"In Shia Islam, intellect is a key component of faith. Intellect allows us to understand the creation of God"(Aga Khan IV, July 23rd 2008, Lisbon, Portugal)
"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)
"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)
"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)
"Every particle of the Creation has a share of the Command of God, because every creature shares a part of the Command of God through which it has come to be there and by virtue of which it remains in being and the light of the Command of God shines in it. Understand this!"(Abu Yakub Al Sijistani, 10th century Fatimid Ismaili cosmologist, d971, Kashf al-Mahjub("Unveiling of the Hidden"))
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
July 26, 2010
Teams of Physicists Closing in on the ‘God Particle’
By DENNIS OVERBYE
A thousand physicists working at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., reported in Paris on Monday that they had not found the “God particle,” yet. But they are beginning to figure out where it is not.
Its mass — in the units preferred by physicists — is not in the range between 158 billion and 175 billion electron volts, according to a talk by Ben Kilminster of Fermilab at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Paris.
And so the most intensive particle hunt in the history of physics goes on.
Over the last decade physicists working on two separate experiments at Fermilab have combed the debris from a thousand trillion (1 with 15 zeros) collisions of protons and anti-protons looking for signs of the Higgs boson, which is said to be responsible for imbuing some other elementary particles with mass. Rumors fanned by a blogger that the Higgs, dubbed the “God particle,” by former Fermilab director Leon Lederman in a book of the same name, had been detected reached all the way to Gawker last week and focused attention on the Paris conference, which also featured a speech by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France.
The new results, combining the data from two separate Fermi experiments, DZero and C.D.F., narrow the range in which the Higgs, if it exists, must be hiding. Physicists had previously concluded that it must lie somewhere between 115 billion and 200 billion electron volts. By comparison a proton, the anchor of ordinary matter, weighs in at about a billion electron volts.
A new competitor is about to enter the hunt. Physicists from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, the most powerful accelerator in the world, announced that their machine, which started operating at half power in March, with 3.5 trillion electron volt protons, had rediscovered all of particle physics, most recently the top quark, and thus the table was set for it begin to look for new physics as well as the Higgs. The new collider has registered about 1.5 billion collisions, but with more energy at its disposal it hopes to catch up to Fermilab in a year or so.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/science/space/27higgs.html?_r=1&ref=science
Related:
The Large Hadron Collider Collection Of Posts On Easy Nash's Blog: A 10 Billion Euro Gizmo That Could Unlock The Secrets Of Genesis.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/05/620the-large-hadron-collider-collection.html
The 19 Grand Ideas Of Science: What Is The Universe Made Up Of And How Does It Operate? Quotes Of Aga Khan IV And Others.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/11/501-19-grand-ideas-of-science-what-is.html
New data suggest a lighter Higgs: Fermilab results heat up race for an elusive particle
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/61449/title/New_data_suggest_a_lighter_Higgs
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)
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
630)"Plato, Platonism, and Neo-platonism" by Dr Nader El-Bizri of the Institute of Ismaili Studies; Quotes of Aga Khans IV and III and Others.
Quotes and Excerpts that include references to the Intellect and Soul of Neoplatonism:
"Time is eternity measured by the movements of the heavens,whose name is day, night, month, year. Eternity is Time not measured, having neither beginning nor end…The cause of Time is the Soul of the World….; it is not in time, for time is in the horizon of the soul as its instrument, as the duration of the living mortal who is “the shadow of the soul”, while eternity is the duration of the living immortal – that is to say of the Intelligence and of the Soul(Nasir Khusraw, 11th Fatimid Ismaili Cosmologist-Philosopher-Theologian-Poet)
http://www.iep.utm.edu/ismaili/
"The Divine Intellect, Aql-i Kull, both transcends and informs the human intellect. It is this Intellect which enables man to strive towards two aims dictated by the faith: that he should reflect upon the environment Allah has given him and that he should know himself. It is the Light of the Intellect which distinguishes the complete human being from the human animal, and developing that intellect requires free inquiry. The man of faith, who fails to pursue intellectual search is likely to have only a limited comprehension of Allah's creation. Indeed, it is man's intellect that enables him to expand his vision of that creation"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University Inauguration Speech, Karachi, Pakistan, November 11, 1985)
"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)
"The Intellect is the substance of (God's) unity and it is the one (al-wahid), both cause and caused, the act of origination (al-ibda) and the first originated being (al-mubda al-awwal); it is perfection and perfect, eternity and eternal, existence and that which exists all in a single substance"( Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani, 11th centuryFatimid Ismaili cosmologist (Kitab al-Riyad, pp. 221-222))
"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)
"God – may He be Glorified and Exalted – created Intellect ('aql) first among the spiritual entities; He drew it forth from the right of His Throne, making it proceed from His own Light. Then he commanded it to retreat, and it retreated, to advance, and it advanced; then God proclaimed: 'I created you glorious, and I gave you pre-eminence over all my creatures.'"(Imam Jafar as-Sadiq, Circa 765CE)
"The beginning of all things, their origin, their force and their prosperity, is that intellect ('aql), without which one can profit from nothing. God created it to adorn His creatures, and as a light for them. It is through intellect ('aql) that the servants recognize God is their Creator and that they themselves are created beings …It is thanks to intellect ('aql) that they can distinguish what is beautiful from what is ugly, that they realize that darkness is in ignorance and that light is in Knowledge"( Imam Jafar as-Sadiq, (al-Kulayni, Usul al-Kafi, Vol. 1, pp. 34), circa 765CE)
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
Plato, Platonism, and Neo-platonism
Dr Nader El-Bizri
This article was originally published in Medieval Islamic Civilization, An Encyclopaedia, Vol. II, p. 614-616, ed. Josef W. Meri, Routledge (New York-London, 2006).
Abstract
The school of philosophy that took shape in the 3rd century CE, based on the teachings of Plato and the commentators on his work, received a new intellectual impetus when its texts became available to scholars in the Islamic civilization through translations from Greek to Arabic, starting from the 9th century CE. Philosophers and thinkers in Islam assimilated this philosophical legacy, and innovatively expanded the theoretical and practical applications of its ideas, as well as brought new directions to its conceptual unfolding, which resulted in significant intellectual contributions, particularly in philosophy and ethics.
Download PDF version of article (32 KB)
Key words:
Neoplatonism, Syriac, Plotinus, Plato, Republic, Phaedo, Symposium, Aristotelian, Stoic, neo-Pythagorean, Enneads, Nous (intellect), methaphysics, Platonists, creatio ex nihilo, the World Soul, Laws, Sophist, Timaeus, history of ideas in Islam, al‑Madina al-Fadila (The Virtuous City), Corpus Platonicum, Tandhib al-akhlaq (The Cultivation of Morals), Ibn Miskawayh, Liber de Causis (Kitab al-Khayr al-Mahd), al-Kindi, Ikhwan al-Safa’, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, al-Sijistani, al-Kirmani, Suhrawardi, Ibn ‘Arabi, Mulla Sadra.
Plato, Platonism and Neo-platonism
Neoplatonism was a philosophical movement that primarily belonged to the Hellenist Alexandrian and Syriac schools of thought. Its founder, Plotinus (ca. 205-270 CE), an Egyptian of Greek culture, was profoundly influenced by Plato’s Republic, Phaedo, and Symposium, as well as being inspired by Aristotelian, Stoic, and neo-Pythagorean doctrines. Plotinus’ own monumental corpus, the Enneads, was partly drafted in response to the objections raised by Aristotle against Plato’s theory of ideas. Therein, Plotinus argued that the Platonic forms subsist in what Aristotle referred to as Nous (intellect). Giving a metaphysical primacy to abstract ideas, the realm of the intelligible was construed as being the ground of the ultimate reality, which was radically independent from sensible beings. This ontology led to a belief in the existence of absolute values rooted in eternity. Further elaborations of Plotinus’s teachings were undertaken by his disciple, Porphyry of Tyre (ca. 232-305 CE), and were supplemented by the work of the latter’s pupil, the Syrian Iamblichus (ca. 250-330 CE). However, Proclus (ca. 411-485 CE) introduced the most rigorous systematization of this tradition.
The impetus of Neoplatonism in philosophy confronted many challenges following the closing of the Athenian Academy (ca. 526 CE) by the Roman Emperor Justinian. The momentum of this tradition was renewed with the philosophers of the medieval Muslim civilization who imbued it with monotheistic directives. Following Socrates, in a critique of the Sophists, Platonists believed that knowledge cannot be derived from appearances alone, and that it can only be properly attained through universal ideas. Heeding the meditations of Parmenides, they held that the realm of being was unchanging, eternal, and indestructible; while following Heraclitus, they took the sensible realm as being subject to a constant flux of transformational becoming. Establishing a distinction between truth and belief, they asserted that the intelligible was apprehended by reason and the sensible by mere opinion. With this Platonist heritage, the ethical code of goodness became a cosmological principle.
Eventually, Neo-Platonists held that The One, as the indeterminate perfection of absolute unity, simplicity, and goodness, imparts existence from itself due to its superabundance. This event was grasped as being a process of emanation that accentuated the primacy of Divine transcendence over creation and represented an alternate explication of generation that challenged the creatio ex nihilo doctrine. Endowed with vision, the One, as the First undiminished Source of existence, imparts Nous, the immanent changeless Intellect, as its own Image. From this effused Nous issues forth the World Soul, which acts as a transition between the realm of ideas and that of the senses. Refracting itself in materiality, the Soul generates all sensible composite beings, while matter represents the last station in the hierarchy of existence as the unreal substratum of the phenomenal universe. Emanation, as a processional descent, was itself to be followed by an ascent that expressed the longing of the rational soul to return to its Source and a yearning to inhabit the realm of ideas. This reversible movement acted as the basis of the moral code of the Neoplatonist system, which advocated a dualist separation of mind and body, as well as affirmed the immortality of the soul.
Philosophers in medieval Islam came to know Plato through the Arabic translations of his Laws, Sophist, Timaeus, and Republic. His influence on the history of ideas in Islam is most felt in the domains of ethics and political philosophy, whereby his views offered possibilities for reconciling pagan philosophy with monotheistic religion in the quest for truth and the unveiling of the ultimate principles of reality. His Republic and Laws presented an appealing legislative model that inspired political thought in Islam, particularly the line in thinking that is attested in al-Farabi’s (ca. 870-950 CE) treatise al‑Madina al-Fadila (The Virtuous City), which gave prominence to the role played by philosophy in setting the legal arrangements and mores of the ideal Islamic polity. The Corpus Platonicum also impressed humanists like Ibn Miskawayh (ca. 940-1030 CE), who, in his Tahdhib al-akhlaq (The Cultivation of Morals) espoused the Platonic tripartite conception of the soul, along with its ethical-political ramifications. As for the Neoplatonist doctrines, these found their way into the intellectual history of Islam through Plato’s dialogues, as well as being channeled via the tracts known as Aristotle’s Theology and Liber de Causis (Kitab al-Khayr al-Mahd). Although both texts were erroneously attributed to Aristotle, the former reproduced fragments from Plotinus’s Enneads, and the latter rested on Proclus’ Elements of Theology. This misguiding textual transmission led to imbuing Aristotelianism with Neoplatonist leitmotifs, which impacted the thinking of authorities such as al-Kindi (d. ca. 873 CE), Ikhwan al-Safa’ (tenth century CE), al-Farabi (d. ca. 950 CE), and Ibn Sina (d. 1037 CE), who in their turn influenced the onto-theological systems of al-Sijistani (d. 971 CE), al-Kirmani (d. 1020 CE), Suhrawardi (d. 1191 CE), Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240 CE), and Mulla Sadra (d. 1640 CE).
Primary Sources
al-Farabi (Alfarabius). De Platonis Philosophia. Edited by Franz Rosenthal and Richard Walzer. London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1943.
Galenus, Claudius. Compendium Timaei Platonis. Edited by Paul Krauss and Richard Walzer. London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1951.
Plato. Plato Arabus. Edited by Paul Krauss and Richard Walzer. London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1943.
Further Reading
Krauss, Paul. “Plotin chez les arabes.” Bulletin de 1’Institut d’Égypte 23 (1941): 236-295.
Netton, Ian Richard. Muslim Neoplatonists: An Introduction to the Thought of the Brethren of Purity. London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1982.
Rosenthal, Franz. “On the Knowledge of Plato’s Philosophy in the Islamic World.” Islamic Culture 14 (1940): 398- 402.
Walzer, Richard. “Aflatun.” In The Encyclopaedia of Islam. Vol I. Leiden: Brill, 1960.
— — Greek into Arabic: Essays in Islamic Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962.
http://iis.ac.uk/view_article.asp?ContentID=106602&l=en
Related:
Plato, Platonism, and Neo-platonism – Dr Nader El-Bizri Institute of Ismaili Studies
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2010/07/18/plato-platonism-and-neo-platonism-dr-nader-el-bizri-institute-of-ismaili-studies/
A 600-Post Blog Summarized: The Story Of My Blog Told Through Collections Of Posts To Date; Spring And Summer Reading For Those Who Are Interested
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/04/599a-600-post-blog-summarized-story-of.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)
"Time is eternity measured by the movements of the heavens,whose name is day, night, month, year. Eternity is Time not measured, having neither beginning nor end…The cause of Time is the Soul of the World….; it is not in time, for time is in the horizon of the soul as its instrument, as the duration of the living mortal who is “the shadow of the soul”, while eternity is the duration of the living immortal – that is to say of the Intelligence and of the Soul(Nasir Khusraw, 11th Fatimid Ismaili Cosmologist-Philosopher-Theologian-Poet)
http://www.iep.utm.edu/ismaili/
"The Divine Intellect, Aql-i Kull, both transcends and informs the human intellect. It is this Intellect which enables man to strive towards two aims dictated by the faith: that he should reflect upon the environment Allah has given him and that he should know himself. It is the Light of the Intellect which distinguishes the complete human being from the human animal, and developing that intellect requires free inquiry. The man of faith, who fails to pursue intellectual search is likely to have only a limited comprehension of Allah's creation. Indeed, it is man's intellect that enables him to expand his vision of that creation"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University Inauguration Speech, Karachi, Pakistan, November 11, 1985)
"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)
"The Intellect is the substance of (God's) unity and it is the one (al-wahid), both cause and caused, the act of origination (al-ibda) and the first originated being (al-mubda al-awwal); it is perfection and perfect, eternity and eternal, existence and that which exists all in a single substance"( Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani, 11th centuryFatimid Ismaili cosmologist (Kitab al-Riyad, pp. 221-222))
"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)
"God – may He be Glorified and Exalted – created Intellect ('aql) first among the spiritual entities; He drew it forth from the right of His Throne, making it proceed from His own Light. Then he commanded it to retreat, and it retreated, to advance, and it advanced; then God proclaimed: 'I created you glorious, and I gave you pre-eminence over all my creatures.'"(Imam Jafar as-Sadiq, Circa 765CE)
"The beginning of all things, their origin, their force and their prosperity, is that intellect ('aql), without which one can profit from nothing. God created it to adorn His creatures, and as a light for them. It is through intellect ('aql) that the servants recognize God is their Creator and that they themselves are created beings …It is thanks to intellect ('aql) that they can distinguish what is beautiful from what is ugly, that they realize that darkness is in ignorance and that light is in Knowledge"( Imam Jafar as-Sadiq, (al-Kulayni, Usul al-Kafi, Vol. 1, pp. 34), circa 765CE)
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
Plato, Platonism, and Neo-platonism
Dr Nader El-Bizri
This article was originally published in Medieval Islamic Civilization, An Encyclopaedia, Vol. II, p. 614-616, ed. Josef W. Meri, Routledge (New York-London, 2006).
Abstract
The school of philosophy that took shape in the 3rd century CE, based on the teachings of Plato and the commentators on his work, received a new intellectual impetus when its texts became available to scholars in the Islamic civilization through translations from Greek to Arabic, starting from the 9th century CE. Philosophers and thinkers in Islam assimilated this philosophical legacy, and innovatively expanded the theoretical and practical applications of its ideas, as well as brought new directions to its conceptual unfolding, which resulted in significant intellectual contributions, particularly in philosophy and ethics.
Download PDF version of article (32 KB)
Key words:
Neoplatonism, Syriac, Plotinus, Plato, Republic, Phaedo, Symposium, Aristotelian, Stoic, neo-Pythagorean, Enneads, Nous (intellect), methaphysics, Platonists, creatio ex nihilo, the World Soul, Laws, Sophist, Timaeus, history of ideas in Islam, al‑Madina al-Fadila (The Virtuous City), Corpus Platonicum, Tandhib al-akhlaq (The Cultivation of Morals), Ibn Miskawayh, Liber de Causis (Kitab al-Khayr al-Mahd), al-Kindi, Ikhwan al-Safa’, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, al-Sijistani, al-Kirmani, Suhrawardi, Ibn ‘Arabi, Mulla Sadra.
Plato, Platonism and Neo-platonism
Neoplatonism was a philosophical movement that primarily belonged to the Hellenist Alexandrian and Syriac schools of thought. Its founder, Plotinus (ca. 205-270 CE), an Egyptian of Greek culture, was profoundly influenced by Plato’s Republic, Phaedo, and Symposium, as well as being inspired by Aristotelian, Stoic, and neo-Pythagorean doctrines. Plotinus’ own monumental corpus, the Enneads, was partly drafted in response to the objections raised by Aristotle against Plato’s theory of ideas. Therein, Plotinus argued that the Platonic forms subsist in what Aristotle referred to as Nous (intellect). Giving a metaphysical primacy to abstract ideas, the realm of the intelligible was construed as being the ground of the ultimate reality, which was radically independent from sensible beings. This ontology led to a belief in the existence of absolute values rooted in eternity. Further elaborations of Plotinus’s teachings were undertaken by his disciple, Porphyry of Tyre (ca. 232-305 CE), and were supplemented by the work of the latter’s pupil, the Syrian Iamblichus (ca. 250-330 CE). However, Proclus (ca. 411-485 CE) introduced the most rigorous systematization of this tradition.
The impetus of Neoplatonism in philosophy confronted many challenges following the closing of the Athenian Academy (ca. 526 CE) by the Roman Emperor Justinian. The momentum of this tradition was renewed with the philosophers of the medieval Muslim civilization who imbued it with monotheistic directives. Following Socrates, in a critique of the Sophists, Platonists believed that knowledge cannot be derived from appearances alone, and that it can only be properly attained through universal ideas. Heeding the meditations of Parmenides, they held that the realm of being was unchanging, eternal, and indestructible; while following Heraclitus, they took the sensible realm as being subject to a constant flux of transformational becoming. Establishing a distinction between truth and belief, they asserted that the intelligible was apprehended by reason and the sensible by mere opinion. With this Platonist heritage, the ethical code of goodness became a cosmological principle.
Eventually, Neo-Platonists held that The One, as the indeterminate perfection of absolute unity, simplicity, and goodness, imparts existence from itself due to its superabundance. This event was grasped as being a process of emanation that accentuated the primacy of Divine transcendence over creation and represented an alternate explication of generation that challenged the creatio ex nihilo doctrine. Endowed with vision, the One, as the First undiminished Source of existence, imparts Nous, the immanent changeless Intellect, as its own Image. From this effused Nous issues forth the World Soul, which acts as a transition between the realm of ideas and that of the senses. Refracting itself in materiality, the Soul generates all sensible composite beings, while matter represents the last station in the hierarchy of existence as the unreal substratum of the phenomenal universe. Emanation, as a processional descent, was itself to be followed by an ascent that expressed the longing of the rational soul to return to its Source and a yearning to inhabit the realm of ideas. This reversible movement acted as the basis of the moral code of the Neoplatonist system, which advocated a dualist separation of mind and body, as well as affirmed the immortality of the soul.
Philosophers in medieval Islam came to know Plato through the Arabic translations of his Laws, Sophist, Timaeus, and Republic. His influence on the history of ideas in Islam is most felt in the domains of ethics and political philosophy, whereby his views offered possibilities for reconciling pagan philosophy with monotheistic religion in the quest for truth and the unveiling of the ultimate principles of reality. His Republic and Laws presented an appealing legislative model that inspired political thought in Islam, particularly the line in thinking that is attested in al-Farabi’s (ca. 870-950 CE) treatise al‑Madina al-Fadila (The Virtuous City), which gave prominence to the role played by philosophy in setting the legal arrangements and mores of the ideal Islamic polity. The Corpus Platonicum also impressed humanists like Ibn Miskawayh (ca. 940-1030 CE), who, in his Tahdhib al-akhlaq (The Cultivation of Morals) espoused the Platonic tripartite conception of the soul, along with its ethical-political ramifications. As for the Neoplatonist doctrines, these found their way into the intellectual history of Islam through Plato’s dialogues, as well as being channeled via the tracts known as Aristotle’s Theology and Liber de Causis (Kitab al-Khayr al-Mahd). Although both texts were erroneously attributed to Aristotle, the former reproduced fragments from Plotinus’s Enneads, and the latter rested on Proclus’ Elements of Theology. This misguiding textual transmission led to imbuing Aristotelianism with Neoplatonist leitmotifs, which impacted the thinking of authorities such as al-Kindi (d. ca. 873 CE), Ikhwan al-Safa’ (tenth century CE), al-Farabi (d. ca. 950 CE), and Ibn Sina (d. 1037 CE), who in their turn influenced the onto-theological systems of al-Sijistani (d. 971 CE), al-Kirmani (d. 1020 CE), Suhrawardi (d. 1191 CE), Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240 CE), and Mulla Sadra (d. 1640 CE).
Primary Sources
al-Farabi (Alfarabius). De Platonis Philosophia. Edited by Franz Rosenthal and Richard Walzer. London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1943.
Galenus, Claudius. Compendium Timaei Platonis. Edited by Paul Krauss and Richard Walzer. London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1951.
Plato. Plato Arabus. Edited by Paul Krauss and Richard Walzer. London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1943.
Further Reading
Krauss, Paul. “Plotin chez les arabes.” Bulletin de 1’Institut d’Égypte 23 (1941): 236-295.
Netton, Ian Richard. Muslim Neoplatonists: An Introduction to the Thought of the Brethren of Purity. London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1982.
Rosenthal, Franz. “On the Knowledge of Plato’s Philosophy in the Islamic World.” Islamic Culture 14 (1940): 398- 402.
Walzer, Richard. “Aflatun.” In The Encyclopaedia of Islam. Vol I. Leiden: Brill, 1960.
— — Greek into Arabic: Essays in Islamic Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962.
http://iis.ac.uk/view_article.asp?ContentID=106602&l=en
Related:
Plato, Platonism, and Neo-platonism – Dr Nader El-Bizri Institute of Ismaili Studies
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2010/07/18/plato-platonism-and-neo-platonism-dr-nader-el-bizri-institute-of-ismaili-studies/
A 600-Post Blog Summarized: The Story Of My Blog Told Through Collections Of Posts To Date; Spring And Summer Reading For Those Who Are Interested
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/04/599a-600-post-blog-summarized-story-of.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)
629)How Canada's Conservatives Won The Immigrant Vote; Quotes of Hon Jason Kenney, Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism
Quote:
"New Canadians are naturally conservative in the way they live their lives: they are entrepreneurial; they have a remarkable work ethic; they are an aspirational class; they want stability; they are intolerant of crime and disorder; they have a profound devotion to family and tradition, including institutions of faith,” said Minister Kenney.
Tim Mak
June 7th, 2010
As center-right parties grapple with the problem of how to appeal to ethnic minorities without compromising their principles, they can look to the Canadian Conservative Party for a solution.
Without patronage, Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney has executed a minority outreach plan that, for the first time, has started a genuine conversation with immigrant voters – a conversation that has increasingly ended with these voters considering a Conservative vote for the first time.
* * *
Jason Kenney, Canada’s Minister of Multiculturalism, is on the line. He’s discussing how his ethnic outreach program has been more effective in conservative western Canada than in Liberal-heavy central Canada. There’s a pause as he reaches for an example.
“You’re from B.C., right?” he says. “Right,” I reply, slightly taken aback. He goes on to explain the characteristics of a riding in British Columbia in order to contrast it with a riding in suburban Ontario.
Kenney and I had only met on one previous social occasion, and I doubted mentioning my hometown then. But he did his homework before our interview.
To previously hostile ethnic groups, Kenney has reached out in ways that showed he understood their details. Through symbolic gestures, he could assuage antagonism – or at least get their attention.
And it has worked. In 2006, a visible minority voter was three times more likely to vote Liberal than to vote Conservative. By the 2008 federal election, ethnic minorities were about as likely to vote Conservative as they were to vote Liberal.
* * *
Through much of the 2000s, Canadian Conservatives wracked their heads, trying to engineer a constructive ethnic outreach program. They were mired in decades-old muck: minority voters tended to see them as racists, as xenophobes, and as anti-immigrant. On the other hand, the Liberal Party dominated this expanding segment of the Canadian electorate. In 2000, 70% of all visible minorities voted for the Liberal Party.
Patrick Muttart, the Prime Minister’s former Deputy Chief of Staff and now the Managing Director of Mercury, a US-based public strategy firm, explained that the Conservatives were desperate to build a new ethnic outreach strategy. Muttart looked at the record of the Conservatives who governed Canada between 1984 and 1993, and saw the problem grimly:
Although [the Mulroney Conservatives] were in power for almost nine years, they didn’t fundamentally change the way government related to ethnic communities. They basically replicated the old Liberal approach… after nine years… new Canadians were voting for Liberals in just as large numbers as they were at the beginning.
Muttart explains that the lack of Conservative appeal amongst new Canadians was untenable over the long term:
They were growing as a share of the Canadian population faster than we were growing our support… this was a structural political problem here that, unless we addressed it, would make us uncompetitive over the long term.
Desperate for answers, the Conservative Party convened a series of focus groups, run in the language of each of the targeted minorities – people were more comfortable talking about politics in their native language – and the results were shocking.
It turned out that “new Canadians are naturally conservative in the way they live their lives: they are entrepreneurial; they have a remarkable work ethic; they are… [an] aspirational class; they want stability; they are intolerant of crime and disorder; they have a profound devotion to family and tradition, including institutions of faith,” said Minister Kenney. “That whole spectrum of values is conservative – but they didn’t vote for us.”
The first efforts that the Conservatives made to engage with ethnic communities were remarkably humble, even comically so.
In the spring of 2006, Kenney was fresh off his appointment as a Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister with the portfolio of multiculturalism. Party strategists identified the Korean community on the west coast as one of the groups that were accessible to the Conservative Party – but no one knew any Koreans to get in touch with.
Minister Kenney resorted to calling up a friend of his, who happened to be Chinese. His friend got him in touch with a Korean businessman. As Kenney tells it, he called the businessman and started: “Hi, we’re the Government of Canada…”
* * *
The Liberal ethnic outreach model had worked swimmingly for the center-left through the 1990s, and helped to ensure Liberal rule for thirteen straight years. Their strategy focused on engagement with the leaders of ethnic groups, often distributing grants for ethnic-specific projects.
The Conservative Party went another way. “Instead of engaging on a patronage basis, [Kenney] appealed to the conservative instincts within some of these groups, often dealing with niche issues within different groups,” said Ezra Levant, a Canadian conservative commentator.
After the Conservative Party’s 2006 federal election victory, the Conservative Party went community by community to identify symbolic issues that were important to them, and then tried to deliver on those issues.
“They weren’t hearing our message on taxes, on crime, [or] on opportunity because there was so much static. We had to break through the clutter… That’s where we came out with a series of issues for each community… and by focusing on those issues… we were able to get them to tune in,” explained Minister Kenney.
For example, the Conservatives reached out to Canada’s Polish community by lifting visa requirements to visit Canada; in a nod to former Vietnamese refugees, they condemned the socialist government in Vietnam; the process of visa applications for Croatians was also simplified.
Most people outside of these communities would not notice these seemingly small gestures. But for each beneficiary group, the symbolic gestures gave them a reason to consider the Conservative Party’s platform.
Conservative strategists recognized that this strategy was merely an excuse to start a conversation. Patrick Muttart puts it this way:
We used a number of emotional and symbolic issues that were consistent with the conservative approach – but we always understood that these were door-openers. You can’t sustain your value proposition to these sorts of voters only by focusing on these peripheral, emotional, symbolic issues.
The Conservatives also refused to meet with groups they deemed were radicalized. “They… focused on bolstering moderates within certain communities… under the conservatives, [extremist] groups have been banned, and those who have not been banned have been marginalized,” says Ezra Levant. “For example, the Canadian-Islamic Congress, which had a big delegation at the Liberal Party convention in 2006 and [is led by someone] who went on TV and said any Israeli over 18 is a legitimate target for a terrorist attack – the federal government will not meet with them.”
To be sure, grants for immigrant groups continued to be doled out. But the focus had changed: grants would be strictly limited to projects that promoted integration, encouraged cooperation between different ethnic communities, and helped combat radicalization.
“We’re not in the business of picking and choosing winners and losers among ethnic communities through some sort of sordid Tammany Hall. That’s the Liberal way, it’s not the Conservative way,” said Alykhan Velshi, Jason Kenney’s Communications Director.
Of course, the Conservatives are in the business of politics, and as such, there are winners and losers. Conservatives targeted ethnic communities that would reap the most political benefit. This means that Hispanic, Italian and Greek voters, who either have voting habits that are ossified in favor of the Liberals or live outside of strategic ridings, were largely left out of Conservative strategies.
* * *
After Jason Kenney made his first overtures toward the Korean community, a group of six Korean community leaders assembled around a table for an initial consultation. Those who assembled had never voted Conservative, and in all likeliness viewed that possibility as mildly repulsive.
“They said that they had never met a Conservative… all they had ever heard was that we were racist and anti-immigrant, and could we respond?” recalls Kenney. He tried his best to explain the party platform under these circumstances, and turned to a woman sitting next to him. “Who knows, maybe you would be the first Korean-Canadian in the Parliament of Canada,” he said.
“Well, I’ve always voted NDP [Canada’s democratic socialist party],” came the reply. “I don’t really know why, but when we first moved to Burnaby, there was an NDP MP that came to our church, and always showed up at our events, and got to know everyone in our community.”
Kenney stayed in contact with the young Korean woman, and scored a coup by getting her to run in a district near Vancouver just eight months later. Though she lost, she managed to garner a swing of more than 6%, and was later appointed to Canada’s upper house as Senator Yonah Martin, the first person of Korean descent to hold federal office in the country.
The empirical results of Kenney’s outreach across Canada have been even more astounding. “We never expected to see electoral realignment in this cohort of twenty-five percent of Canadians overnight,” said Kenney. The Minister estimates that there are twenty-five to forty “ridings that have substantial numbers of new Canadians… [which] are now competitive but [were] not three elections ago.”
* * *
But what qualifies Jason Kenney to be the leader of the Conservative Party’s outreach to visible minorities? Kenney seemed taken aback by the question when I posed it. “Well, nothing qualifies me for the job,” he said.
And I suppose that’s the point. “The thing with Kenney is, I mean, his name is Jason Thomas Kenney,” chuckled Patrick Muttart. “He’s Irish Catholic; he’s Caucasian; he doesn’t fit the profile of a typical ethnic outreach guy.”
“There’s an advantage to having a guy who doesn’t come from one of the communities. I’m therefore not perceived as a token, I don’t walk into any community with baggage,” says Kenney. “The fact that I’m not a ‘token’ … and the fact that I was seen as an influential mainstream member of the party, said to people that they were being treated equally.”
“He is culturally sophisticated and culturally intelligent,” said Muttart. “When he goes to an ethnic event, it’s not, ‘oh, the food’s too spicy,’ or ‘oh, I don’t want to eat that,’ – he doesn’t look awkward.”
Kenney later added that perhaps, on second thought, he did have a qualification for the job. “Maybe I have a hard work-ethic, and it is hard work,” he mused. His colleagues, on the other hand, would have omitted the ‘maybe’.
“He is renowned. It’s been said that it’s hard to find anyone in Canada who doesn’t know him, because of his incredible industriousness,” said John Weston, an MP from a riding in suburban Vancouver.
“I’ve worked for several MPs, and I’ve never seen a schedule like this,” said his scheduler, Agnes Kim. “Even on his weekends… he often has days where he’s working from 9AM until 10PM at night because he has dinner events at night.”
Over the course of a typical two days in his schedule, Kim tells me that Kenney has events scheduled with Taiwanese, Chinese, Indian, Coptic, Portuguese, Turkish, Filipino, Mexican, and Polish groups. His schedule is so frenetic, in fact, that Kenney only gets a free weekend once every two months.
* * *
In executing this new minority outreach strategy, Kenney and the Conservative Party have been able to reach communities who would have never been accessible – and this outreach model manages to stay true to basic conservative principles.
The cost of the new conservative strategy can be measured in the cost of sending an MP to attend a Diwali celebration, or having the Minister present at a Portuguese Independence Day celebration – this in stark contrast to the free-wheeling patronage that was doled out under Liberal rule.
The Conservative Party has spent tens of millions targeting voters in Quebec, and millions more to establish Arctic sovereignty bona fides. All of this cash led to a net loss of one seat in Quebec and one seat gained in Nunavut during the 2008 federal election. With their ethnic outreach, they’ve managed far greater success, with a much lower profile and a lot less taxpayer money.
With the achievements of Kenney’s new model, one is left to wonder whether Tammany Hall style politics is still effective in the 21st century. Kory Teneycke, the former Communications Director for the Prime Minister, says the effectiveness of ethnic-based grants is decreasing:
If it’s not dead, it’s certainly dying… the thought that there is a paternalistic, ethnic hierarchy is less true today than it was last year. You have a greater range of media options, people are getting their information from a lot of different places, [and] people’s kids are integrating in the public school system… I don’t think that people are going to a local boss and getting a ballot that’s filled out for them.
Patrick Muttart, on the other hand, believes that the Tammany Hall model still works – but that Conservatives are just terrible at implementing it:
I think [Tammany Hall] still works for the left… [but] we are not particularly authentic in executing Tammany Hall style politics… when you’re offended by big government, being in charge of doling out big government doesn’t really work very well.
The growing accomplishments of the Conservative Party’s strategy offers hope for right-of-center parties around the world. Ethnic outreach can, in fact, be done in a conservative way by enacting low-cost symbolic measures to get the attention of minority groups.
But tokenism is not a long term strategy – eventually one has to sell immigrant groups on the party’s broader platform. Over the last few years, Jason Kenney has made stunning progress in appealing to minority groups – progress that will be critical to determining when the Conservatives stay in power, or are to be defeated. If Kenney has anything to do with it, one can count on the Conservatives being around a while longer.
http://www.frumforum.com/how-canadas-conservatives-won-the-immigrant-vote
Quotes Of Canadian Minister Of Citizenship, Immigration And Multiculturalism Hon. Jason Kenney(2009):
1)When you become a citizen, you're not just getting a travel document into Hotel Canada.
2)I think it's scandalous that someone could become a Canadian not knowing what the poppy represents, or never having heard of Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, Dieppe or Juno Beach.
3)We mention freedom of conscience and freedom of religion as important rights but we also make it very clear that our laws prohibit barbaric cultural practices, they will not be tolerated, whether or not someone claims that such practices are protected by reference to religion.
4)I think we need to reclaim a deeper sense of citizenship, a sense of shared obligations to one another, to our past, as well as to the future, a kind of civic nationalism where people understand the institutions, values and symbols that are rooted in our history.
"New Canadians are naturally conservative in the way they live their lives: they are entrepreneurial; they have a remarkable work ethic; they are an aspirational class; they want stability; they are intolerant of crime and disorder; they have a profound devotion to family and tradition, including institutions of faith,” said Minister Kenney.
Tim Mak
June 7th, 2010
As center-right parties grapple with the problem of how to appeal to ethnic minorities without compromising their principles, they can look to the Canadian Conservative Party for a solution.
Without patronage, Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney has executed a minority outreach plan that, for the first time, has started a genuine conversation with immigrant voters – a conversation that has increasingly ended with these voters considering a Conservative vote for the first time.
* * *
Jason Kenney, Canada’s Minister of Multiculturalism, is on the line. He’s discussing how his ethnic outreach program has been more effective in conservative western Canada than in Liberal-heavy central Canada. There’s a pause as he reaches for an example.
“You’re from B.C., right?” he says. “Right,” I reply, slightly taken aback. He goes on to explain the characteristics of a riding in British Columbia in order to contrast it with a riding in suburban Ontario.
Kenney and I had only met on one previous social occasion, and I doubted mentioning my hometown then. But he did his homework before our interview.
To previously hostile ethnic groups, Kenney has reached out in ways that showed he understood their details. Through symbolic gestures, he could assuage antagonism – or at least get their attention.
And it has worked. In 2006, a visible minority voter was three times more likely to vote Liberal than to vote Conservative. By the 2008 federal election, ethnic minorities were about as likely to vote Conservative as they were to vote Liberal.
* * *
Through much of the 2000s, Canadian Conservatives wracked their heads, trying to engineer a constructive ethnic outreach program. They were mired in decades-old muck: minority voters tended to see them as racists, as xenophobes, and as anti-immigrant. On the other hand, the Liberal Party dominated this expanding segment of the Canadian electorate. In 2000, 70% of all visible minorities voted for the Liberal Party.
Patrick Muttart, the Prime Minister’s former Deputy Chief of Staff and now the Managing Director of Mercury, a US-based public strategy firm, explained that the Conservatives were desperate to build a new ethnic outreach strategy. Muttart looked at the record of the Conservatives who governed Canada between 1984 and 1993, and saw the problem grimly:
Although [the Mulroney Conservatives] were in power for almost nine years, they didn’t fundamentally change the way government related to ethnic communities. They basically replicated the old Liberal approach… after nine years… new Canadians were voting for Liberals in just as large numbers as they were at the beginning.
Muttart explains that the lack of Conservative appeal amongst new Canadians was untenable over the long term:
They were growing as a share of the Canadian population faster than we were growing our support… this was a structural political problem here that, unless we addressed it, would make us uncompetitive over the long term.
Desperate for answers, the Conservative Party convened a series of focus groups, run in the language of each of the targeted minorities – people were more comfortable talking about politics in their native language – and the results were shocking.
It turned out that “new Canadians are naturally conservative in the way they live their lives: they are entrepreneurial; they have a remarkable work ethic; they are… [an] aspirational class; they want stability; they are intolerant of crime and disorder; they have a profound devotion to family and tradition, including institutions of faith,” said Minister Kenney. “That whole spectrum of values is conservative – but they didn’t vote for us.”
The first efforts that the Conservatives made to engage with ethnic communities were remarkably humble, even comically so.
In the spring of 2006, Kenney was fresh off his appointment as a Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister with the portfolio of multiculturalism. Party strategists identified the Korean community on the west coast as one of the groups that were accessible to the Conservative Party – but no one knew any Koreans to get in touch with.
Minister Kenney resorted to calling up a friend of his, who happened to be Chinese. His friend got him in touch with a Korean businessman. As Kenney tells it, he called the businessman and started: “Hi, we’re the Government of Canada…”
* * *
The Liberal ethnic outreach model had worked swimmingly for the center-left through the 1990s, and helped to ensure Liberal rule for thirteen straight years. Their strategy focused on engagement with the leaders of ethnic groups, often distributing grants for ethnic-specific projects.
The Conservative Party went another way. “Instead of engaging on a patronage basis, [Kenney] appealed to the conservative instincts within some of these groups, often dealing with niche issues within different groups,” said Ezra Levant, a Canadian conservative commentator.
After the Conservative Party’s 2006 federal election victory, the Conservative Party went community by community to identify symbolic issues that were important to them, and then tried to deliver on those issues.
“They weren’t hearing our message on taxes, on crime, [or] on opportunity because there was so much static. We had to break through the clutter… That’s where we came out with a series of issues for each community… and by focusing on those issues… we were able to get them to tune in,” explained Minister Kenney.
For example, the Conservatives reached out to Canada’s Polish community by lifting visa requirements to visit Canada; in a nod to former Vietnamese refugees, they condemned the socialist government in Vietnam; the process of visa applications for Croatians was also simplified.
Most people outside of these communities would not notice these seemingly small gestures. But for each beneficiary group, the symbolic gestures gave them a reason to consider the Conservative Party’s platform.
Conservative strategists recognized that this strategy was merely an excuse to start a conversation. Patrick Muttart puts it this way:
We used a number of emotional and symbolic issues that were consistent with the conservative approach – but we always understood that these were door-openers. You can’t sustain your value proposition to these sorts of voters only by focusing on these peripheral, emotional, symbolic issues.
The Conservatives also refused to meet with groups they deemed were radicalized. “They… focused on bolstering moderates within certain communities… under the conservatives, [extremist] groups have been banned, and those who have not been banned have been marginalized,” says Ezra Levant. “For example, the Canadian-Islamic Congress, which had a big delegation at the Liberal Party convention in 2006 and [is led by someone] who went on TV and said any Israeli over 18 is a legitimate target for a terrorist attack – the federal government will not meet with them.”
To be sure, grants for immigrant groups continued to be doled out. But the focus had changed: grants would be strictly limited to projects that promoted integration, encouraged cooperation between different ethnic communities, and helped combat radicalization.
“We’re not in the business of picking and choosing winners and losers among ethnic communities through some sort of sordid Tammany Hall. That’s the Liberal way, it’s not the Conservative way,” said Alykhan Velshi, Jason Kenney’s Communications Director.
Of course, the Conservatives are in the business of politics, and as such, there are winners and losers. Conservatives targeted ethnic communities that would reap the most political benefit. This means that Hispanic, Italian and Greek voters, who either have voting habits that are ossified in favor of the Liberals or live outside of strategic ridings, were largely left out of Conservative strategies.
* * *
After Jason Kenney made his first overtures toward the Korean community, a group of six Korean community leaders assembled around a table for an initial consultation. Those who assembled had never voted Conservative, and in all likeliness viewed that possibility as mildly repulsive.
“They said that they had never met a Conservative… all they had ever heard was that we were racist and anti-immigrant, and could we respond?” recalls Kenney. He tried his best to explain the party platform under these circumstances, and turned to a woman sitting next to him. “Who knows, maybe you would be the first Korean-Canadian in the Parliament of Canada,” he said.
“Well, I’ve always voted NDP [Canada’s democratic socialist party],” came the reply. “I don’t really know why, but when we first moved to Burnaby, there was an NDP MP that came to our church, and always showed up at our events, and got to know everyone in our community.”
Kenney stayed in contact with the young Korean woman, and scored a coup by getting her to run in a district near Vancouver just eight months later. Though she lost, she managed to garner a swing of more than 6%, and was later appointed to Canada’s upper house as Senator Yonah Martin, the first person of Korean descent to hold federal office in the country.
The empirical results of Kenney’s outreach across Canada have been even more astounding. “We never expected to see electoral realignment in this cohort of twenty-five percent of Canadians overnight,” said Kenney. The Minister estimates that there are twenty-five to forty “ridings that have substantial numbers of new Canadians… [which] are now competitive but [were] not three elections ago.”
* * *
But what qualifies Jason Kenney to be the leader of the Conservative Party’s outreach to visible minorities? Kenney seemed taken aback by the question when I posed it. “Well, nothing qualifies me for the job,” he said.
And I suppose that’s the point. “The thing with Kenney is, I mean, his name is Jason Thomas Kenney,” chuckled Patrick Muttart. “He’s Irish Catholic; he’s Caucasian; he doesn’t fit the profile of a typical ethnic outreach guy.”
“There’s an advantage to having a guy who doesn’t come from one of the communities. I’m therefore not perceived as a token, I don’t walk into any community with baggage,” says Kenney. “The fact that I’m not a ‘token’ … and the fact that I was seen as an influential mainstream member of the party, said to people that they were being treated equally.”
“He is culturally sophisticated and culturally intelligent,” said Muttart. “When he goes to an ethnic event, it’s not, ‘oh, the food’s too spicy,’ or ‘oh, I don’t want to eat that,’ – he doesn’t look awkward.”
Kenney later added that perhaps, on second thought, he did have a qualification for the job. “Maybe I have a hard work-ethic, and it is hard work,” he mused. His colleagues, on the other hand, would have omitted the ‘maybe’.
“He is renowned. It’s been said that it’s hard to find anyone in Canada who doesn’t know him, because of his incredible industriousness,” said John Weston, an MP from a riding in suburban Vancouver.
“I’ve worked for several MPs, and I’ve never seen a schedule like this,” said his scheduler, Agnes Kim. “Even on his weekends… he often has days where he’s working from 9AM until 10PM at night because he has dinner events at night.”
Over the course of a typical two days in his schedule, Kim tells me that Kenney has events scheduled with Taiwanese, Chinese, Indian, Coptic, Portuguese, Turkish, Filipino, Mexican, and Polish groups. His schedule is so frenetic, in fact, that Kenney only gets a free weekend once every two months.
* * *
In executing this new minority outreach strategy, Kenney and the Conservative Party have been able to reach communities who would have never been accessible – and this outreach model manages to stay true to basic conservative principles.
The cost of the new conservative strategy can be measured in the cost of sending an MP to attend a Diwali celebration, or having the Minister present at a Portuguese Independence Day celebration – this in stark contrast to the free-wheeling patronage that was doled out under Liberal rule.
The Conservative Party has spent tens of millions targeting voters in Quebec, and millions more to establish Arctic sovereignty bona fides. All of this cash led to a net loss of one seat in Quebec and one seat gained in Nunavut during the 2008 federal election. With their ethnic outreach, they’ve managed far greater success, with a much lower profile and a lot less taxpayer money.
With the achievements of Kenney’s new model, one is left to wonder whether Tammany Hall style politics is still effective in the 21st century. Kory Teneycke, the former Communications Director for the Prime Minister, says the effectiveness of ethnic-based grants is decreasing:
If it’s not dead, it’s certainly dying… the thought that there is a paternalistic, ethnic hierarchy is less true today than it was last year. You have a greater range of media options, people are getting their information from a lot of different places, [and] people’s kids are integrating in the public school system… I don’t think that people are going to a local boss and getting a ballot that’s filled out for them.
Patrick Muttart, on the other hand, believes that the Tammany Hall model still works – but that Conservatives are just terrible at implementing it:
I think [Tammany Hall] still works for the left… [but] we are not particularly authentic in executing Tammany Hall style politics… when you’re offended by big government, being in charge of doling out big government doesn’t really work very well.
The growing accomplishments of the Conservative Party’s strategy offers hope for right-of-center parties around the world. Ethnic outreach can, in fact, be done in a conservative way by enacting low-cost symbolic measures to get the attention of minority groups.
But tokenism is not a long term strategy – eventually one has to sell immigrant groups on the party’s broader platform. Over the last few years, Jason Kenney has made stunning progress in appealing to minority groups – progress that will be critical to determining when the Conservatives stay in power, or are to be defeated. If Kenney has anything to do with it, one can count on the Conservatives being around a while longer.
http://www.frumforum.com/how-canadas-conservatives-won-the-immigrant-vote
Quotes Of Canadian Minister Of Citizenship, Immigration And Multiculturalism Hon. Jason Kenney(2009):
1)When you become a citizen, you're not just getting a travel document into Hotel Canada.
2)I think it's scandalous that someone could become a Canadian not knowing what the poppy represents, or never having heard of Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, Dieppe or Juno Beach.
3)We mention freedom of conscience and freedom of religion as important rights but we also make it very clear that our laws prohibit barbaric cultural practices, they will not be tolerated, whether or not someone claims that such practices are protected by reference to religion.
4)I think we need to reclaim a deeper sense of citizenship, a sense of shared obligations to one another, to our past, as well as to the future, a kind of civic nationalism where people understand the institutions, values and symbols that are rooted in our history.
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