals, said Andrew Schafer, a professor at Weill Cornell Medical College and the outgoing president of the American Society of Hematology. Blood is the one tissue that comes into contact with every other tissue of the body, and it is through blood that our disparate parts communicate, through blood that our organs cooperate. Without a circulatory system, there would be no internal civilization, no means of ensuring orderly devotion to the common cause that is us.

“It’s an enormous communications network,” Dr. Schafer said — the original cellphone system, if you will, 100 trillion users strong.

Blood can also be thought of as a private ocean, a recapitulation of what life was like for all the years we spent drifting as microscopic, single-celled organisms, “taking up nutrients from sea water and then eliminating waste products back into sea water,” Dr. Schafer said. Not only is blood mostly water, but the watery portion of blood, the plasma, has a concentration of salt and other ions that is remarkably similar to sea water.

Of course, we can’t rely on wind and weather to keep our hidden seas salubriously churned and aerated, so we have evolved an active respirator and pumping mechanism, the lungs and heart. Our eight pints of blood circulate through the powerhouse duet maybe 60 times an hour, absorbing recently inhaled oxygen from the honeycombed fabric of the lungs and proceeding into the thickly muscled heart, which then shoots the enriched fluid outward.

Oxygen allocation is the task of the red blood cells, which hematology researchers refer to with a mix of affection and awe. “Red cells have enormous capabilities,” said Stanley Schrier of Stanford University’s School of Medicine. They give up so much to make room for their hemoglobin, the proteins that can latch onto oxygen and that give blood its brilliant grenadine sheen. Alone among body cells, red cells at maturity jettison their nucleus and DNA to accommodate their cargo.

And oh how roughly they are treated. A red cell at rest looks like a plump bialy and measures about 8 microns, or .0003 inches, across. Yet to reach every far-flung, oxygen-hungry customer, the cells must squeeze through capillaries less than half their width, which they accomplish by squashing down into threads that then crawl in single file along the capillary wall, pulling themselves forward, Dr. Schrier said, like tank treads gripping the road.

Blood is also a genius, able to sustain two contradictory states without going mad. To ceaselessly shuttle along the body’s 60,000 miles of arteries, veins and capillaries, blood must be fluid, our trusty souvenir sea.

Yet even though we constantly replace components of our blood, directing the aged and the battered to the spleen and liver — the “graveyards for blood cells,” Dr. Schafer said — and replenishing them with fresh blood cells forged in the bone marrow, the turnover cycle is gradual and we can’t afford to lose everything in one big gush wrought by a predator’s gash. Blood, then, departs from sea water, or, for that matter, from breast milk, another prized body fluid, in one outstanding way: it is always poised to clot, to relinquish liquidity and assume solidity.

In deciding whether to flow or clot, blood takes its cues from its surroundings. As blood glides through the bulk of its tubular circuitry, the comparatively heavy red cells are driven toward the center of the swirl, said James N. George, a hematologist at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, while two other, lighter characters are pushed out to the periphery: the white blood cells that operate as immune warriors, and the platelets, tiny cells that have been called the Band-Aids of the body. Their marginalization is no accident. “They’re surveillance cells,” Dr. George said. “It’s almost like they’re scouting for trouble.”

White blood cells look for signs of invasive microbes, while platelets scan for leaks. As long as the platelets detect the Teflon-like surface of unbroken endothelium, the tissue with which blood vessels are lined, they keep moving.

But even the tiniest cut or gap in the smooth vessel wall will expose some of the fibrous strands beneath, and the platelets are primed to instantly detect the imperfection. A passing platelet will stick to the raggedy strand and change shape, from round to octopoid, which in turn attracts other platelets, forming a little clump. “If the cut is small, that’s all you need,” Dr. George said. If not, the next phase of flood control begins. Signals from the platelets arouse the blood’s clotting factors, free-floating proteins that can cross-link together into bigger, better Band-Aids.

“Platelets and clotting factors,” Dr. Schrier said. “It’s a marriage made in heaven.”

Up to a point. Just as our immune cells can go awry and begin attacking our own body tissue, so an overzealous clot response can have dire consequences. Should a clot happen to cut off blood flow to a vital organ like the heart or brain, the only one playing the harp will be you.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/science/21angi.html?_r=1&oref=slogin



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)

418)Ibn Al-Haytham(AlHazen), Father Of Modern Optics, Mathematician, Astronomer, Physicist, Philosopher: A Collection Of Posts; Quote Of Aga Khan IV

"....AND SHOULD'NT IB SCIENCE STUDENTS not learn about Ibn al-Haytham, the Muslim scholar who developed modern optics, as well as his predecessors Euclid and Ptolemy, whose ideas he challenged.....The legacy which I am describing actually goes back more than a thousand years, to the time when our forefathers, the Fatimid Imam-Caliphs of Egypt, founded Al-Azhar University and the Academy of Knowledge in Cairo. For many centuries, a commitment to learning was a central element in far-flung Islamic cultures. That commitment has continued in my own Imamat through the founding of the Aga Khan University and the University of Central Asia and through the recent establishment of a new Aga Khan Academies Program."(Aga Khan IV, "The Peterson Lecture" on the International Baccalaureate, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, 18 April 2008)

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




Mathematics vs. Physics: Ibn al-Haytham’s Geometrical Conception of Space and the Refutation of Aristotle’s Physical Definition of Place; from IIS
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/02/556mathematics-vs-physics-ibn-al.html



Emulating Ibn Sina and Ibn al-Haytham; Renewing the Impetus of Philosophical Thinking in Islam: Paper presented by IIS's Dr Nader El-Bizri in Iran
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/01/540emulating-ibn-sina-and-ibn-al.html



Ibn al-Haytham(Alhazen) Revisited: He Criticised The Theories Of His Predecessors And Revolutionised Mathematical Optics In His Book 'Optics'
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/12/532ibn-al-haythamalhazen-revisited-he.html



One mega-post, encompassing five regular posts, on the pioneering 9th century Muslim scientist Ibn al-Haytham or Alhazen(965CE to 1039CE).
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/296one-mega-post-encompassing-four.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)

417)The Web Wanderings Blog: A Remarkable Feeder Blog that helps nourish and sustain my own Blog; Quotes of Aga Khan IV

"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)

"Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly"(Aga Khan IV, Toronto, Canada, 8th June 2005)

"In the ebb and flow of history, "knowledge is a shield against the blows of time". It dispels "the torment of ignorance" and nourishes "peace to blossom forth in the soul"."(Aga Khan IV quoting Nasir Khusraw, Dushanbe, Tajikistan, August 30, 2003)

"The truth, as the famous Islamic scholars repeatedly told their students, is that the spirit of disciplined, objective enquiry is the property of no single culture, but of all humanity. To quote the great physician and philosopher, Ibn Sina: "My profession is to be forever journeying, to travel about the universe so that I may know all its conditions." "(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University, 16 March 1983, Karachi, Pakistan)

"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)

The above are 5 quotes and excerpts taken from Blogpost FourHundred:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html



In April 2008 Web Wanderings began as a Blog entitled "Web Wanderings: News, Stories and More", which rivetted my attention:

http://webwanderings.wordpress.com/

The author's internet search capabilities for uncovering scientific material(which I am very interested in) appear to be outstanding. Since I am generally all thumbs when it comes to using a computer and especially navigating an internet search engine, Web Wanderings Blog has turned out to be a great benefit for me and I appreciate it very much.

Here are just a few of Web Wanderings postings that I have commented on:

http://webwanderings.wordpress.com/2008/10/27/the-brain-unveiled-a-new-imaging-method-offers-a-spectacular-view-of-neural-structures/

http://webwanderings.wordpress.com/2008/10/24/enceladus-up-close/#comments

http://webwanderings.wordpress.com/2008/10/24/news-mcgill-physicists-discover-new-state-of-matter/#comments

http://webwanderings.wordpress.com/2008/10/23/filament-of-dark-matter-strings-14-galaxies/#comments

http://webwanderings.wordpress.com/2008/10/22/the-faith-of-scientists-in-their-own-words/#comments

http://webwanderings.wordpress.com/2008/10/20/50-stunning-underwater-photos/#comments

http://webwanderings.wordpress.com/2008/10/13/the-sun-the-big-picture-bostoncom/#comments

http://webwanderings.wordpress.com/2008/10/10/planets-loneliest-bug-revealed-bbc-news/

http://webwanderings.wordpress.com/2008/10/04/the-magnificent-seven-projects-that-will-answer-big-questions-about-the-cosmos/#comment-46

http://webwanderings.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/bbc-news-science-environment-unbreakable-encryption-unveiled/#comment-45

http://webwanderings.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/earth-from-above/

http://webwanderings.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/new-jupiter-image/

http://webwanderings.wordpress.com/2008/10/01/american-public-education-material-science-and-religious-beliefs/

http://webwanderings.wordpress.com/2008/10/01/embracing-mind-the-common-ground-of-science-and-spirituality/

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

http://webwanderings.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/adnan-oktar-aka-harun-yahya-campaigns-to-ban-richard-dawkins-website-in-turkey/


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)

416)Nobel Laureates uncover marvels of Allah's creation: HIV virus, HPV virus, Glowing Proteins, Symmetry, Asymmetry, Matter, Antimatter, Particles.

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


"One hour of contemplation on the works of the Creator is better than a thousand hours of prayer"(Prophet Muhammad, circa 632CE)

"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)

"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds."(Albert Einstein, circa 1950)

"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)

"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)

"Allah alone wishes: the Universe exists; and all manifestations are as a witness of the Divine Will"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"...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)

"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 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)

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


Highlights from the 3 articles below(relating to the 2008 Nobel Laureates of the Physics, Chemistry and Medicine Prizes):

A)Physics Prize:
"The basic laws of physics seem to be incredibly symmetric," Greene adds, "but to get the kinds of things that we're used to in the word around us — stars, planets and people — that symmetry needs to be reduced in order for that kind of structure to emerge.

It's like adding paint to a blank canvas, notes Greene. On a bare canvas, every point is the same as every other — there's complete symmetry. But to see the beauty of a painting emerge, a painter adds splashes of color, which reduces the symmetry, "and that's what needed to happen in the universe," he says. The cosmos began as a hot uniform sea of particles in which all the laws of physics had melded into one, but transformed and cooled into a rich tapestry"(Brian Greene)

One way to understand spontaneously broken symmetry is to imagine a round dinner table at which the place settings are symmetric. There's a napkin to the left and right of each dinner plate, so either side looks the same. But once a diner reaches for a napkin to the left, he determines the choice for everyone at the table, and the symmetry is broken.


B)Chemistry Prize:
Making cells glow with a protein borrowed from jellyfish is one of the brightest ideas in chemistry. At least that is what the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences implied when it announced October 8 that the 2008 Nobel Prize in chemistry would be awarded to three scientists who were instrumental in discovering green fluorescent protein, commonly called GFP, and developing the protein as a powerful tool for basic biological research.

"There's no doubt that GFP has changed the way we do biology," says Jeff Lichtman, a neuroscientist at Harvard University. "There's a wide range of things that can be done with GFP that are just unthinkable without it." For instance, scientists can watch the movement of proteins within a cell or track the migration of cells throughout the body.

Tsien, of the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla and of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, tweaked the structure of the jellyfish protein and a red fluorescent protein found in corals to make them glow in a rainbow of colors from the deepest purples to true red. That ability enables scientists to track a number of different proteins or cells at once, allowing for a deeper understanding of biological interactions.

Lichtman uses a Crayola box of fluorescent proteins —most developed by Tsien — to color neurons in mouse brains. He and his colleagues can watch the neurons grow and develop and form and break connections with each other in living animals. Such experiments only became possible with the fluorescent proteins, he says.


C)Medicine Prize:
The 2008 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine will be shared among three European researchers for their pivotal work in identifying the roles of sexually transmitted viruses in causing cervical cancer(HPV virus) and AIDS(HIV virus).

HPV is a stealthy virus that infects both men and women and often goes unnoticed by the person who carries it. That helps to make HPV one of the most common sexually transmitted pathogens. Between 50 and 80 percent of the world's population harbors at least one strain of the virus at some point in their lives.

In 1981, signs of AIDS showed up in patients who were deathly ill, seemingly from a rash of opportunistic infections. The disease wasn't inherited, so scientists named it Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS.

In the early 1980s, a team led by Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi tested lymph nodes in people with the new disease and found that a virus, later named HIV, not only replicated out of control in these patients but also damaged their immunity by killing T cells, the workhorses of the immune system.

"They not only isolated the virus but they also provided an explanation for why immune impairment occurred," Andersson says.



The 3 articles in detail:

A)Nobel Prize in physics shared for work that unifies forces of nature

By Ron Cowen
Web edition : Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

Understanding of broken symmetry has been crucial to the standard model of particle physics

The 2008 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to three theoretical physicists for advances involving the concept of symmetry breaking. The theory highlights how three of the four seemingly disparate forces in nature fall under the same umbrella. The work forms a cornerstone of the standard model of particle physics.

Half of the $1.4 million prize goes to Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi Institute. He began formulating his mathematical description of a type of symmetry violation, known as spontaneous broken symmetry, as early as 1960.

The other half is shared by Japanese researchers Makoto Kobayashi of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba and Toshihide Maskawa of Kyoto University’s Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics. Kobayashi and Maskawa discovered the origin of another type of symmetry violation that had been observed but not explained. Their work successfully predicted that nature must have at least three families of quarks, which are the fundamental building blocks of matter such as neutrons and protons.

The accomplishments of the winners tie in to the “most essential ideas in our understanding of modern physics,” says physicist Brian Greene of Columbia University in New York City.

“The basic laws of physics seem to be incredibly symmetric,” Greene adds, “but to get the kinds of things that we’re used to in the word around us — stars, planets and people — that symmetry needs to be reduced in order for that kind of structure to emerge.”

It’s like adding paint to a blank canvas, notes Greene. On a bare canvas, every point is the same as every other — there’s complete symmetry. But to see the beauty of a painting emerge, a painter adds splashes of color, which reduces the symmetry, “and that’s what needed to happen in the universe,” he says. The cosmos began as a hot uniform sea of particles in which all the laws of physics had melded into one, but transformed and cooled into a rich tapestry.

Nambu discovered that symmetries in nature can be hidden — and spontaneously broken. That idea of hidden symmetries has now become a guiding principle in understanding nature at its deepest level, says Turner.

One way to understand spontaneously broken symmetry is to imagine a round dinner table at which the place settings are symmetric. There’s a napkin to the left and right of each dinner plate, so either side looks the same. But once a diner reaches for a napkin to the left, he determines the choice for everyone at the table, and the symmetry is broken.

In the early 1960s, Nambu was studying the phenomenon of superconductivity, in which electric current, below a certain temperature, suddenly flows without any resistance. Below this critical temperature, electrons, which normally repel each other, abruptly bind up in pairs. It took Nambu two years to develop the concept of spontaneous symmetry breaking in order to explain how superconductivity works. He then rapidly applied the idea to particle physics.

“Nambu was the first to apply the idea of a spontaneously broken symmetry in elementary particle physics — that is, a symmetry that is an exact property of the underlying equations of the theory, but is not realized in the solutions of these equations, and hence not easily apparent in the properties of elementary particles,” says Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin, who shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics. Nambu’s idea “has proved crucial in understanding the properties of particles that interact through the strong nuclear force, in particular pi mesons,” he says, adding that it has also helped unify the weak and electromagnetic interactions.

Nambu discovered a mechanism embedded in the laws of physics that allowed the character of symmetries to change as the universe evolved. In technical parlance, Nambu introduced a scalar field, which Greene likens to a ubiquitous mist. “We don’t know it’s there, it has no manifest features, but the laws of physics know about that mist and it plays the role of reducing symmetry,” says Greene.

“His study of this broken symmetry not only paved the way for hidden symmetry in particle physics more broadly,” Turner says, “but also explained why the pi meson is so much lighter than all the other mesons.”

Kobayashi and Maskawa examined a very different sort of symmetry violation. They were trying to explain a set of puzzling experiments, first performed by James Cronin and Val Fitch in the mid 1960s. In those experiments, subatomic particles called K mesons didn’t behave the same if the particles were replaced by their antiparticles and the same experiment took place in a looking-glass universe, where right and left were interchanged. (Cronin and Fitch went on to win the 1980 Nobel Prize for the experiment.)

In 1972, Kobayashi and Maskawa found that this puzzling asymmetry could be explained if the family of elementary particles was expanded to include at least three families of quarks. At the time, only three quarks were known — up, down and strange. The up and down form one family. Missing members of the other families were subsequently discovered in experiments. The charm quark (partner of the strange quark) was discovered in 1974; the bottom quark (1977) and the top quark in (1994) make up the third family.

Their theory also suggested that physicists could observe a symmetry violation in another type of elementary particle, the B-meson, which is ten times heavier than a K meson, or kaon. Because the broken symmetry involving the B meson occurs rarely, physicists built giant “B factories,” one at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California and the other at the KEK Accelerator Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan. These factories each produced more than a million B mesons a day. In 2001, both experiments confirmed the B meson violation that Kobayashi and Maskawa had predicted nearly three decades earlier.

Related post:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/285abdus-salam-1979-nobel-laureate-in.html




B)Nobel Prize in chemistry commends finding and use of green fluorescent protein

By Tina Hesman Saey
Web edition : Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

One researcher is awarded for discovering the protein that helps jellyfish glow and two for making the protein into a crucial tool for biologists.

Making cells glow with a protein borrowed from jellyfish is one of the brightest ideas in chemistry. At least that is what the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences implied when it announced October 8 that the 2008 Nobel Prize in chemistry would be awarded to three scientists who were instrumental in discovering green fluorescent protein, commonly called GFP, and developing the protein as a powerful tool for basic biological research.

Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien will equally share the $1.4 million prize.
GFP can absorb light at one energy and emit light at another. The result is that the protein glows, and glows with a specific color, when exposed to a specific wavelength of light. This function differs from that of bioluminescent proteins, which can generate their own light.
"There's no doubt that GFP has changed the way we do biology," says Jeff Lichtman, a neuroscientist at Harvard University. "There's a wide range of things that can be done with GFP that are just unthinkable without it." For instance, scientists can watch the movement of proteins within a cell or track the migration of cells throughout the body.

Shimomura, of both the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and of Boston University, first discovered the barrel-shaped protein in jellyfish called Aequorea victoria in 1962. He collected more than a million jellyfish in Friday Harbor, Wash., and extracted light-producing chemicals from the animals. While purifying a protein called aequorin, which produces blue light in response to rising calcium levels in a cell, Shimomura found another protein that absorbs the blue light from aequorin and then gives off green light.

The discovery of a fluorescent protein astounded many scientists, says Marc Zimmer, a computational chemist at Connecticut College in New London. Inside GFP sits a chromophore, a structure of rings that absorbs light and then emits light of lower energy. Until GFP was discovered, all of the fluorescent molecules known in nature were either not proteins or were pairs of proteins, in which each member performed chemical surgery on the other and gave off light as a byproduct of the reaction, he says.

So it came as a shock to find that GFP could twist and turn on itself, attacking and rearranging its amino acids to form a five-sided ring and giving off water and light.

“You have here a protein that has figured out how to do surgery on its own gut,” says Tsien. “If you had asked us before GFP came along whether a protein could do this, we would have said, ‘absolutely not.’ It would be almost as if a protein could lift its wings and start flying through the air. It would be almost as ludicrous.”

Since the discovery of the jellyfish protein, at least 125 different species have been found to contain individual proteins that are fluorescent, all with a shape and a method for emitting light that is similar to GFP, Zimmer says.

Shimomura said during an Oct. 8 teleconference that he didn’t expect to win the chemistry prize for his basic research on jellyfish. He didn’t realize the practical uses of the green fluorescent protein until Chalfie’s lab succeeded in producing the protein in another organism, and retaining the protein’s ability to fluoresce, he said.

But the Japanese-born scientist “was the obvious choice” to win a Nobel for his discovery of the molecule, says Zimmer. At least four other scientists had a hand in developing the protein into a powerful research tool, but no more than three people can share a Nobel Prize. "It must have been very difficult to make the choice," Zimmer says.

Chalfie, of Columbia University, first heard about the protein in a seminar. He immediately realized that if he could put a fluorescent protein into the cells of the transparent roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans he could see which cells produced the light. He developed the gene that encodes the fluorescent protein as a biological tag and showed its usefulness by coloring six cells in the roundworm. Even before he published the results of his experiments in 1994, Chalfie distributed the technology for introducing GFP into living cells to researchers around the world.
Now the use of fluorescent proteins is ubiquitous in biology. “I don’t know anyone who isn’t using it,” Lichtman says. “The Green Revolution, as I call it, has become such a dominant technology, I worried that it wouldn't get the prize because it would be taken for granted."

Tsien, of the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla and of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, tweaked the structure of the jellyfish protein and a red fluorescent protein found in corals to make them glow in a rainbow of colors from the deepest purples to true red. That ability enables scientists to track a number of different proteins or cells at once, allowing for a deeper understanding of biological interactions.

In 1968, at age 16, Tsien won the top prize in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search competition (now the Intel Science Talent Search). His project explored the orientation of an ion in transition-metal complexes. The competition is owned and operated by Society for Science & the Public (then Science Service), which publishes Science News.

Lichtman uses a Crayola box of fluorescent proteins —most developed by Tsien — to color neurons in mouse brains. He and his colleagues can watch the neurons grow and develop and form and break connections with each other in living animals. Such experiments only became possible with the fluorescent proteins, he says.

“I’m just very pleased,” Lichtman says. "If I have to have any qualm at all it is about the missing person," Douglas Prasher. Prasher was the first to isolate the gene that encodes GFP, but he had difficulty making it fluoresce when produced in another organism. His discovery of the gene made Chalfie's and Tsien’s work possible. "I'm a bit sad that he didn't get to share in this prize, but all three deserve it," Lichtman says.

The Nobel Prize committee announced the winners at 5:45 a.m. EST Wednesday, October 8. Laureates are informed of their selection before the announcement of the prize, but Chalfie says he slept through the congratulatory phone call from the Swedish academy because he had muted his phone a few days earlier. He woke up about 25 minutes later to a faintly ringing phone and recalled that the chemistry prize was being awarded. “I decided to find out who the schnuck was who won it this year,” he said during the October 8 teleconference. “I opened up my laptop and discovered that I was the schnuck. The other two are very good scientists,” he quipped.
SN staff writer Rachel Ehrenberg contributed to this article.




C)Nobel Prize in medicine given for HIV, HPV discoveries

By Nathan Seppa
Web edition : Monday, October 6th, 2008

Three Europeans recognized for linking viruses to AIDS, cervical cancer

The 2008 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine will be shared among three European researchers for their pivotal work in identifying the roles of sexually transmitted viruses in causing cervical cancer and AIDS.Half of the $1.4 million prize goes to Harald zur Hausen of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg for his discovery that the human papillomavirus, or HPV, causes cervical cancer. His work in the 1970s and 1980s laid the foundation for a full onslaught against HPV. In recent years, scientists have developed and made available for commercial use two vaccines against HPV, one marketed by Merck as Gardasil and the other marketed by GlaxoSmithKline as Cervarix. The vaccines are the first to guard against a cancer, preventing key strains of HPV infection that cause most cervical cancers. HPV has since been linked to other cancers as well.The other half of the 2008 medical Nobel prize will be split by Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for work that culminated in the early 1980s with the discovery that a strange virus, later called the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, was the cause of AIDS. It is the first Nobel given specifically for HIV research.

Their work, done at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, was later confirmed in the United States by Robert Gallo and his team at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., although that work ignited a controversy, which simmered throughout the 1980s, over the rightful owner of the “discoverer” title. In any case, no one disputes that the early HIV findings cleared the way for a test for the virus, for blood supply screening and for the development of drugs to combat HIV in patients.

In his work on human papillomavirus, zur Hausen toiled against a prevailing notion taught in medical schools at the time — that a herpes virus probably caused cervical cancer. Using a new technology developed in the 1970s called recombinant DNA, he failed to find any herpes DNA in cervical tumors.

Instead, he isolated HPV DNA from cervical tumors in the lab, and dubbed the viral strain HPV-16. His team was also able to look for this particular strain of the virus in other cervical cancers, and found it in roughly half of such tumors. When some women with cervical cancer turned out to have a form of HPV other than this strain, the team cloned that and named it HPV-18.

“These discoveries by Harald zur Hausen led to a paradigm shift in the field,” the Nobel Committee concluded.

There are dozens of strains of HPV, but HPV-16 and HPV-18 account for about 70 percent of all cervical cancers, says Jan Andersson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, a member of the Nobel Prize committee. Some other strains cause cancer or genital warts. Andersson discusses the prizes in a taped interview on the Nobel Foundation website.
HPV is a stealthy virus that infects both men and women and often goes unnoticed by the person who carries it. That helps to make HPV one of the most common sexually transmitted pathogens. Between 50 and 80 percent of the world’s population harbors at least one strain of the virus at some point in their lives.

Not all strains cause cancer, and only a small fraction of infections with the cancer-causing HPV strains result in malignancy, because people routinely naturally clear HPV from the body. But the sheer numbers of HPV infections result in cancers in some women and make it a public health burden worldwide.

Meanwhile, HPV has also been found in cancers of the penis and vulva, and recent work links it to mouth and throat cancer, possibly due to oral sex with an infected partner.

“Dr. zur Hausen has been the mover behind pushing the field toward recognition of HPV as the cause of cervical cancer,” says Robert Burk, a pediatrician and medical geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. It’s important to note that zur Hausen “also did something extraordinary and unique in science,” Burk says. “He distributed his cloned [viral] genomes throughout the world to anybody who would ask for them, and the field just exploded through his generosity.” Not all scientists do that, Burk says, often seeking patent protections and guarding their secrets. “He came out with it right away.”

The result has been the development of better HPV testing and diagnostics, and, most importantly, the creation of a vaccines. Both protect against cancer-causing HPV-16 and HPV-18, while Gardasil also protects against two other strains that cause genital warts. Work is under way to expand the reach of the vaccine to cover more strains that cause cervical cancer.
While the vaccines clearly prevent infection by strains HPV-16 and HPV-18, Andersson says, “we’ll have to wait 10 to 15 years to make sure they actually prevent the development of cervical cancer.”

Meanwhile, allocation of praise for the discovery of HIV has followed a much more contentious path.

In 1981, signs of AIDS showed up in patients who were deathly ill, seemingly from a rash of opportunistic infections. The disease wasn’t inherited, so scientists named it Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS.

The early examination of patients set in motion a race to discover the cause of this new disease. “Many factors — fungi chemicals, and even an autoimmunity to leukocytes [white blood cells] — were invoked at that time as possible causes,” Gallo and Montagnier wrote much later in a joint article published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2003.

In the early 1980s, a team led by Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi tested lymph nodes in people with the new disease and found that a virus, later named HIV, not only replicated out of control in these patients but also damaged their immunity by killing T cells, the workhorses of the immune system.

The French researchers developed a method for rapidly cloning the genome of HIV-1, the most common form of the virus, which made possible further discoveries throughout the 1980s and 1990s that revealed the virus’ replication cycle and its interactions with the human host.

Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi later went on to locate this virus in people who had been infected sexually, and from hemophiliacs and other patients receiving blood transfusions. The team also showed that HIV could be transmitted from an infected pregnant mother to her child.

“They not only isolated the virus but they also provided an explanation for why immune impairment occurred,” Andersson says.

The French team’s findings led to powerful screening techniques that allow accurate testing for HIV and scanning of blood supplies to detect the virus. These early discoveries also led to the development of anti-HIV drugs, which mainly counteract the virus by intervening in the HIV life cycle.

But HIV discovery had a rocky start. Shortly after the French researchers published early work on the virus in 1983, Gallo published data confirming it. There followed a sometimes bitter dispute over who had discovered HIV first. Eventually, both teams were given credit. The parties have even reconciled in a fashion, as evidenced by the joint retrospective in NEJM by Gallo and Montagnier.

“The Nobel Prize historically goes to the person or group that makes the first seminal discovery or observation, and the 1983 paper by Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi — in which they identified the virus ultimately called HIV — came first,” says Anthony Fauci, a physician-researcher and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md.

The French team and zur Hausen are deserving, he says, “and should be congratulated on their spectacular work.” Fauci adds, “Gallo’s contribution was substantial and should not be forgotten.”

Shared Nobels are limited to three recipients.

Related post:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/01/280no6-ayatssigns-in-universe-series.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)

415)A Collaboration to promote the ISM(Inspiring and Sharing Moments) Photography Competition celebrating Ismailis around the World

"....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 2008 ISM Photography Competition has the following Vision:

To share, inspire and celebrate the diversity of the Ismaili community through the art of photography.

Quote of Aga Khan IV:
"I, of course, start with the basic assumption that the world is a much better place because it is pluralist and multi-cultural. Imagine what it would be like living in a world of no diversity, a world where we were all the same colour, shape and size, ate the same biryani, told the same jokes and combed our hair identically. Aside from the fact that my comb, sadly, serves less purpose these days, I would find a world like that quite boring!"

- Excerpt by His Highness the Aga Khan at the Ninth Award Cycle of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, New Delhi, 27 November 2004


It also has the following Mission:

1)To produce a beautiful Coffee Table Book that will promote diversity and inspire unity of the Ismaili community.

2)To promote the art of photography within the Ismaili community.


Net proceeds from sale of books will be donated to Aga Khan Foundation Canada to support Aga Khan Development Network projects.

The Aga Khan Development Network's (AKDN) mandate ranges from health and education to architecture, culture, microfinance, disaster reduction, rural development and the revitalisation of historic cities. The AKDN has been instrumental in developing schools and hospitals around the world to provide the poor with access to the best education and health care.

For more information go to http://www.akdn.org/


The Deadline for Photographic submissions is FEBRUARY 27TH 2009 at midnight. Details about the Competition can be found at:

http://www.ismglobalphotos.com/

You can also become a fan of the Facebook Group "ISM 2008 Photography Competition" and post your unique photographs at:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/2008-ISM-Photography-Competition/79256235491

The Facebook Group for this competition has also linked to my blog on the link between Science and Religion in Islam:

http://www.facebook.com/posted.php?id=79256235491&share_id=29558637898#s29558637898

Photography is an applied science and the photographic images in this compettion are to be about the diverse cultural aspects and visual images of Ismailis, who are part of God's creation.

The much-visited and wildly popular ISMAILI MAIL website has also published both the link to the Competiton and the Facebook Group at:

http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2008/09/16/ism-inspiring-and-sharing-moments-photography-competition/

http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2008/09/22/facebook-page-of-2008-ism-photography-competition/


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)

414)Two Magnificent Accounts describing the sojourn of the Keshavjee family in Pretoria, apartheid South Africa, during the 20th Century: A Legacy

The following are two eloquent accounts of the sojourn of the Keshavjee Family at the southern tip of the African continent during the 20th Century. Four brothers from Chotila, Gujarat, India landed by ship on the eastern coast of South Africa around 1894. Some accounts have it that they overslept and missed their intended disembarkation point in Mombasa or Dar es Salaam(or was it Diani Beach?) and consequently had no choice but to get off in Durban, South Africa, the last stop on the journey(or was it Delgoa Bay aka Lorenco Marques aka Maputo in Southern Mozambique?). The true story will have to wait untill the well-researched, authoritative book gets released in the near future. In any case the family's true destiny lay in South Africa and there they lived(in the interior city of Pretoria in the Transvaal Province) for almost 3 generations before scattering all over the globe.

Fast forward to today. Curious about my remote origins, I joined an international National Geographic genetic study done by world-renowned geneticist Spencer Wells in 2004 and dutifully sent a sample of my inner cheek cells to his research lab in the USA. Since I am endowed with the genes that issued forth from the venerable loins of the patriarch of this family, the father of those four brothers, the man whose first name was Keshavjee, I was pleased to sacrifice myself to discover knowledge of our origins. I was startled to discover that I, of northwestern Indian stock, share the same genetic markers as a caucasian Englishman I know and that a very large proportion of Europe's, Central Asia's and the northern Indian subcontinent's population all originate from one man who lived in the area of present-day Ukraine or Southern Russia ten to fifteen thousand years ago! This is how I described my heritage based on the information sent to me by Spencer Wells, the geneticist:

"Based on a genetic analysis done in 2004 of the Y-chromosome extracted from my cheek cell DNA, which shows that I belong to the R1a haplogroup of the M17 genetic marker, my remote ancestor was a man of European origin born on the grassy steppes in the region of present-day Ukraine or Southern Russia 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. This man's descendants(known also as the Kurgan people) became the nomadic steppe dwellers who eventually spread as far afield as India and Iceland. I am descended from the Indo-European branch of this clan, which is thought to be responsible for, among other things, the domestication of the horse and the development of the Proto-Indo-European language, leading eventually to the development of English, French, German, Russian, Spanish, other Romance languages as well as Sanskrit-based languages like Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati and Urdu. Many of the Indo-European languages share similar words for animals, plants, tools and weapons. My more recent ancestors were originally Hindus living in Chotila, Gujarat, India(35% of people currently living in the State of Gujarat, millions of people, carry the same genetic marker as me). They were converted to Shia Ismaili Islam by Persian Sufi Mystics(Pirs) around the 14th century CE. My great-grandfather and his 3 brothers travelled by ship and train from India to Pretoria, South Africa around 1894. Thus, having originally left Africa 60,000 years ago during the big migration, my ancestors had, once again, returned to Africa. I emigrated to Toronto, Ontario, Canada from Pretoria, South Africa in 1973. My wife has a similar heritage to me but she was born in Mbale, Uganda and lived in Kampala, Uganda. Both our children(son 24yrs, daughter 15yrs) were born in Canada. I am very proud of my heritage."



A)Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Languages in the Location

By Mahomed(Mamdoo) Ally Keshavjee

As I reflect on my life, I sometimes go back to my childhood days and recollect my thoughts about the life we led in the non-white ghetto in Pretoria. There were three ghettos in a total area of about a mile and a quarter by a mile and a quarter for the three basic non-white groups, namely coloured or Cape coloured (those of mixed race), Indian or Asian and African or Bantu. The ghetto was made up of Marabastaadt, the area for blacks, the Asiatic Bazaar for Indians and the Cape Location for those of mixed race. All of us who lived there just called it Location.

By the mid-forties, the Black African population was growing rapidly and they were slowly being moved out to Atteridgeville. The blacks called it Pelindaba --a basic bare-boned city, some 8 or 9 miles West from the City of Pretoria. Atteridgeville was ethnically divided to keep people from different black tribes who came from different areas of South Africa apart. This was in keeping with the divide and conquer philosophy of the ruling party in South Africa –Apartheid began at the ethnic or root level. Once the Blacks had been moved out, plans for moving the Coloureds was initiated. The Coloureds were moved to Derdepoort, an area some 10 miles East of Pretoria. Similar arrangements were made in Johannesburg and other major and minor cities of South Africa. Indians in Pretoria were to be moved to Laudium, which today is a reality and somehow also ethnically divided. However, before all those events took place, all three races lived in the one Location.

The Location was bounded on the North side by the Magalis (pronounced with a throaty g –almost like a raspy h) range of low mountains. Struben Street acted as the Southern border. The Municipality of Pretoria had a fence along the entire Southern border, behind which they stored road building equipment and other requisites. The West side of the Location was cut off by a highway called Von Wielligh Street. The East side was cut off by the Apis (Monkey) River. Boom Street ran through the middle of the Location, connected by a bridge on the East side to the White areas and the outside world. These three major groups of people shared their destiny of being cut off from so-called superior White civilization. We definitely lived in a world of our own.

Some Indians who had shops in the City of Pretoria, from the early part of the century before the official Apartheid policy came into effect, were allowed to go to their businesses during the day, but had to be back by evening to spend the night in the Location. Some Indian businessmen did have homes behind their businesses in the City, but this was an anomaly from the early part of the century. By the mid-fifties they were already ear-marked for removal –both business and residence. This was part of the Group Areas Act which set aggressive milestones for the separation of the races.

Those were years of increasing oppression and being on the receiving end of an inherently discriminatory and divisive policy. South African White policy in those years was designed to progressively remove all economic and political opportunities from non-whites. However, reminiscing of the days in the Location, all is not lost because life is not measured in terms of money, places or status. It is measured in how we lived with our fellow man and the trials and tribulations we bore together and how we emerged from it all.

The first great thing that came to be was that Mahatma Gandhi came to live in the Location in the early part of the 20th century. This was surely divinely ordered. He lived there for many years before moving to Natal and eventually back to India. Everyone knows the mark he left on India. Few have heard of the legacy he left in South Africa –a legacy of pride in heritage, fighting for freedom and belief in the greatness of ordinary people. I went to school with many children who came from families who took the Mahatma as their leader. Many of them later played important roles in the South African freedom movement.

Now my thoughts go back to the fact that the Location was probably one of the richest sources of cultural exchange on the face of the globe at that time –something never to be repeated in this fast changing, modern world of ours. Toronto is probably the only other place where this cultural heterogeneity is encouraged, to a point. However, Toronto is not a ghetto and it is also so large that the ethnics have their own ghettos. But Pretoria’s Location was unparalleled on the planet because nowhere else were so many different people put together in such a small area from where they could not leave by their own choice.

The richness of life that I’m also talking about is the people who lived in this Location. And my memory takes me to re-meet the neighbours and their cultures and the languages that were spoken here all around us. The Location was over-crowded because the Indian area was no more than about ¾ of a mile by ¾ of a mile. There were close to 10,000 people in that small area, living in poverty and under an oppressive regime. Families and extended families of 20 or 30 people using one toilet was not uncommon. But people got along. We survived. We learned to tolerate each other. Understand each other. We visited each other in our homes. We went to school together in this one-of-a-kind place in the world, the Location. We had three movie theatres, showing Indian, American, British, Egyptian and Tamil movies. This was our escape.

When I look back on my school days and school mates, first of all, everyone spoke either one of the country’s major legal languages, English or Afrikaans. The Coloureds mostly spoke either local or Cape Afrikaans (a Dutch-German derivative language, with a smattering of Flemish and English mixed in). The African servants and black customers at the local shops (blacks were allowed to be there until 7 pm, but had to observe the curfew that forced them to go back to their areas by 7 pm), spoke either Zulu, Xosa, Venda, Sesutho, Swazi, Ndebele, Tswana or Mchangan. Most of the Indians and local business people spoke at least 2 of the above languages, including their own local language from India. In addition most also spoke Hindi, English or Afrikaans or both.

Indians were truly multi-lingual out of necessity. They were the trades people of the area –running small shops and service businesses for the blacks and coloureds, who worked in the white areas. There were also a couple dozen Chinese families living in the Location. Some came from Mainland China, others from Hong Kong or Macau. They spoke either Cantonese or Mandarin.

In the Location, there were Indians from South India, especially Tamils, who were a big percentage of the population. They spoke, depending on where they came from in the South of India, Madrasi, Telegu or Malayalam. Also, some from the mid-section of India spoke a few different dialects of Indian languages. There were the Hyderabadis, who spoke their own language. There were Cochnis from Cochin, they spoke their own distinct language. There were a few from Ceylon, who spoke Sinhalese. Moving North towards Pakistan, there were many Urdu speaking peoples. Indians from Mumbai spoke Marhastran. And Parsis, who also came from the same area, especially from Mumbai, spoke Gujerati. Then there were the Gujeratis, with a big ethnic population, who spoke their different brands of Gujerati –the Kanamyas, the Surtis, the Katchis, the Katchi-Mehman and Halai-Mehman from Sindh. There were Sindis who spoke pure Sindi, with their own unique script. There were those who spoke Hindi and as we go further North, we find the Sikhs, with their own language, Punjabi. There were people from Kolkata, speaking Kalkatian language. And from Bangladesh, people spoke Bengali. There were Patthan-speaking Indians from the North West of India and Punjabi-speakers from the Punjab.

This was a microcosm of almost all the people you could think of. Pizzaro and Cortes didn’t allow the Aztecs and the Mayas to be in the Location, otherwise we would have had them also. And the North American Indians and the Northern Aboriginals all fighting for survival –they were not here.

There were Portuguese-speaking Indians who came from Portuguese speaking enclaves in India. The Malays of the Cape were also here, with their Malay-mixed Afrikaans. They had come to South Africa with the Dutch from Malaysia. There were German-speaking coloureds who came from the Cape province, on the border with Southwest Africa, where they spoke German. And there were Arab-speaking Mullahs at the local Madrassa.

I’m sure I’m forgetting some other people with their peculiar language here. But they were there in this Location. All their children, boys and girls, were at the local school. Nowhere on Earth will you find this. The children of the very, very wealthy and those of the very poor, went to the same school because of the Apartheid ghetto –which did not differentiate between rich and poor –only between white and non-white.

In spite of the oppression and lack of opportunities, what could be more momentous than having one of the greatest men on this planet as a neighbour living in this Location? That’s what it felt like to have Mahatma Gandhi as part of our neighbourhood. It gave our lives and experiences meaning and richness in a larger global sense. When I see Ben Kingsley portraying Mahatma Gandhi, I say to myself, ‘We had the real thing.’

In conclusion, I must reiterate the richness of this once-in-a-lifetime, once-in-a-long-historical-period that only divine intervention could have produced. Where in the world would you get a Location of so many cultural and sub-cultural backgrounds with their rich heritage of music, dress, color, religion and language have come together in such a small place? Yes, there were even Ismailis here. One family in particular, the Keshavjees, had very close contact with Mahatma Gandhi. This was truly a historical event of a magnitude that would have world-wide impact. Mahatma Gandhi was part of this beautiful historical mosaic. Indians and Africans played out their roles, while the British and Dutch looked on from the side-lines with their attitudes of Apartheid, snobbery and British arrogance. Look where they are today.

This was a one-time phenomenon with, not Ben Kingsly whose relatives are also known to me, but the real thing thrown in: the Mahatma. This is my legacy. A tapestry full of riches, a mosaic to cherish, with all the different music, art, religion, dances, stories and languages woven into the fabric of life. The White man in South Africa, with his one superior language truly missed out. To him, Gandhi was yet another `coolie` to be derided and ridiculed. What irony. Wake up Canada, smell the real world that the divine created. Embrace it or you’ll lose out also.

Mahomed Ally(Mamdoo) Keshavjee

http://mamdoochacha.blogspot.com/2008/03/languages-in-location.html



B)My Life

Keshavjee-Umedaly Family Story

By Lella S. Umedaly

In the 1890s when my great-uncle, Jiwan Keshavjee left the family home in Chotila, Gujarat, a province near Bombay (now called Mumbai). He traveled on a steamer ship tracing the ancient trade routes from India to Africa, and his three brothers, Velshi (my grandfather), Naran, and Manji, followed soon after, leaving a life of struggle and poverty in search of opportunity. Most Indian immigrants settled in East Africa or Mozambique, but the brothers went almost as far as the steamer could take them. Disembarking on the eastern coast of South Africa, probably at Durban, our family often tries to imagine why these unique and adventurous men, our Keshavjee clan founders, traveled so far. Once the ship docked, the authorities sent them far inland to Pretoria, the Dutch capital, and they lived there for more than two generations.

The brothers, in their youth, did not know the adversities they would face. There were few Indians, and segregation was already thoroughly entrenched, so we lived apart from the Bantu, the white Afrikaner, and the British colonialists. The region proved to be a difficult place to live and raise a family, but the brothers, though poor, were young and strong. They worked hard as merchants, opening small grocery shops, and soon were able to send to India for their wives, sisters, and extended families. Each of the brothers had four to six children, and this group was the start of what we now think of as the Keshavjee clan. I am part of the second generation born in South Africa.

My grandfather, Velshi, was a very religious Shia Imami Ismaili Muslim who was strict in his ways. He and his three brothers built a beautiful mosque in the heart of Pretoria’s Indian area. In those years, my grandfather also developed a friendship with the famous Indian pacifist and statesman Mahatma Gandhi. The Mahatma came to South Africa as a young man, after he completed his law degree in England, and he lived near Durban, on the coast. He traveled to Pretoria to try an important case and befriended my grandfather, and even though he was of the Hindu faith, he tutored my uncle Rajabali, helping him to learn his Ismaili Muslim prayers. Because of Gandhi’s close relationship and influence, Uncle Rajabali became a vegetarian. Thus we all learned to cook many simple vegetarian dishes, some of which are described in this cookbook. A number of our family members even supported Mahatma Gandhi’s passive resistance and participated in acts of civil disobedience to protest the passes that all Indians once had to carry. Today letters between Gandhi and my grandfather Velshi, are in Ghandi’s ashram near Ahmedabad, India.

With time and great effort, the family prospered in their various businesses. One uncle had a bakery, another had a gas station and yet another a small machinery auction house. My father owned a movie theatre, but the government censored the movies, not allowing us to see white people kissing, for example, and they insisted that movie houses be segregated. Indians, blacks, and white Afrikaner were all separated, and my father was forced to choose between an Indian and a black clientele. This segregation would precipitate my father’s later decision to leave South Africa for Kenya.

My father’s generation of men brought young brides from India or from Indian communities in East Africa so they could marry within their religion. And so the family grew. To marry my mother, Sakina, my father had to return to Vichia, a village in the province of Gujarat where my family originated. My grandfather had arranged the marriage, and Mahatma Gandhi was asked to take the wedding jewelry to my father’s intended to seal the proposal. Sakina came to South Africa as a young bride of fifteen and was immediately responsible for cooking, under the auspices of the matriarch, my grandmother, Jabubai.

I was born in 1930, the second of five children. My mother died of a weak heart when she was just 29 years old, so I became responsible for my brothers and sisters when I was only twelve. Soon after, my father remarried to a distant relative, whose name was also Sakina, the family grew further with three more brothers.

The growing clan of Keshavjees now numbered over one hundred people, and the community was one large family, often sitting, praying, and eating together. We lived in homes that were close together, where all doors were open to all the children. In addition to caring for each others‘ children, the women shared the cooking and cleaning tasks.They made chapattis (unleavened bread), dhal, spinach and potato curries, and other vegetarian dishes, all from organic ingredients bought fresh each day from local farmers. They also made a great variety of simple sweet desserts, and I have included some, such as Seero, Sweet Potato Pudding, and Dood Paak, in the dessert section.

I remember these meals as delicious and fun, and I have special memories of all the children sitting around the fire with my grandfather, taking turns stirring milk until it condensed into a moist cake that could be used for making sweetmeats. Today we make the same dishes with powdered milk, as you will see in my recipe for Barfi, which is sweet, smooth, milky, and truly delightful.

Girls were expected to learn to cook at an early age so that we would be useful to the families into which we married. I started to cook after my mother died, and I continued to learn from my aunt and a very good African pishi (cook) named Charlie. He was a brilliant chef who worked with many cuisines and was able to imitate a dish after tasting it just once.

I am sure Charlie worked for white families before us because he understood English foods and standards of cooking. At this time my father, who was self educated and yearned to be a doctor, decided that English food was healthier and more sophisticated, so we learned yet another style of cooking. Later my grandfather came to live with us, so we cooked Indian food for him, and we all grew to love the food of our homeland again. My stepmother brought yet another influence. She used the same ingredients with slightly different quantities that created different tastes.
These are fond memories, with cooking as a central influence. Those times helped bond our family, young and old alike, and it reminds me of the saying, It takes a village to raise a child.” I try to replicate these fun times with my grandchildren.

In 1946, when I was fifteen, my father decided to go with the family to Dar es Salaam in East Africa. We went to attend a ceremony honoring our spiritual leader, the Aga Khan, Sultan Mohamed Shah, who had become Imam of the Ismailis when he was eight years old and had served as our leader for seventy-five years. This Diamond Jubilee brought Ismailis from all over the world, and they watched as our Imam, a heavy-set man, was weighed against an equal amount of un-cut diamonds. The entire East African congregation had contributed money to purchase the diamonds, and once he was weighed, this treasure trove was sold again to establish a trust. Now called the Aga Khan Foundation, this trust is of great importance to the Ismailis. It is used for humanitarian aid around the world and to provide low-interest loans to Ismailis everywhere, to build homes, attend universities, and start businesses. I sat in the front and witnessed this amazing ceremonial occasion.

The journey to the diamond jubilee was a trip of a lifetime…a real safari. The countries through which we traveled, now called Zambia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Kenya, were beautiful. The roads were all murum (dirt), so it took us two weeks to cover 3,000 miles, and we had enough flat tires to last a lifetime! But we made many friends along the way and ate rich and different foods that are part of the Indian cuisine of East Africa. We learned some mouthwatering recipes like Biryani, chicken curries, and mutton curries.

This journey was to have a major impact on my family. It was when I first met my future husband. It was also a time when apartheid was becoming a huge and oppressive issue for our family, and my father was contemplating leaving South Africa. n 1951, he and his cousins would decide to seek their fortunes in a more open society. Following the advice of our Imam, they would migrate to Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, and in later years, many members of the Keshavjee clan would follow. A few remained in South Africa, however, this was to be the first of the moves that would scatter the clan around the world.

Members of the clan now number approximately 2,000 and have settled all over the world. We keep in touch by e-mail today, but we can recognize each other a mile away, so strong are our physical resemblances. Once a Keshavjee speaks, the recognition is complete, because of tone of voice and abundant use of gestures. We confirm our kinship by asking, “Where have you been and what have you done?” The answers are inevitably bold and enthusiastic, so it seems that most members of the Keshavjee clan have adventurous souls and ambitious dreams. We are also people with a good sense of humor, and we love family get-togethers over a sumptuous meal.

In 1948, while the family was still in South Africa, we made another foray back to East Africa, and my future husband, Shamas Umedaly, wooed me in Uganda with his borrowed Singer sports car. We were married in Nairobi, Kenya, in August of that year, when I was a mere seventeen years old, and we then moved to Uganda to live with his family. There I was in for a shock.
In South Africa we had electric appliances and gadgets, but in Uganda we had no such conveniences. We cooked with wood-burning stoves, heated water for each bath in a large samovar, and even had to grind our own masala. My cooking style and flavors were so different from my mother-in-law’s that I had to learn yet another way to prepare food. She was not easy to please, so I was determined to be the best cook and use all my skills to impress her. I learned to make coconut curries, with coconut meat we ground from scratch, and I mastered many East African-style desserts, such as Mango Pudding, Faluda, Shikand, Kulfi, and Carrot Halva. We stayed with my in-laws for seven years.

In the midst of these activities, I had five children. Being unable to afford full-time help, I learned to raise our children, clean, wash clothes, sew, and drive (I even raced cars competitively), but mainly to cook quickly and proficiently. I was also efficient in caring for my children, and they often laugh about the way I would bathe them one after the other as if operating an assembly line. They were always nicely dressed, clean, and well fed.

After all my children were born, I went to England for three months to study the Montessori method of education. I wanted more for my family, and when I returned, I opened two schools with one hundred and thirty children in each. Now I had the money to hire a full-time pishi, whom I taught all the various dishes I had learned, but I continued to cook, too. I learned to make party dishes like Samosas, Kebobs, Muthia, Kachori and Chicken Tikka, in the East African way, and I also added some Italian and Chinese dishes to my repertoire. The form, texture and taste of my chapattis became better than ever— even my critical grandfather would have approved.

In 1972, disaster struck, when my family and eighty thousand others fell victim to ethnic cleansing by Uganda’s dictatorial president Idi Amin. We were told to leave our houses open and our cars with keys in the ignition and were forced to leave the country. Once again the family and its ever-growing clan were scattered to the winds, to Europe, Australia, or North America, and we began again in new lands. Where we went depended on which country would accept us. My youngest daughter, only fourteen, went to Medford, Oregon, to relatives of a university professor we had befriended in Uganda. My nineteen year old daughter went to a university in West Virginia. The rest of us acquired Canadian immigration papers and found our way to Ontario.

As hard as it was, I was happy to call Canada my home. I had always wanted to live there and had admired the trees, mountains and rivers that I saw and read about in books. Eventually we moved to North Vancouver, one of the most beautiful places in the world, and there I started a licensed daycare in my house, and we began our lives again. Since then, I have taught at least a thousand children. I retired in 1997, at the age of 67, still living in North Vancouver, British Columbia. Our children now live all over the continent, and all five of them went to University. I am very proud of their accomplishments.

When my family first came to North America, there were few of us, and Indian cuisine was not popular. It was difficult to find the correct ingredients, and we had to improvise, altering recipes to be more flexible and even more practical. My children now began to call home to ask for recipes. My youngest daughter, for instance, made chicken curry for the first time just after she arrived in Oregon. She called me and asked, “Mum how do you make your curry brown—mine is red?” The answer was simple, “Cook the onions longer next time.” But the instructions had to be given long-distance.

Today, my children and grandchildren often ask me how to cook various dishes, and they have been requesting a legacy of fast, tasty recipes that embody the meanderings of our diaspora. I have spent four years on this cookbook, working out the measurements and accurately noting the best cooking methods. It has been an enjoyable but frustrating experience because I had learned to cook by feel, smell, color, texture and the look of the dish. We used to pour the ingredients into the palms of our hands or the lid of the container, sensing the right amount while adjusting for the likes and dislikes of the guests. I must admit that the most difficult part about writing this book has been developing exact measurements.

When we were refining and testing these recipes my daughter, Muneera, and I would often cook in the early morning. Then we would invite friends and acquaintances to come to the house and try the recipes while we observed. We made note of questions and did taste tests to ensure the consistencies of flavor, texture, color and aroma of each dish. Laughter filled the house, taking me back to the joyful days in South Africa with my grandfather and cousins.

Writing this book has been a labor of love, helping me rediscover the recipes that nourished my family. It has encouraged me to invite old memories and relish new thoughts. With each recipe I remember a person, a story and a feeling, In this book I see so many colors, smell the spices, hear the laughter, and I feel the tears and the challenges that have made me who I am today. I remember my father’s response to my request for flight lessons, when I wanted to be a pilot: “Lella, you learn how to pilot your pots and pans!” And here I am actually doing it. But most importantly I realize that the dishes form a bridge from my past to my grandchildren.

Now these recipes will be a bridge to you and your families, too. I look forward to sharing these tasty, quick dishes with you. Enjoy forming your own memories over these meals.

With love,
Lella S. Umedaly

http://mamajeeskitchen.com/mylife.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)