This collection of posts, written by Khalil Andani, was an exclusive publication by the much-visited and wildly popular ISMAILIMAIL website, home to over 3.5 million hits.
Mr Andani uses 10th-13th century Ismaili intellectual literature to show religious symbolism in a creation of the inspired mind of man, a building. In my Blog on the link between Science and Religion in Islam I use the same literature to show the same symbolism in nature and the universe around us, God's creation:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/04/463a-collection-of-posts-describing.html
Quotes Of Aga Khan IV:
"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)
"...As we use our intellect to gain new knowledge about Creation, we come to see even more profoundly the depth and breadth of its mysteries. We explore unknown regions beneath the seas – and in outer space. We reach back over hundreds of millions of years in time. Extra-ordinary fossilised geological specimens seize our imagination – palm leaves, amethyst flowers, hedgehog quartz, sea lilies, chrysanthemum and a rich panoply of shells. Indeed, these wonders are found beneath the very soil on which we tread – in every corner of the world – and they connect us with far distant epochs and environments.And the more we discover, the more we know, the more we penetrate just below the surface of our normal lives – the more our imagination staggers. Just think for example what might lie below the surfaces of celestial bodies all across the far flung reaches of our universe. What we feel, even as we learn, is an ever-renewed sense of wonder, indeed, a powerful sense of awe – and of Divine inspiration.Using rock crystal’s irridescent mystery as an inspiration for this building, does indeed provide an appropriate symbol of the Timelessness, the Power and the Mystery of Allah as the Lord of Creation.What we celebrate today can thus be seen as a new creative link between the spiritual dimensions of Islam and the cultures of the West. Even more particularly, it represents another new bridge between the peoples of Islam and the peoples of Canada”(Aga Khan IV, Delegation of the Ismaili Imamat, Ottawa, Canada, December 6th 2008
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/easy-nashs-blogpost-four-hundred-updated-with-quotes-from-the-opening-of-the-delegation-of-the-ismaili-imamat/
"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)
“Muslims believe in an all-encompassing unit of man and nature. To them there is no fundamental division between the spiritual and the material while the whole world, whether it be the earth, sea or air, or the living creatures that inhabit them, is an expression of God’s creation.”(Aga Khan IV, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, 13 April 1984)
The above are 4 quotes and excerpts taken from Blogpost Four Hundred, a collection of around 100 quotes on the subjects of Knowledge, Intellect, Creation, Science and Religion:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
1)The Delegation Decoded – An Esoteric Exegesis of the Delegation of the Isma‘ili Imamat, by Khalil Andani
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2009/12/06/the-delegation-decoded-an-esoteric-exegesis-of-the-delegation-of-the-isma%e2%80%98ili-imamat-by-khalil-andani/
2)The Delegation Decoded: An Esoteric Exegesis of the Delegation of the Isma‘ili Imamat – Overview
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/the-delegation-decoded-an-esoteric-exegesis-of-the-delegation-of-the-isma%e2%80%98ili-imamat-overview/
3)The Delegation Decoded – Introduction: The World of Faith
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2009/12/08/the-delegation-decoded-introduction-the-world-of-faith/
4)The Delegation Decoded – Jali Screen and Atrium: Exoteric and the Esoteric
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/the-delegation-decoded-jali-screen-and-atrium-exoteric-and-the-esoteric/
5)The Delegation Decoded – Upper Glass Dome: The Lords of Inspiration
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/the-delegation-decoded-upper-glass-dome-the-lords-of-inspiration-2/
6)The Delegation Decoded – Inner Glass Fibre Canopy: The Masters of Instruction
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/the-delegation-decoded-inner-glass-fibre-canopy-the-masters-of-instruction/
7)The Delegation Decoded – Jali Screen Sections: The Summoners of Knowledge
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2009/12/12/the-delegation-decoded-jali-screen-sections-the-summoners-of-knowledge/
8)The Delegation Decoded – The Atrium Floor: The Seven Repeated Ones
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2009/12/13/the-delegation-decoded-the-atrium-floor-the-seven-repeated-ones/
9)The Delegation Decoded – Char-Bagh Garden: The Rivers of Paradise
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2009/12/14/the-delegation-decoded-char-bagh-garden-the-rivers-of-paradise/
10)The Delegation Decoded – Conclusion: Searching Below the Surface
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/the-delegation-decoded-conclusion-searching-below-the-surface/
Other posts on this Blog by Khalil Andani:
An Article By Khalil Andani That Reaches The Heart Of The Shia Ismaili Muslim Belief System;Light Upon Light:Succession in the Shia Ismaili Imamat
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/07/492an-article-by-khalil-andani-that.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)
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Monday, August 2, 2010
635)Global Marine Life Census Reveals New Species From The Deep Ocean, Marvels of God's Creation; Quotes From Blogpost Four Hundred.
"Islam is fundamentally in its very nature a natural religion. Throughout the Quran God's signs (Ayats) are referred to as the natural phenomenon, the law and order of the universe, the exactitudes and consequences of the relations between natural phenomenon in cause and effect. Over and over, the stars, sun, moon, earthquakes, fruits of the earth and trees are mentioned as the signs of divine power, divine law and divine order. Even in the Ayeh of Noor, divine is referred to as the natural phenomenon of light and even references are made to the fruit of the earth. During the great period of Islam, Muslims did not forget these principles of their religion." (Aga Khan III, April 4th 1952, Karachi, Pakistan)
"...As we use our intellect to gain new knowledge about Creation, we come to see even more profoundly the depth and breadth of its mysteries. We explore unknown regions beneath the seas – and in outer space. We reach back over hundreds of millions of years in time. Extra-ordinary fossilised geological specimens seize our imagination – palm leaves, amethyst flowers, hedgehog quartz, sea lilies, chrysanthemum and a rich panoply of shells. Indeed, these wonders are found beneath the very soil on which we tread – in every corner of the world – and they connect us with far distant epochs and environments.And the more we discover, the more we know, the more we penetrate just below the surface of our normal lives – the more our imagination staggers. Just think for example what might lie below the surfaces of celestial bodies all across the far flung reaches of our universe. What we feel, even as we learn, is an ever-renewed sense of wonder, indeed, a powerful sense of awe – and of Divine inspiration"(Aga Khan IV, Delegation of the Ismaili Imamat, Ottawa, Canada, December 6th 2008)For the full version of this quote see:
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/easy-nashs-blogpost-four-hundred-updated-with-quotes-from-the-opening-of-the-delegation-of-the-ismaili-imamat/
"Behold! in the creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alternation of the night and the day; in the sailing of the ships through the ocean for the profit of mankind; in the rain which Allah sends down from the skies, and the life which He gives therewith to an earth that is dead; in the beasts of all kinds that He scatters through the earth; in the change of the winds, and the clouds which they Trail like their slaves between the sky and the earth; (Here) indeed are Signs for the people of intellect"(Noble Quran)
"One hour of contemplation on the works of the Creator is better than a thousand hours of prayer"(Prophet Muhammad, circa 632CE)
"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)
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
Global marine life census reveals new species from the deep ocean
UBC biologist among scientists compiling inventory of underwater lifeforms
By Darah Hansen
Vancouver Sun
August 2, 2010
Imagine living in the sea where it is permanently dark, cold, and food is hard to find. For many animals at depth it may be weeks to months between meals. If you find something to eat, you have to hang on to it. This is why so many deep-sea fishes have lots of big teeth. This dragonfish even has teeth on its tongue! They would be terrifying animals if they weren’t the size of a banana
(Photograph by: Dr. Julian Finn, Museum Victoria, Vancouver SunVANCOUVER - Meet the manylight viperfish, the Everyman of the deep ocean.)
The fish, a toothy critter with a rare ability to survive in unsuitable environmental conditions, has been recorded in more than one-quarter of the world's marine waters, making it one of our most cosmopolitan marine species — at least among those we know of.
That's just one of the many findings of a newly released landmark census aimed at answering one of humanity's oldest questions: What lives in the sea?
The census, which involved hundreds of scientists in more than 80 nations, and took 10 years and an estimated $650 million to complete, has so far gathered together an inventory of 114,000 known species, from the great white shark to the unassuming sea sponge.
By October, when an updated report is scheduled to be presented in London, England, the species tally is expected to exceed 230,000, with scientists adding new discoveries almost every day.
"We have over 5,000 things in jars that people are pretty sure are going to be new species when they get around to looking at them, and there are over 1,200 new species that have actually been described," said Ron O'Dor, a University of British Columbia-educated biologist and senior scientist with the census project.
It's the world's first inventory of marine species found in 25 of the world's key marine regions. The goal was to lay down a baseline on which to measure future changes to the marine environment.
"You can't manage an ecosystem if you don't know what's in it," said O'Dor, now a professor at Dalhousie University.
The census sprang out of the Convention of Biodiversity in the mid-1990s when world leaders began to take formal notice of the growing threat to species and ecosystems caused by human activities. American scientists were first to realize they were unable to create a comprehensive list of what lived in the nation's marine waters because the information didn't exist in an accessible format.
"And there wasn't another country in the world that could do it," O'Dor said.
"We didn't even know how many species have been recorded because that information has never been assembled in any one place before," he said.
Over the past decade, the census has consolidated a remarkable 30 million records and more than 800 databases contributed by institutions around the world. Each record consists of an identification of a particular species in a particular place. Some of the records stem from historical information gathered hundreds of years ago.
O'Dor said the information has been useful in allowing scientists to study patterns and trends in species' diversity, distribution and, wherever possible, abundance.
Australian and Japanese waters, which each features almost 33,000 known species, were found to be by far the most biodiverse of the 25 areas reported to date. The oceans off China, the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico round out the top five.
Experts say the number of known, named species range from about 2,600 to 33,000, but average about 10,750 across the regions.
The species fall into a dozen groups, led by crustaceans (including crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, krill and barnacles).
On average, about one-fifth (19 per cent) of the known species present in a region are crustaceans, followed by mollusks (17 per cent, including squid, octopus, clams, snails and slugs) and fish (12 per cent, including sharks).
Some of the best-known marine animals, including whales, sea lions, seals, sea birds, turtles and walruses, make up only two per cent of our ocean's biodiversity.
Canada's east, west and Arctic were among the key regions included in the project.
According to the census data, the eastern region yielded records for 3,160 plant and animal species. A quarter of the records fall under the category of crustacea.
Out west, 2,636 species were recorded, with plants and algae totalling 38 per cent.
More generally, O'Dor said the much older and deeper Pacific Ocean is more diverse than the Atlantic.
"Biodiversity accumulates over a long period of time, through evolution and immigration," he said.
What lives in the Arctic, meanwhile, is more difficult to measure due to year-round ice cover.
"Scientists simply can't get to the water most of the time," said O'Dor.
The census recorded 3,038 species in the Canadian arctic, mainly plants and algae (36 per cent) and crustacea (24 per cent).
O'Dor said technological advances in the 10 years since the census work began have given the project an enormous boost globally.
In one case, U.S. researchers were able to map a school of herring the size of Manhattan by using cutting-edge waveguide acoustic technology.
Unmanned submersible vehicles now allow scientists to probe the ocean's greatest depths, including the Mariana Trench, while a Norwegian-designed, silent-running ship, containing the world's most powerful sonar system, can spot a tiny shrimp at 3,000 metres.
"There is no place that we can't get information from," O'Dor said.
Scientists are hoping to produce another census by 2020. O'Dor and others are keen to measure the impact of climate change, overfishing, pollution and other human activities on the world's water.
With about half the world's oxygen supplied by the ocean, the value of the project is vital, he said.
"It's like flying an airplane that is held together by rivets and the rivets are popping off. You are never quite sure how many can pop off before the plane falls apart and crashes to the ground," he said.
dahansen@vancouversun.com
http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Global+marine+life+census+reveals+species+from+deep+ocean/3351066/story.html
Earlier post on this topic:
Marvels Of Allah's Creation: Census Of Marine Life Discovers 5000 New Species In Ocean; Quotes From Blogpost Four Hundred.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/02/566marvels-of-allahs-creation-census-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)
"...As we use our intellect to gain new knowledge about Creation, we come to see even more profoundly the depth and breadth of its mysteries. We explore unknown regions beneath the seas – and in outer space. We reach back over hundreds of millions of years in time. Extra-ordinary fossilised geological specimens seize our imagination – palm leaves, amethyst flowers, hedgehog quartz, sea lilies, chrysanthemum and a rich panoply of shells. Indeed, these wonders are found beneath the very soil on which we tread – in every corner of the world – and they connect us with far distant epochs and environments.And the more we discover, the more we know, the more we penetrate just below the surface of our normal lives – the more our imagination staggers. Just think for example what might lie below the surfaces of celestial bodies all across the far flung reaches of our universe. What we feel, even as we learn, is an ever-renewed sense of wonder, indeed, a powerful sense of awe – and of Divine inspiration"(Aga Khan IV, Delegation of the Ismaili Imamat, Ottawa, Canada, December 6th 2008)For the full version of this quote see:
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/easy-nashs-blogpost-four-hundred-updated-with-quotes-from-the-opening-of-the-delegation-of-the-ismaili-imamat/
"Behold! in the creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alternation of the night and the day; in the sailing of the ships through the ocean for the profit of mankind; in the rain which Allah sends down from the skies, and the life which He gives therewith to an earth that is dead; in the beasts of all kinds that He scatters through the earth; in the change of the winds, and the clouds which they Trail like their slaves between the sky and the earth; (Here) indeed are Signs for the people of intellect"(Noble Quran)
"One hour of contemplation on the works of the Creator is better than a thousand hours of prayer"(Prophet Muhammad, circa 632CE)
"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)
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
Global marine life census reveals new species from the deep ocean
UBC biologist among scientists compiling inventory of underwater lifeforms
By Darah Hansen
Vancouver Sun
August 2, 2010
Imagine living in the sea where it is permanently dark, cold, and food is hard to find. For many animals at depth it may be weeks to months between meals. If you find something to eat, you have to hang on to it. This is why so many deep-sea fishes have lots of big teeth. This dragonfish even has teeth on its tongue! They would be terrifying animals if they weren’t the size of a banana
(Photograph by: Dr. Julian Finn, Museum Victoria, Vancouver SunVANCOUVER - Meet the manylight viperfish, the Everyman of the deep ocean.)
The fish, a toothy critter with a rare ability to survive in unsuitable environmental conditions, has been recorded in more than one-quarter of the world's marine waters, making it one of our most cosmopolitan marine species — at least among those we know of.
That's just one of the many findings of a newly released landmark census aimed at answering one of humanity's oldest questions: What lives in the sea?
The census, which involved hundreds of scientists in more than 80 nations, and took 10 years and an estimated $650 million to complete, has so far gathered together an inventory of 114,000 known species, from the great white shark to the unassuming sea sponge.
By October, when an updated report is scheduled to be presented in London, England, the species tally is expected to exceed 230,000, with scientists adding new discoveries almost every day.
"We have over 5,000 things in jars that people are pretty sure are going to be new species when they get around to looking at them, and there are over 1,200 new species that have actually been described," said Ron O'Dor, a University of British Columbia-educated biologist and senior scientist with the census project.
It's the world's first inventory of marine species found in 25 of the world's key marine regions. The goal was to lay down a baseline on which to measure future changes to the marine environment.
"You can't manage an ecosystem if you don't know what's in it," said O'Dor, now a professor at Dalhousie University.
The census sprang out of the Convention of Biodiversity in the mid-1990s when world leaders began to take formal notice of the growing threat to species and ecosystems caused by human activities. American scientists were first to realize they were unable to create a comprehensive list of what lived in the nation's marine waters because the information didn't exist in an accessible format.
"And there wasn't another country in the world that could do it," O'Dor said.
"We didn't even know how many species have been recorded because that information has never been assembled in any one place before," he said.
Over the past decade, the census has consolidated a remarkable 30 million records and more than 800 databases contributed by institutions around the world. Each record consists of an identification of a particular species in a particular place. Some of the records stem from historical information gathered hundreds of years ago.
O'Dor said the information has been useful in allowing scientists to study patterns and trends in species' diversity, distribution and, wherever possible, abundance.
Australian and Japanese waters, which each features almost 33,000 known species, were found to be by far the most biodiverse of the 25 areas reported to date. The oceans off China, the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico round out the top five.
Experts say the number of known, named species range from about 2,600 to 33,000, but average about 10,750 across the regions.
The species fall into a dozen groups, led by crustaceans (including crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, krill and barnacles).
On average, about one-fifth (19 per cent) of the known species present in a region are crustaceans, followed by mollusks (17 per cent, including squid, octopus, clams, snails and slugs) and fish (12 per cent, including sharks).
Some of the best-known marine animals, including whales, sea lions, seals, sea birds, turtles and walruses, make up only two per cent of our ocean's biodiversity.
Canada's east, west and Arctic were among the key regions included in the project.
According to the census data, the eastern region yielded records for 3,160 plant and animal species. A quarter of the records fall under the category of crustacea.
Out west, 2,636 species were recorded, with plants and algae totalling 38 per cent.
More generally, O'Dor said the much older and deeper Pacific Ocean is more diverse than the Atlantic.
"Biodiversity accumulates over a long period of time, through evolution and immigration," he said.
What lives in the Arctic, meanwhile, is more difficult to measure due to year-round ice cover.
"Scientists simply can't get to the water most of the time," said O'Dor.
The census recorded 3,038 species in the Canadian arctic, mainly plants and algae (36 per cent) and crustacea (24 per cent).
O'Dor said technological advances in the 10 years since the census work began have given the project an enormous boost globally.
In one case, U.S. researchers were able to map a school of herring the size of Manhattan by using cutting-edge waveguide acoustic technology.
Unmanned submersible vehicles now allow scientists to probe the ocean's greatest depths, including the Mariana Trench, while a Norwegian-designed, silent-running ship, containing the world's most powerful sonar system, can spot a tiny shrimp at 3,000 metres.
"There is no place that we can't get information from," O'Dor said.
Scientists are hoping to produce another census by 2020. O'Dor and others are keen to measure the impact of climate change, overfishing, pollution and other human activities on the world's water.
With about half the world's oxygen supplied by the ocean, the value of the project is vital, he said.
"It's like flying an airplane that is held together by rivets and the rivets are popping off. You are never quite sure how many can pop off before the plane falls apart and crashes to the ground," he said.
dahansen@vancouversun.com
http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Global+marine+life+census+reveals+species+from+deep+ocean/3351066/story.html
Earlier post on this topic:
Marvels Of Allah's Creation: Census Of Marine Life Discovers 5000 New Species In Ocean; Quotes From Blogpost Four Hundred.
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2010/02/566marvels-of-allahs-creation-census-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)
634)The Incredible Shrinking Proton: Subatomic Particle May Be Smaller Than Theory Dictates; Quotes From Blogpost Four Hundred.
"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)
"....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)
"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.)
"An institution dedicated to proceeding beyond known limits must be committed to independent thinking. In a university scholars engage both orthodox and unorthodox ideas, seeking truth and understanding wherever they may be found. That process is often facilitated by an independent governance structure, which serves to ensure that the university adheres to its fundamental mission and is not pressured to compromise its work for short-term advantage. For a Muslim university it is appropriate to see learning and knowledge as a continuing acknowledgement of Allah's magnificence"(Aga Khan IV, Speech, 1993, Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan)
"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, Aga Khan University Inauguration Speech, Karachi, Pakistan, November 11th 1985)
"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)
"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
The incredible shrinking proton
Subatomic particle may be smaller than theory dictates
By Rachel Ehrenberg
July 31st, 2010; Vol.178 #3 (p. 7)
Measurements made with lasers suggest the proton is smaller than previously thought. Nothing is immune to downsizing in these tough economic times — not even subatomic particles. New measurements published in the July 8 Nature suggest that the proton has a radius about 4 percent smaller than previously thought.
The result could just be a mistake. But if confirmed, a smaller proton could have enormous implications, scientists say.
“If this result holds up there’s something drastically wrong,” says Jeff Flowers of the National Physical Laboratory in England.
It could be that there’s a problem with quantum electrodynamics, a major unifying theory that’s been called the jewel of physics. QED basically describes how light and matter interact by incorporating Einstein’s special relativity into the realm of quantum mechanics.
“That opens the door for a major advancement in theory,” Flowers says.
To get the new measurements, a team led by Randolf Pohl of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, created an exotic form of hydrogen in which the atom’s lone electron is replaced by a particle known as a muon. Muons have the same charge as electrons but are about 200 times heavier, so they orbit much closer to the hydrogen atom’s nucleus. This coziness enhances the muon’s interaction with the proton at the atom’s center, allowing researchers to probe the proton in greater detail than they could with ordinary hydrogen.
In their experiments, the scientists aimed a beam of muons at hydrogen gas, creating muonic hydrogen. Whenever a muon was detected in the gas, the team fired a laser at the muon, hoping to bump it up to a higher energy level. Measuring the gap between the muon’s first and second energy levels — known as the Lamb shift — would allow the team to calculate the size of the proton’s radius.
Yet after years of fiddling with the muon beam and laser arrangements, the team still wasn’t having any luck. The laser had been tuned so that it could measure the proton’s radius if the value fell within the range of 0.87 to 0.91 femtometers, in line with QED. But by tuning the laser to work with a smaller proton, the team finally started seeing results. Their estimate of the proton’s radius: just over 0.84184 femtometers.
“There was no signal till the last three weeks before the experiment would have been stopped,” says study coauthor Aldo Antognini of the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland. “It was like in a Hollywood movie where everything goes bad till five minutes before the end.”
The new proton radius is 10 times more precise than previous estimates but well outside their range, which puzzles physicists.
“Presumably somebody made a mistake,” says Pohl. “But everybody’s convinced that nobody made a mistake, so it’s really intriguing. The measurements conflict with each other, but the question is now, how do you solve this problem?”
Physicists are already doing experiments with the hope of resolving the discrepancy, and theorists may have to revisit their numbers.
“Either one of the experiments is wrong, or the calculations are wrong,” says Pohl. “If it turns out that none of these is wrong, then one has to, maybe at some point in the far future, declare that QED is wrong, which would be really interesting. But we are not that far yet.”
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/60990/title/The_incredible_shrinking_proton
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)
"....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)
"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.)
"An institution dedicated to proceeding beyond known limits must be committed to independent thinking. In a university scholars engage both orthodox and unorthodox ideas, seeking truth and understanding wherever they may be found. That process is often facilitated by an independent governance structure, which serves to ensure that the university adheres to its fundamental mission and is not pressured to compromise its work for short-term advantage. For a Muslim university it is appropriate to see learning and knowledge as a continuing acknowledgement of Allah's magnificence"(Aga Khan IV, Speech, 1993, Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan)
"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, Aga Khan University Inauguration Speech, Karachi, Pakistan, November 11th 1985)
"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)
"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
The incredible shrinking proton
Subatomic particle may be smaller than theory dictates
By Rachel Ehrenberg
July 31st, 2010; Vol.178 #3 (p. 7)
Measurements made with lasers suggest the proton is smaller than previously thought. Nothing is immune to downsizing in these tough economic times — not even subatomic particles. New measurements published in the July 8 Nature suggest that the proton has a radius about 4 percent smaller than previously thought.
The result could just be a mistake. But if confirmed, a smaller proton could have enormous implications, scientists say.
“If this result holds up there’s something drastically wrong,” says Jeff Flowers of the National Physical Laboratory in England.
It could be that there’s a problem with quantum electrodynamics, a major unifying theory that’s been called the jewel of physics. QED basically describes how light and matter interact by incorporating Einstein’s special relativity into the realm of quantum mechanics.
“That opens the door for a major advancement in theory,” Flowers says.
To get the new measurements, a team led by Randolf Pohl of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, created an exotic form of hydrogen in which the atom’s lone electron is replaced by a particle known as a muon. Muons have the same charge as electrons but are about 200 times heavier, so they orbit much closer to the hydrogen atom’s nucleus. This coziness enhances the muon’s interaction with the proton at the atom’s center, allowing researchers to probe the proton in greater detail than they could with ordinary hydrogen.
In their experiments, the scientists aimed a beam of muons at hydrogen gas, creating muonic hydrogen. Whenever a muon was detected in the gas, the team fired a laser at the muon, hoping to bump it up to a higher energy level. Measuring the gap between the muon’s first and second energy levels — known as the Lamb shift — would allow the team to calculate the size of the proton’s radius.
Yet after years of fiddling with the muon beam and laser arrangements, the team still wasn’t having any luck. The laser had been tuned so that it could measure the proton’s radius if the value fell within the range of 0.87 to 0.91 femtometers, in line with QED. But by tuning the laser to work with a smaller proton, the team finally started seeing results. Their estimate of the proton’s radius: just over 0.84184 femtometers.
“There was no signal till the last three weeks before the experiment would have been stopped,” says study coauthor Aldo Antognini of the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland. “It was like in a Hollywood movie where everything goes bad till five minutes before the end.”
The new proton radius is 10 times more precise than previous estimates but well outside their range, which puzzles physicists.
“Presumably somebody made a mistake,” says Pohl. “But everybody’s convinced that nobody made a mistake, so it’s really intriguing. The measurements conflict with each other, but the question is now, how do you solve this problem?”
Physicists are already doing experiments with the hope of resolving the discrepancy, and theorists may have to revisit their numbers.
“Either one of the experiments is wrong, or the calculations are wrong,” says Pohl. “If it turns out that none of these is wrong, then one has to, maybe at some point in the far future, declare that QED is wrong, which would be really interesting. But we are not that far yet.”
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/60990/title/The_incredible_shrinking_proton
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)
633)Shi‘i Ismaili Interpretations Of The Holy Qur’an, Institute Of Ismaili Studies Article By Dr Azim Nanji; Quotes From Blogpost Four Hundred Et Al.
"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
Lifelong Learning: Articles
Shi‘i Ismaili Interpretations of the Holy Qur’an
Professor Azim Nanji
This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in Selected Proceedings of the International Congress for the Study of the Qur’an, 1980, pp.39-49
Key words
Fatimids, Qur’an, ta’wil, tawhid, shari‘a, zahir, batin, salat, Adam
Given the whole spectrum of views that have developed throughout Ismaili history, it is not easy to define any one of these as representing an exclusive form of Ismaili interpretation. Focusing on the Fatimid period, this article attempts to develop a basis for understanding Shi’i Ismaili interpretations of the Holy Qur’an. It illustrates how the Ismailis used the foundational doctrine of ta’wil as a tool to interpret Qur’anic concepts such as tawhid, Creation, Prophecy, shari‘a and Adam. Believing that mere zahir without batin is not complete; they see each human being as part of a purposeful sacred history, imbued with Divine purpose where human destiny is exalted, moving forwards and upwards to its origin.
Continue at the source to download the pdf version of the article:
http://iis.ac.uk/view_article.asp?ContentID=111705&l=en
Related:
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2010/08/01/the-institute-of-ismaili-studies-shi%e2%80%98i-ismaili-interpretations-of-the-holy-qur%e2%80%99an/
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)
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
Lifelong Learning: Articles
Shi‘i Ismaili Interpretations of the Holy Qur’an
Professor Azim Nanji
This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in Selected Proceedings of the International Congress for the Study of the Qur’an, 1980, pp.39-49
Key words
Fatimids, Qur’an, ta’wil, tawhid, shari‘a, zahir, batin, salat, Adam
Given the whole spectrum of views that have developed throughout Ismaili history, it is not easy to define any one of these as representing an exclusive form of Ismaili interpretation. Focusing on the Fatimid period, this article attempts to develop a basis for understanding Shi’i Ismaili interpretations of the Holy Qur’an. It illustrates how the Ismailis used the foundational doctrine of ta’wil as a tool to interpret Qur’anic concepts such as tawhid, Creation, Prophecy, shari‘a and Adam. Believing that mere zahir without batin is not complete; they see each human being as part of a purposeful sacred history, imbued with Divine purpose where human destiny is exalted, moving forwards and upwards to its origin.
Continue at the source to download the pdf version of the article:
http://iis.ac.uk/view_article.asp?ContentID=111705&l=en
Related:
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2010/08/01/the-institute-of-ismaili-studies-shi%e2%80%98i-ismaili-interpretations-of-the-holy-qur%e2%80%99an/
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)
632)Fossils From Just Before The Cambrian Period: Quotes Of Aga Khan IV and Aga Khan III
"...As we use our intellect to gain new knowledge about Creation, we come to see even more profoundly the depth and breadth of its mysteries. We explore unknown regions beneath the seas – and in outer space. We reach back over hundreds of millions of years in time. Extra-ordinary fossilised geological specimens seize our imagination – palm leaves, amethyst flowers, hedgehog quartz, sea lilies, chrysanthemum and a rich panoply of shells. Indeed, these wonders are found beneath the very soil on which we tread – in every corner of the world – and they connect us with far distant epochs and environments.And the more we discover, the more we know, the more we penetrate just below the surface of our normal lives – the more our imagination staggers. Just think for example what might lie below the surfaces of celestial bodies all across the far flung reaches of our universe. What we feel, even as we learn, is an ever-renewed sense of wonder, indeed, a powerful sense of awe – and of Divine inspiration"(Aga Khan IV, Delegation of the Ismaili Imamat, Ottawa, Canada, December 6th 2008)For the full version of this quote see:
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/easy-nashs-blogpost-four-hundred-updated-with-quotes-from-the-opening-of-the-delegation-of-the-ismaili-imamat/
"The second great historical lesson to be learnt is that the Muslim world has always been wide open to every aspect of human existence. The sciences, society, art, the oceans, the environment and the cosmos have all contributed to the great moments in the history of Muslim civilisations. The Qur’an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God’s creation"(Closing Address by His Highness Aga Khan IV at the "Musée-Musées" Round Table Louvre Museum, Paris, France, October 17th 2007)
"......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)
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)
"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)
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
In Charles Darwin's day (and for many years after), no fossils were known in the enormous, older rock formations below those of the Cambrian. This was an extremely unsettling fact for his theory of evolution because complex animals should have been preceded in the fossil record by simpler forms.
It took a very long time, and the searching of some of the most remote places on the planet — in the Australian Outback, the Namibian desert, the shores of Newfoundland and far northern Russia — but we now have fossil records from the time immediately preceding the Cambrian. The rocks reveal a world whose oceans were teeming with a variety of life forms, including primitive animals, which is certainly good news for Darwin.
Begin Slide Show:
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/07/26/science/20100727creature.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)
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/easy-nashs-blogpost-four-hundred-updated-with-quotes-from-the-opening-of-the-delegation-of-the-ismaili-imamat/
"The second great historical lesson to be learnt is that the Muslim world has always been wide open to every aspect of human existence. The sciences, society, art, the oceans, the environment and the cosmos have all contributed to the great moments in the history of Muslim civilisations. The Qur’an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God’s creation"(Closing Address by His Highness Aga Khan IV at the "Musée-Musées" Round Table Louvre Museum, Paris, France, October 17th 2007)
"......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)
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)
"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)
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
In Charles Darwin's day (and for many years after), no fossils were known in the enormous, older rock formations below those of the Cambrian. This was an extremely unsettling fact for his theory of evolution because complex animals should have been preceded in the fossil record by simpler forms.
It took a very long time, and the searching of some of the most remote places on the planet — in the Australian Outback, the Namibian desert, the shores of Newfoundland and far northern Russia — but we now have fossil records from the time immediately preceding the Cambrian. The rocks reveal a world whose oceans were teeming with a variety of life forms, including primitive animals, which is certainly good news for Darwin.
Begin Slide Show:
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/07/26/science/20100727creature.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)
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
631)Teams of Physicists Closing in on the ‘God Particle’; Quotes From Blogpost Four Hundred.
"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)
"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)
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.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
628)Birds That Migrate Thousands of Miles With Nary A Stop: 7,000 Miles Nonstop, And No Pretzels; A Marvel To Behold; Quotes From Blogpost 400.
I thank my lucky stars for the daily presence of Philosophical Ismailism in my life; its origins go back to the Ikhwan Al Safa(750CE); it came into full bloom and fruition during the Fatimid era(909CE-1174CE); it even more relevant today after 400 years of empirical western scientific discovery because it allows us to see the marvels of God's creation in their proper perspective. My deepest gratitude goes to Ismaili cosmologists An Nasafi, Al Sijistani, Nasir Khusraw, Al Kirmani, Al Tusi among others. They nurtured and strengthened the development of Philosophical Ismailism under the benevolent guidance of the Imams of their time.
"Our religious leadership must be acutely aware of secular trends, including those generated by this age of science and technology. Equally, our academic or secular elite must be deeply aware of Muslim history, of the scale and depth of leadership exercised by the Islamic empire of the past in all fields"(Aga Khan IV, 6th February 1970, Hyderabad, Pakistan)
"The 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)
"In sum the process of creation can be said to take place at several levels. Ibda represents the initial level - one transcends history, the other creates it. The spiritual and material realms are not dichotomous, since in the Ismaili formulation, matter and spirit are united under a higher genus and each realm possesses its own hierarchy. Though they require linguistic and rational categories for definition, they represent elements of a whole, and a true understanding of God must also take account of His creation. Such a synthesis is crucial to how the human intellect eventually relates to creation and how it ultimately becomes the instrument for penetrating through history the mystery of the unknowable God implied in the formulation of tawhid."(Azim Nanji, Director, Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, U.K., 1998)
"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.)
"In Islamic belief, knowledge is two-fold. There is that revealed through the Holy Prophet (s.a.s.) and that which man discovers by virtue of his own intellect. Nor do these two involve any contradiction, provided man remembers that his own mind is itself the creation of God. Without this humility, no balance is possible. With it, there are no barriers. Indeed, one strength of Islam has always lain in its belief that creation is not static but continuous, that through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University, 16 March 1983, Karachi, Pakistan)
"Thus Islam's basic principle can only be defined as mono-realism and not as monotheism. Consider, for example, the opening declaration of every Islamic prayer: "Allah-o-Akbar". What does that mean? There can be no doubt that the second word of the declaration likens the character of Allah to a matrix which contains all and gives existence to the infinite, to space, to time, to the Universe, to all active and passive forces imaginable, to life and to the soul. Imam Hassan has explained the Islamic doctrine of God and the Universe by analogy with the sun and its reflection in the pool of a fountain; there is certainly a reflection or image of the sun, but with what poverty and with what little reality; how small and pale is the likeness between this impalpable image and the immense, blazing, white-hot glory of the celestial sphere itself. Allah is the sun; and the Universe, as we know it in all its magnitude, and time, with its power, are nothing more than the reflection of the Absolute in the mirror of the fountain"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)
"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)
"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)
“The physician considers [the bones] so that he may know a way of healing by setting them, but those with insight consider them so that through them they may draw conclusions about the majesty of Him who created and shaped [the bones]. What a difference between the two who consider!”(Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali, Muslim Theologian-Philosopher-Mystic, d1111CE)
"All human beings, by their nature, desire to know."(Aristotle, The Metaphysics, circa 322BC)
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
May 24, 2010
7,000 Miles Nonstop, and No Pretzels
By CARL ZIMMER
In 1976, the biologist Robert E. Gill Jr. came to the southern coast of Alaska to survey the birds preparing for their migrations for the winter. One species in particular, wading birds called bar-tailed godwits, puzzled him deeply. They were too fat.
“They looked like flying softballs,” said Mr. Gill.
At the time, scientists knew that bar-tailed godwits spend their winters in places like New Zealand and Australia. To get there, most researchers assumed, the birds took a series of flights down through Asia, stopping along the way to rest and eat. After all, they were land birds, not sea birds that could dive for food in the ocean. But in Alaska, Mr. Gill observed, the bar-tailed godwits were feasting on clams and worms as if they were not going to be able to eat for a very long time.
“I wondered, why is that bird putting on that much fat?” he said.
Mr. Gill wondered if the bar-tailed godwit actually stayed in the air for a much longer time than scientists believed. It was a difficult idea to test, because he could not actually follow the birds in flight. For 30 years he managed as best he could, building a network of bird-watchers who looked for migrating godwits over the Pacific Ocean. Finally, in 2006, technology caught up with Mr. Gill’s ideas. He and his colleagues were able to implant satellite transmitters in bar-tailed godwits and track their flight.
The transmitters sent their location to Mr. Gill’s computer, and he sometimes stayed up until 2 in the morning to see the latest signal appear on the Google Earth program running on his laptop. Just as he had suspected, the bar-tailed godwits headed out over the open ocean and flew south through the Pacific. They did not stop at islands along the way. Instead, they traveled up to 7,100 miles in nine days — the longest nonstop flight ever recorded. “I was speechless,” Mr. Gill said.
Since then, scientists have tracked a number of other migrating birds, and they are beginning now to publish their results. Those results make clear that the bar-tailed godwit is not alone. Other species of birds can fly several thousand miles nonstop on their migrations, and scientists anticipate that as they gather more data in the years to come, more birds will join these elite ranks.
“I think it’s going to be a number of examples,” said Anders Hedenström of Lund University in Sweden.
As more birds prove to be ultramarathoners, biologists are turning their attention to how they manage such spectacular feats of endurance. Consider what might be the ultimate test of human endurance in sports, the Tour de France: Every day, bicyclists pedal up and down mountains for hours. In the process, they raise their metabolism to about five times their resting rate.
The bar-tailed godwit, by contrast, elevates its metabolic rate between 8 and 10 times. And instead of ending each day with a big dinner and a good night’s rest, the birds fly through the night, slowly starving themselves as they travel 40 miles an hour.
“I’m in awe of the fact that birds like godwits can fly like this,” said Theunis Piersma, a biologist at the University of Groningen.
Not long ago, ornithologists had far lower expectations for birds. Ruby-throated hummingbirds, for example, were known to spend winters in Central America and head to the United States for the summer. But ornithologists believed that the hummingbirds burned so much fuel flapping their wings that they simply could not survive a nonstop trip across the Gulf of Mexico. They were thought to have flown over Mexico, making stops to refuel.
In fact, ruby-throated hummingbirds returning north in the spring will set out from the Yucatán Peninsula in the evening and arrive in the southern United States the next afternoon.
In the 1960s, zoologists began to track bears and other mammals with radio collars, and then later moved on to satellite transmitters. All the while, ornithologists could only look on in envy. The weight and drag of the trackers made them impossible to put on migrating birds.
Over the past decade, however, transmitters have finally shrunk to a size birds can handle. In Mr. Gill’s first successful experiment with bar-tailed godwits, he and his colleagues slipped a battery-powered model weighing just under an ounce into the abdominal cavity of the birds, which weigh about 12 ounces and have a wingspan of 30 inches.
The epic odyssey that those transmitters recorded spurred Mr. Gill and other researchers to gather more data, both on bar-tailed godwits and other species. And even as they planned their experiments, tracking technology got better. This summer, for example, Mr. Gill will implant bar-tailed godwits with transmitters that weigh only six-tenths of an ounce.
Still, most migrating birds are so small that even a transmitter of that weight — about the same as three nickels — would be an intolerable burden. Fortunately, researchers have been able to scale down a different kind of tracking device. Known as a geolocator, it can get as light as two grains of rice, less than two-hundreths of an ounce. “Now we can track really small birds,” Dr. Hedenström said.
Geolocators can get so small because they do not communicate with satellites. Instead, they just record changing light levels. If scientists can recapture birds carrying geolocators, they can retrieve the data from the devices and use sophisticated computer programs to figure out the location of the birds based on the rising and setting of the sun.
In 2007, Carsten Egevang of Aarhus University in Denmark and his colleagues attached geolocators to Arctic terns nesting in Greenland. Based on years of bird spotting, the scientists knew that the terns migrated to the Southern Ocean around Antarctica and then returned to the Arctic the following spring. But they did not know much more than that. “It was all based on snapshots,” Dr. Egevang said.
In 2008, the scientists managed to capture 10 Arctic terns that had come back to Greenland. It then took them months to make sense of the data. “You have to use three kinds of special software,” Dr. Egevang said. “It takes quite a long time.”
The researchers reported this February that the Arctic terns flew from Greenland to a region of the Atlantic off the coast of North Africa, where they spent about three weeks. Unlike bar-tailed godwits, which wade on beaches for food, Arctic terns are ocean birds that can dive for fish in the open sea.
The Arctic terns then resumed their journey south. They spent five months in the Southern Ocean. “They probably just stayed on an iceberg and fished,” Dr. Egevang said.
In the spring, the terns then returned to the Arctic, often hugging the coasts of South America or Africa along the way. All told, the birds logged as much as 49,700 miles on their geolocators, the longest migration ever recorded. Over the 30-year lifetime of a tern, it may migrate about 1.5 million miles — the distance a spaceship would cover if it went to the moon and back three times.
Other scientists are now placing geolocators on small wading birds as well. In a paper to be published in the Wader Study Group Bulletin, a team of ornithologists describe attaching geolocators to four ruddy turnstones. The birds left northern Australia in May 2009 and flew nonstop to Taiwan, a distance of 4,700 miles.
After a few days in Taiwan, the ruddy turnstones took flight again, making a series of trips northward until they reached Alaska. At the end of the summer, three of the four birds took the same route back south. The fourth struck out on a different path. It flew 3,800 miles nonstop to the Gilbert Islands in the Pacific. From there, it flew 3,100 miles back to Australia.
Mr. Gill and his colleagues have recorded similar odysseys from other wading birds, using satellite transmitters. They found that bristle-thighed curlews fly as far as 6,000 miles without a stop, traveling from Alaska to the Marshall Islands. They have also recorded whimbrels flying 5,000 miles nonstop from Alaska to Central America.
This spring, scientists are attaching geolocators to more birds, and they expect to find new champions. One population of red knots, for example, is now arriving in Delaware Bay from its wintering grounds 5,500 miles away in Argentina. “My bet is that a lot of them make it in one go,” Dr. Piersma said.
The long journeys these transmitters are revealing pose a biological puzzle. Dr. Piersma and other scientists are trying to figure out how the birds manage to push their bodies so far beyond most animals, and why.
As Mr. Gill observed when he first observed bar-tailed godwits, a long journey requires a lot of food. It turns out that long-distance migrators will enlarge their liver and intestines as they feed, so that they can convert their food as fast as possible. They build up large breast muscles and convert the rest of their food to fat.
By the time the birds are ready to leave, their bodies are 55 percent fat. In humans, anything more than 30 percent is considered obese. But as soon as the birds are done eating, their livers and intestines become dead weight. They then essentially “eat” their organs, which shrink 25 percent. The birds use the proteins to build up their muscles even more.
Once they take flight, the birds take whatever help they can get. Bar-tailed godwits time their departure with the onset of stormy weather, so that they can take advantage of tailwinds. “That gives them an extra push,” Dr. Hedenström said.
The birds then fly for thousands of miles. How they get to their final destinations remains a mystery. One thing is clear: they somehow know where they are, even when they are flying over vast expanses of featureless ocean. “It’s as if they have a GPS on board,” Dr. Piersma said.
A bird like a bar-tailed godwit cannot rely on the tricks used by birds that take short migrations. They cannot follow landmarks, for example. Some birds use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate. But they do so by sensing the tilt of the field lines. At the equator, the lines run parallel to the surface, making them useless for birds that have to travel between hemispheres. Dr. Piersma suspects that when birds travel several thousand miles, they have to combine several different navigation tricks together.
As spectacular as these migrations may be, it may not take long for birds to evolve them. Long-distance migrators are closely related to short-distance birds. It is possible that many birds have the potential to push themselves to make these vast journeys, but they do not because the costs outweigh the benefits.
When animals raise their metabolism above four or five times their resting rate (the Tour de France level), they can become so exhausted that they become very vulnerable to predators. They can even become more prone to getting sick. Birds that go on long migrations may have escaped this tradeoff.
Birds like the bar-tailed godwit have found places like the coast of Alaska where the supply of food is high and predators are scarce. By flying over the open ocean, they continue to avoid predators. They may also reduce their odds of picking up a parasite from another bird.
Their destinations are also safe enough for them to recover. Bar-tailed godwits that arrive in New Zealand face no predators, and so they can simply rest. “They just look exhausted. They’ll land and just go to sleep for several hours before they do anything else,” Mr. Gill said.
Unfortunately, some of the habitats on which these endurance champions depend are under serious threat. In the Delaware Bay, for example, fisherman are scooping up horseshoe crabs to bait traps for eel and conch. Birds like the red knot, which travel thousands of miles, land on Delaware Bay beaches to feast on the eggs of the crabs. When bar-tailed godwits return to Alaska in the spring, they make one stop along the coast of China and Korea, a favorite spot for many other migrating birds. The coastal wetlands there are disappearing fast, and many migrant birds are in decline.
“I hope we have these birds to study 100 years from now,” Dr. Piersma said. “But sometimes I wonder.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 4, 2010
An article on May 25 about long-distance bird migration incorrectly described a threat posed to red knots in the Delaware Bay, where the birds land to feast on horseshoe crabs’ eggs and regain their strength. Fishermen collect the crabs themselves (for bait in eel and conch traps), not their eggs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/science/25migrate.html?ref=science&pagewanted=all
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/science/25migrate.html?ref=science
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)
"Our religious leadership must be acutely aware of secular trends, including those generated by this age of science and technology. Equally, our academic or secular elite must be deeply aware of Muslim history, of the scale and depth of leadership exercised by the Islamic empire of the past in all fields"(Aga Khan IV, 6th February 1970, Hyderabad, Pakistan)
"The 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)
"In sum the process of creation can be said to take place at several levels. Ibda represents the initial level - one transcends history, the other creates it. The spiritual and material realms are not dichotomous, since in the Ismaili formulation, matter and spirit are united under a higher genus and each realm possesses its own hierarchy. Though they require linguistic and rational categories for definition, they represent elements of a whole, and a true understanding of God must also take account of His creation. Such a synthesis is crucial to how the human intellect eventually relates to creation and how it ultimately becomes the instrument for penetrating through history the mystery of the unknowable God implied in the formulation of tawhid."(Azim Nanji, Director, Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, U.K., 1998)
"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.)
"In Islamic belief, knowledge is two-fold. There is that revealed through the Holy Prophet (s.a.s.) and that which man discovers by virtue of his own intellect. Nor do these two involve any contradiction, provided man remembers that his own mind is itself the creation of God. Without this humility, no balance is possible. With it, there are no barriers. Indeed, one strength of Islam has always lain in its belief that creation is not static but continuous, that through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University, 16 March 1983, Karachi, Pakistan)
"Thus Islam's basic principle can only be defined as mono-realism and not as monotheism. Consider, for example, the opening declaration of every Islamic prayer: "Allah-o-Akbar". What does that mean? There can be no doubt that the second word of the declaration likens the character of Allah to a matrix which contains all and gives existence to the infinite, to space, to time, to the Universe, to all active and passive forces imaginable, to life and to the soul. Imam Hassan has explained the Islamic doctrine of God and the Universe by analogy with the sun and its reflection in the pool of a fountain; there is certainly a reflection or image of the sun, but with what poverty and with what little reality; how small and pale is the likeness between this impalpable image and the immense, blazing, white-hot glory of the celestial sphere itself. Allah is the sun; and the Universe, as we know it in all its magnitude, and time, with its power, are nothing more than the reflection of the Absolute in the mirror of the fountain"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)
"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)
"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)
“The physician considers [the bones] so that he may know a way of healing by setting them, but those with insight consider them so that through them they may draw conclusions about the majesty of Him who created and shaped [the bones]. What a difference between the two who consider!”(Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali, Muslim Theologian-Philosopher-Mystic, d1111CE)
"All human beings, by their nature, desire to know."(Aristotle, The Metaphysics, circa 322BC)
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
May 24, 2010
7,000 Miles Nonstop, and No Pretzels
By CARL ZIMMER
In 1976, the biologist Robert E. Gill Jr. came to the southern coast of Alaska to survey the birds preparing for their migrations for the winter. One species in particular, wading birds called bar-tailed godwits, puzzled him deeply. They were too fat.
“They looked like flying softballs,” said Mr. Gill.
At the time, scientists knew that bar-tailed godwits spend their winters in places like New Zealand and Australia. To get there, most researchers assumed, the birds took a series of flights down through Asia, stopping along the way to rest and eat. After all, they were land birds, not sea birds that could dive for food in the ocean. But in Alaska, Mr. Gill observed, the bar-tailed godwits were feasting on clams and worms as if they were not going to be able to eat for a very long time.
“I wondered, why is that bird putting on that much fat?” he said.
Mr. Gill wondered if the bar-tailed godwit actually stayed in the air for a much longer time than scientists believed. It was a difficult idea to test, because he could not actually follow the birds in flight. For 30 years he managed as best he could, building a network of bird-watchers who looked for migrating godwits over the Pacific Ocean. Finally, in 2006, technology caught up with Mr. Gill’s ideas. He and his colleagues were able to implant satellite transmitters in bar-tailed godwits and track their flight.
The transmitters sent their location to Mr. Gill’s computer, and he sometimes stayed up until 2 in the morning to see the latest signal appear on the Google Earth program running on his laptop. Just as he had suspected, the bar-tailed godwits headed out over the open ocean and flew south through the Pacific. They did not stop at islands along the way. Instead, they traveled up to 7,100 miles in nine days — the longest nonstop flight ever recorded. “I was speechless,” Mr. Gill said.
Since then, scientists have tracked a number of other migrating birds, and they are beginning now to publish their results. Those results make clear that the bar-tailed godwit is not alone. Other species of birds can fly several thousand miles nonstop on their migrations, and scientists anticipate that as they gather more data in the years to come, more birds will join these elite ranks.
“I think it’s going to be a number of examples,” said Anders Hedenström of Lund University in Sweden.
As more birds prove to be ultramarathoners, biologists are turning their attention to how they manage such spectacular feats of endurance. Consider what might be the ultimate test of human endurance in sports, the Tour de France: Every day, bicyclists pedal up and down mountains for hours. In the process, they raise their metabolism to about five times their resting rate.
The bar-tailed godwit, by contrast, elevates its metabolic rate between 8 and 10 times. And instead of ending each day with a big dinner and a good night’s rest, the birds fly through the night, slowly starving themselves as they travel 40 miles an hour.
“I’m in awe of the fact that birds like godwits can fly like this,” said Theunis Piersma, a biologist at the University of Groningen.
Not long ago, ornithologists had far lower expectations for birds. Ruby-throated hummingbirds, for example, were known to spend winters in Central America and head to the United States for the summer. But ornithologists believed that the hummingbirds burned so much fuel flapping their wings that they simply could not survive a nonstop trip across the Gulf of Mexico. They were thought to have flown over Mexico, making stops to refuel.
In fact, ruby-throated hummingbirds returning north in the spring will set out from the Yucatán Peninsula in the evening and arrive in the southern United States the next afternoon.
In the 1960s, zoologists began to track bears and other mammals with radio collars, and then later moved on to satellite transmitters. All the while, ornithologists could only look on in envy. The weight and drag of the trackers made them impossible to put on migrating birds.
Over the past decade, however, transmitters have finally shrunk to a size birds can handle. In Mr. Gill’s first successful experiment with bar-tailed godwits, he and his colleagues slipped a battery-powered model weighing just under an ounce into the abdominal cavity of the birds, which weigh about 12 ounces and have a wingspan of 30 inches.
The epic odyssey that those transmitters recorded spurred Mr. Gill and other researchers to gather more data, both on bar-tailed godwits and other species. And even as they planned their experiments, tracking technology got better. This summer, for example, Mr. Gill will implant bar-tailed godwits with transmitters that weigh only six-tenths of an ounce.
Still, most migrating birds are so small that even a transmitter of that weight — about the same as three nickels — would be an intolerable burden. Fortunately, researchers have been able to scale down a different kind of tracking device. Known as a geolocator, it can get as light as two grains of rice, less than two-hundreths of an ounce. “Now we can track really small birds,” Dr. Hedenström said.
Geolocators can get so small because they do not communicate with satellites. Instead, they just record changing light levels. If scientists can recapture birds carrying geolocators, they can retrieve the data from the devices and use sophisticated computer programs to figure out the location of the birds based on the rising and setting of the sun.
In 2007, Carsten Egevang of Aarhus University in Denmark and his colleagues attached geolocators to Arctic terns nesting in Greenland. Based on years of bird spotting, the scientists knew that the terns migrated to the Southern Ocean around Antarctica and then returned to the Arctic the following spring. But they did not know much more than that. “It was all based on snapshots,” Dr. Egevang said.
In 2008, the scientists managed to capture 10 Arctic terns that had come back to Greenland. It then took them months to make sense of the data. “You have to use three kinds of special software,” Dr. Egevang said. “It takes quite a long time.”
The researchers reported this February that the Arctic terns flew from Greenland to a region of the Atlantic off the coast of North Africa, where they spent about three weeks. Unlike bar-tailed godwits, which wade on beaches for food, Arctic terns are ocean birds that can dive for fish in the open sea.
The Arctic terns then resumed their journey south. They spent five months in the Southern Ocean. “They probably just stayed on an iceberg and fished,” Dr. Egevang said.
In the spring, the terns then returned to the Arctic, often hugging the coasts of South America or Africa along the way. All told, the birds logged as much as 49,700 miles on their geolocators, the longest migration ever recorded. Over the 30-year lifetime of a tern, it may migrate about 1.5 million miles — the distance a spaceship would cover if it went to the moon and back three times.
Other scientists are now placing geolocators on small wading birds as well. In a paper to be published in the Wader Study Group Bulletin, a team of ornithologists describe attaching geolocators to four ruddy turnstones. The birds left northern Australia in May 2009 and flew nonstop to Taiwan, a distance of 4,700 miles.
After a few days in Taiwan, the ruddy turnstones took flight again, making a series of trips northward until they reached Alaska. At the end of the summer, three of the four birds took the same route back south. The fourth struck out on a different path. It flew 3,800 miles nonstop to the Gilbert Islands in the Pacific. From there, it flew 3,100 miles back to Australia.
Mr. Gill and his colleagues have recorded similar odysseys from other wading birds, using satellite transmitters. They found that bristle-thighed curlews fly as far as 6,000 miles without a stop, traveling from Alaska to the Marshall Islands. They have also recorded whimbrels flying 5,000 miles nonstop from Alaska to Central America.
This spring, scientists are attaching geolocators to more birds, and they expect to find new champions. One population of red knots, for example, is now arriving in Delaware Bay from its wintering grounds 5,500 miles away in Argentina. “My bet is that a lot of them make it in one go,” Dr. Piersma said.
The long journeys these transmitters are revealing pose a biological puzzle. Dr. Piersma and other scientists are trying to figure out how the birds manage to push their bodies so far beyond most animals, and why.
As Mr. Gill observed when he first observed bar-tailed godwits, a long journey requires a lot of food. It turns out that long-distance migrators will enlarge their liver and intestines as they feed, so that they can convert their food as fast as possible. They build up large breast muscles and convert the rest of their food to fat.
By the time the birds are ready to leave, their bodies are 55 percent fat. In humans, anything more than 30 percent is considered obese. But as soon as the birds are done eating, their livers and intestines become dead weight. They then essentially “eat” their organs, which shrink 25 percent. The birds use the proteins to build up their muscles even more.
Once they take flight, the birds take whatever help they can get. Bar-tailed godwits time their departure with the onset of stormy weather, so that they can take advantage of tailwinds. “That gives them an extra push,” Dr. Hedenström said.
The birds then fly for thousands of miles. How they get to their final destinations remains a mystery. One thing is clear: they somehow know where they are, even when they are flying over vast expanses of featureless ocean. “It’s as if they have a GPS on board,” Dr. Piersma said.
A bird like a bar-tailed godwit cannot rely on the tricks used by birds that take short migrations. They cannot follow landmarks, for example. Some birds use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate. But they do so by sensing the tilt of the field lines. At the equator, the lines run parallel to the surface, making them useless for birds that have to travel between hemispheres. Dr. Piersma suspects that when birds travel several thousand miles, they have to combine several different navigation tricks together.
As spectacular as these migrations may be, it may not take long for birds to evolve them. Long-distance migrators are closely related to short-distance birds. It is possible that many birds have the potential to push themselves to make these vast journeys, but they do not because the costs outweigh the benefits.
When animals raise their metabolism above four or five times their resting rate (the Tour de France level), they can become so exhausted that they become very vulnerable to predators. They can even become more prone to getting sick. Birds that go on long migrations may have escaped this tradeoff.
Birds like the bar-tailed godwit have found places like the coast of Alaska where the supply of food is high and predators are scarce. By flying over the open ocean, they continue to avoid predators. They may also reduce their odds of picking up a parasite from another bird.
Their destinations are also safe enough for them to recover. Bar-tailed godwits that arrive in New Zealand face no predators, and so they can simply rest. “They just look exhausted. They’ll land and just go to sleep for several hours before they do anything else,” Mr. Gill said.
Unfortunately, some of the habitats on which these endurance champions depend are under serious threat. In the Delaware Bay, for example, fisherman are scooping up horseshoe crabs to bait traps for eel and conch. Birds like the red knot, which travel thousands of miles, land on Delaware Bay beaches to feast on the eggs of the crabs. When bar-tailed godwits return to Alaska in the spring, they make one stop along the coast of China and Korea, a favorite spot for many other migrating birds. The coastal wetlands there are disappearing fast, and many migrant birds are in decline.
“I hope we have these birds to study 100 years from now,” Dr. Piersma said. “But sometimes I wonder.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 4, 2010
An article on May 25 about long-distance bird migration incorrectly described a threat posed to red knots in the Delaware Bay, where the birds land to feast on horseshoe crabs’ eggs and regain their strength. Fishermen collect the crabs themselves (for bait in eel and conch traps), not their eggs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/science/25migrate.html?ref=science&pagewanted=all
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/science/25migrate.html?ref=science
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)
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