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 Apr 2011

BRICS: A False Dawn

The BRICS countries met on the 14 April 2011, a bloc increasingly emerging as the new powers on the global scene that are driving most of the world’s economic growth.

The summit held in China promoted cooperation and criticized the western dominated global system. A joint communique, termed the Sanya declaration, stated the current system was no longer representative. BRICS was a term coined by Goldman Sachs investment banker Jim O'Neill to highlight Brazil, China, Russia and India's similarities in terms of their potential for development and growth. This concept has now turned into talking shop.

South Africa was invited to the 2011 annual get together, this was its first time at the summit and it has been included it into the emerging club. This allows it to show it represents the entire developing world. The summit criticized the current Libya operation and the destabilising capital inflows to emerging markets by Western institutions.

The group has asked for certain changes to the global financial system. These included a call for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to expand its use of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), which are used as a quasi currency to transfer funds between member governments. The BRICS called for a broad-based international reserve currency system "providing stability and certainty". The joint communiqué said "The governing structure of the international financial institutions should reflect the changes in the world economy, increasing the voice and representation of emerging economies and d eveloping countries." The BRICS also called for a greater say on the UN Security Council, on which only China and Russia of the group have a permanent seat.

Despite being called the world’s developing countries all the constituents of the bloc are different militarily and economically and where they are in their respective stages of development.

Brazil has traditionally exported commodities and minerals to the US and Europe, but Chinese demand is changing the equation for Brazil's agriculture. This has resulted in China becoming its number one import partner, which in turn has led to cheap Chinese goods flooding the Latin American nation at the expense of its own industries.

Russia is a largely commodities driven nation with extensive reserves of the world’s key minerals and resources. Russia is the largest global exporter of most of the commodities needed for industry. Russia’s resurgence has simply changed its supply of massive reserves of energy from the West and the former Soviet territories to the East.

India, whilst still early in its development is a global leader as a provider of services. Unlike Brazil and Russia, which have built their economies on commodities exports, India has transformed from an economy that was dominated by agriculture to one where the service sector generates 54% of the nation’s wealth. Business services such as IT and business process outsourcing contribute 33% to the total output of services. India for the moment has failed to become a mass manufacturer like the other BRICS countries and as a result still imports much of its manufactured goods from China.

China in a matter of decades has become the world’s factory, producing the world’s textiles and high-end hi-tech products such as semi-conductors and solar panels. It produces these at prices that undercut every other country in the world. This has turned China into a global exports powerhouse, but it has also become a massive consumer of energy which is necessary to fuel such exports.

Such differences have all been formalised into a bloc, these differences will always be an obstacle in the way of any meaningful alliance or agreement. The result of a union coming together on perceived similarities and interests is the fracturing of the alliance by the national interests of participating nations. Each of the nations will attempt to gain their own interests through the bloc rather than unite on a global agenda. The sheer size of China and its imports impacts all decisions.

The 2011 summit was heavily influenced by China who made trade deals with all the other nations in order to strengthen itself. It then made many rhetorical calls for change in the global system established by the colonial powers. India and China are rivals and do not trust each other in Asia. Both have gone to war in the past over disputed borders in Kashmir, and India is worried over the China-Pakistan all season’s relationship. It was with Chinese help Pakistan developed its nuclear weapons. China on the other hand views India’s relationship with the US as another attempt to contain it in South Asia.

Russia and China are also rivals battling for central Asia. Both nations distrust each other as they are vying for similar territories even though they are both quasi strategic partners due to common enemy – the US.

Brazil and China are two nations struggling to industrialise. As a result of a change of government in 2002 a complete transformation took place in Brazil where traditional higher valued products have been replaced by agricultural and mineral imports from China, China has now replaced the US as Brazil’s biggest trade partner. Brazil has now shifted to exports of natural resources from manufactured goods that have long dominated its economy. Such a shift has resulted in cheap Chinese manufactured products flooding the Brazilian economy at the expense of local industry this is now threatening Brazil’s industrial development.

Fundamentally the relationship of each of the BRICS nations with the US - the world’s superpower is strong enough to act as a wedge between any of the members with the others. Each nation also has its own bilateral relations with the US which further weakens the bloc. What this bloc however does allow for, is for each nation to deal with the others outside the international order, giving an appearance of a new coalition of nations standing apart form the US and the West.

This bloc of developing nations is offering little in the way of anything new to the current order, they are merely calling to be taken more seriously on international issues and have a say regarding international institutes established by the colonial powers such as the UN and the Bretton Woods institutes (IMF and World Bank). However the bloc is not willing to gets its hands dirty on most issues. On the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, authorizing the use of military force to protect civilians (regime change) in Libya, Brazil and India as non-permanent members and permanent members China and Russia did nothing to stop the invasion. They could have vetoed the resolution but choose to simply abstain from voting. Despite this they remain united in their condemnation of the US, French and British invasion.

Each nation of the BRICS has commercial interests with some nations having global and regional ambitions. This bloc is a real case of the parts being much stronger then the whole. Without any unifying ideology, such nations will not undermine the global system but remain as players amongst many others. Hence the BRICS is not the emergence of a new system for the world or the rise of another power, in fact such a crippled movement further strengthens the US, remaining as mere talking shops. If there is any lesson to be learnt, it would be that this type of union and every union like it will end in failure.

A union of states into a larger union is a weak method of amalgamation. It lacks the characteristics found in full unification where a people become one nation. A union as a method of binding peoples and nations is always prone to political differences as it continues to recognise the sovereignty of constituent nations, this leaves it open to interference from the outside. The European Union has today expanded well beyond its original founder states. Consensus on how far enlargement should go and how deep integration should be continues to plague the union. Member states are reluctant to relinquish their sovereignty to bureaucrats in Brussels or leave key decision making to the two nations that dominate the EU – Germany and France. Whilst from an economic perspective the EU acts as one block, political sovereignty means the union will always remain disjointed – like any of union established in the same manner.

[Written by Adnan Khan, April 2011]
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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]