About this blog

In recent times a plethora of misconceptions, misrepresentation and myths have been forged about Islam
and Muslims. Many western influentials from politicians, policymakers to judges have taken it upon
themselves to undermine the Islamic beliefs, values and rules so to make it palatable to their
egotistic minds and the secular liberal thoughts.

This blog is dedicated:-

1. To argue the point for Islam in its belief and systems and to refute the misconceptions.
2. To expose the weakness and contradictions of all forms of secularism.

15 Sept 2008

Western Economy: Falling of Americas fourth largest Investment Bank

Lehman Bros files for bankruptcy

Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest US investment bank, has filed for bankruptcy protection, dealing a blow to the fragile global financial system.

The news led to sharp falls in share prices around the world, and officials took measures to reassure markets. Lehman had incurred losses of billions of dollars in the US mortgage market. Merrill Lynch, also stung by the credit crunch, has agreed to be taken over by Bank of America, the latest twist in a dramatic turn of events on Wall Street.

In Washington the US President sought to reassure markets."In the long term I am confident that our financial markets are flexible and resilient and can deal with these adjustments", said George W Bush.

Tumbling bank stocks

Lehman's demise is being felt around the world:

  • Stock markets and the US dollar have tumbled in reaction to Lehman's collapse, with banking shares hardest hit. UK bank HBOS saw its shares plummet 30%.
  • Central banks have moved to reassure markets. The US Federal Reserve has broadened its emergency lending scheme and the UK and European central banks have injected a total of about $50bn (£28bn; 35bn euros) into the financial system.
  • There are fears AIG, once the world's largest insurer, could also face collapse. It is taking steps to raise money amid reports it is seeking a $40bn emergency loan from the Fed.
  • Bank of America's move to buy Merrill in a $50bn deal means that three of the top five US investment banks have fallen prey to the sub-prime crisis within six months.
  • In the UK, accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) have been appointed as administrators for Lehman.

'No cash'

PWC told a news conference in London that it is unclear whether Lehman's UK staff will get paid the $75m (£42m) that they are owed in wages this month. "When we took over this morning, there was no cash in the company," said Tony Lomas from PWC. "We still don't know what the position is - we will tell staff as soon as we know if we can, or if it is appropriate to pay staff on Friday." In response to a question from a journalist he agreed it was extraordinary for a company like this to collapse. "What it underlines to me is the importance of market confidence," Mr Lomas said. "If no one wants to trade with you...there's no way back."

Central bank funds

Stock markets in Europe and Asia have dropped sharply and the dollar tumbled against the yen, the euro and the Swiss franc as Lehman's failure raised fears about the strength of the global financial system. The global financial economy has never in recent years been tested by quite such a combination of accidents and jolts to confidence Calls to boost the ECB's roleThe FTSE 100 index of leading UK shares ended down 212.6 points or 3.9% to 5,204.2.US shares on Wall Street also fell. Shortly after trading began the Dow Jones index was 304 points lower, or 2.7%, at 11,118.To help stabilise the money markets, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank pumped in £5bn and 30bn euros respectively.

In addition, the Federal Reserve said that for the first time it would accept stocks owned by banks as collateral for short-term cash loans, broadening its emergency lending programme.

Talks collapse

Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection after a weekend of frantic activity on Wall Street. Barclays and Bank of America had been in talks to rescue the bank, but negotiations faltered when it became clear that the US Treasury was strongly opposed to using government money to help clinch a deal.

By Sunday evening, staff at Lehman's headquarters in New York were leaving with cardboard boxes as onlookers gathered to watch the bank's demise."I think the whole history - 150 years of effort and hard work - that's the most saddening part for me," said one Lehman employee as she left the building. The bank, which employs about 25,000 staff worldwide, including 5,000 in the UK, was founded in 1850 by three brothers.

Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, which allows a company time to reorganise and devise a plan to pay creditors over time. It said that its broker-dealer division and asset management division Neuberger Berman Holdings would not be included in the filing.

'Extraordinary 24 hours'

Separately, Bank of America said it had agreed to buy investment bank Merrill Lynch for $50bn (£28bn), in a deal that will create the world's largest financial services company. Three of the top five US investment banks have now fallen victim to the credit crunch. Lehman and Merrill join Bear Stearns, which was sold to JP Morgan for a knockdown price in March. The BBC's business editor, Robert Peston, said that it had been Wall Street's most extraordinary 24 hours since the late 1920s. He said that Merrill's sale was almost as shocking as Lehman's demise. "The global financial economy has never in recent years been tested by quite such a combination of accidents and jolts to confidence," he said.

[Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7615931.stm]
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What they said...

“Islam represented the greatest military power on earth…It was the foremost economic power in the world…It had achieved the highest level so far in human history, in the arts and sciences of civilization...Islam in contrast created a world civilization, poly-ethnic, multiracial, international, one might even say intercontinental.”





[Bernard Lewis, Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Orientalist and Historian, 2001]





"There was once a civilization that was the greatest in the world. It was able to create a continental super-state that stretched from ocean to ocean, and from northern climes to tropics and deserts…the civilization I'm talking about was the Islamic world from the year 800 to 1600… Although we are often unaware of our indebtedness to this other civilization, its gifts are very much a part of our heritage"





[Carly Fiorina, ex-CEO of Hewlett-Packard, 2001]





"For the first three centuries of its existence (circ. A.D 650-1000) the realm of Islam was the most civilized and progressive portion of the world. Studded with splendid cities, gracious mosques and quiet universities where the wisdom of the ancient world was preserved and appreciated, the Moslem world offered a striking contrast to the Christian West, then sunk in the night of the Dark Ages."





[Lothrop Stoddard, Ph.D (Harvard), American political theorist and historian, 1932]





"Medieval Islam was technologically advanced and open to innovation. It achieved far higher literacy rates than in contemporary Europe;it assimilated the legacy of classical Greek civilization to such a degree that many classical books are now known to us only through Arabic copies. It invented windmills ,trigonometry, lateen sails and made major advances in metallurgy, mechanical and chemical engineering and irrigation methods. In the middle-ages the flow of technology was overwhelmingly from Islam to Europe rather from Europe to Islam. Only after the 1500's did the net direction of flow begin to reverse."





[Jared Diamond, UCLA sociologist and Author, 1997]



"No other society has such a record of success in uniting in an equality of status, of opportunity and endeavour so many and so varied races of mankind. The great Muslim communities of Africa, India and Indonesia, perhaps also the small community in Japan, show that Islam has still the power to reconcile apparently irreconcilable elements of race and tradition. If ever the opposition of the great societies of the East and west is to be replaced by cooperation, the mediation of Islam is an indispensable condition."





[Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb, Professor at Harvard University, 1932]





“The Muhammadan Law which is binding on all -- from the crowned head to the meanest subject is a law interwoven with a system of the wisest, the most learned and the most enlightened jurisprudence that ever existed in the world.”





[Edmund Burke, British Statesman and Philosopher, 1789]





"The Exile here is not like in our homeland. The Turks hold respectable Jews in esteem. Here and in Alexandria, Egypt, Jews are the chief officers and administrators of the customs, and the king’s revenues. No injuries are perpetuated against them in all the empire. Only this year, in consequence of the extraordinary expenditure caused by the war against Shah Tahmsap al-Sufi, were the Jews required to make advances of loans to the princes."





[David dei Rossi, Jewish Traveller 17CE, quoted by Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands]





"The notable religious tolerance towards Christians and Jew under Muslim rule had given way to the uncompromising zealotry of Spanish Inquisition. Jews and Muslims thus fled Spain with large numbers of Jews immigrating to the Ottoman Empire which was known for its tolerance to the Jews."





[Graham Fuller, Author and former CIA, 1995]





“If there is much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture and civilization owe to the Islamic world. It is a failure, which stems, I think, from the straightjacket of history, which we have inherited. The medieval Islamic world, from central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic, was a world where scholars and men of learning flourished. But because we have tended to see Islam as the enemy of the West, as an alien culture, society, and systems of beliefs, we have tended to ignore or erase its great relevance to our own history”





[Charles Philip Arthur George, HRH The Prince of Wales, 1993]





"...Not being subject to the Sharia, Jews and Christians were free to go to their own religious authorities for adjudication of disputes; but in many cases they went instead to the [Muslim] Qadi"





[Richard W. Bulliet, Professor of History and Author, 2004]





"Here in the land of the Turks we have nothing to complain of. We possess great fortunes; much gold and silver are in our hands. We are not oppressed by heavy taxes and our commerce is free and unhindered. Rich are the fruits of the earth. Everything is cheap and each one of us lives in freedom. Here a Jew is not compelled to wear a yellow star as a badge of shame as is the case in Germany where even wealth and great fortune is a curse for a Jew because he therewith arouses jealousy among the Christians and they devise all kinds of slander against him to rob him of his gold. Arise my brethren, gird up your loins, collect up your forces and come to us."





[In his book 'Constantinople', Philip Mansel quotes a rabbi in Turkey writing to his brethren in Europe where they were facing increasing persecution after 1453]





"Praise be to the beneficent God for his mercy towards me! Kings of the earth, to whom his [the Caliph’s] magnificence and power are known, bring gifts to him, conciliating his favour by costly presents, such as the king of the Germans, the king of the Gebalim, the king of Constantinople, and others. All their gifts pass through my hands, and I am charged with making gifts in return. (Let my lips express praise to the God in heaven who so far extends his loving kindness towards me without any merit of my own, but in the fullness of his mercies.) I always ask the ambassadors of these monarchs about our brethren the Jews, the remnant of the captivity, whether they have heard anything concerning the deliverance of those who have pined in bondage and had found no rest."





[Hasdai Ibn Shaprut (915-990 CE) Jewish physician, chief minister of Islamic Caliphate in Cordova, 'The Jewish Caravan']





"In Baghdad there are about forty thousand Jews, and they dwell in security, prosperity, and honour under the great Caliph [al-Mustanjid, 1160-70 CE], and amongst them are great sages, the Heads of the Academies engaged in the study of the Law…’"





[Benjamin of Tudela, Rabbi in Baghdad in the year 1168 CE, 'The Jew in the Medieval World']





"Those Eastern thinkers of the ninth century laid down, on the basis of their theology, the principle of the Rights of Man, in those very terms, comprehending the rights of individual liberty, and of inviolability of person and property; described the supreme power in Islam, or Califate, as based on a contract, implying conditions of capacity and performance, and subject to cancellation if the conditions under the contract were not fulfilled; elaborated a Law of War of which the humane, chivalrous prescriptions would have put to the blush certain belligerents in the Great War; expounded a doctrine of toleration of non-Moslem creeds so liberal that our West had to wait a thousand years before seeing equivalent principles adopted.





[Leon Ostorog, French Jurist]





"The debt of our science to that of the Arabs does not consist in startling discoveries or revolutionary theories; science owes a great deal more to Arab culture, it owes its existence"





[Robert Briffault, Novelist and Historian, 1928]





"The only effective link between the old and the new science is afforded by the Arabs. The dark ages come as an utter gap in the scientific history of Europe, and for more than a thousand years there was not a scientific man of note except in Arabia"





[Oliver Joseph Lodge, Writer and Professor of Physics, 1893]





“Thus, when Muslims crossed the straits of Gibraltar from North Africa in 711 and invaded the Iberian Peninsula, Jews welcomed them as liberators from Christian Persecution.”





[Zion Zohar, Jewish scholar at Florida International University, 2005]







“Throughout much of the period in question, Arabic served as the global language of scholarship, and learned men of all stripes could travel widely and hold serious and nuanced discussions in this lingua franca. Medieval Western scholars who wanted access to the latest findings also needed to master the Arabic Tongue or work from translations by those who had done so.”





[Jonathan Lyons, Author, Writer and Lecturer, 2009]