The Prophet Muhammad (2)

Shortly before Muhammad’s birth, the Byzantine Empire, based in Constantinople, reached the zenith of its power under Justinian. Throughout the Prophet’s lifetime, the lands of the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia were ravaged by wars between Byzantium and Persian. The Persians captured Damascus in 613, sacked Jerusalem in 614, and briefly took Egypt. Then the tide was reversed, and in 625, seven years before Muhammad died, the Byzantines scored a decisive victory over the Persians at Nineveh. Southern Arabia was a Persian satrapy for a time, but most of these events on the northern fringes of the peninsula had little direct impact on the Prophet. Their importance to him was that they left both Byzantium and Persia exhausted and vulnerable to the advance of the inspired Arabians who were to overwhelm them within a generation. It is often said that Muhammad was the only great religious leader to live in the full light of history, meaning that his life and works known to us in detail, recorded by himself and by contemporaries whose works survive. But it is difficult to distinguish facts about Muhammad from pious tradition passed down as fact. Scholars do not even agree on the year of his birth. Information about the years before he undertook his prophetic mission is almost as scanty as information about the young manhood of Jesus. There are wide variations in accounts of such crucial events as the Battle of Badr and the hijra, and the bias of each narrator influences his accounts. Muslim biographers and hostile commentators have irreconcilable views about Muhammad’s character and motivation and about the nature of his mission. What Muslims believe was divine inspiration and a command from God has been ascribed by some Western writers to epilepsy or fakery or insanity. Dante, in the The Divine Comedy, consigned Muhammad to the ninth circle of the Inferno, with the “sowers of schism and of discord,” as if Muhammad were a renegade Christian. Henry Treece, his story of the Crusades, attributed Muhammad’s revelations to the sun-crazed musings of a semiliterate trader lulled into a trance by the swaying of his camel. Because of the tradition that Muhammad actually fell down, groaning and sweating, as the revelation came upon him, Tor Andrae, a sympathetic biographer, observed, “it has long been thought that Mohammed was an epileptic. Even certain Byzantine writers made this discovery, and for a long time past western writers have edified their readers with this compromising fact about the archenemy of Christianity. Even in recent times some authors have held fast to this idea, influenced by the scientifically superficial and hasty theory, which the medical psychology of the past century has made fashionable for a while, that the inspired state is ‘pathological.’” However, Andrae says there is no evidence that Muhammad was clinically epileptic; even if there were, that would not necessarily undermine his claim to have received divine revelations. This accounts of Muhammad’s life and work is derived from both western and Muslim account, including the Koran, which is the only source of detail about many episodes in the Prophet’s career. Dates and events that are presented as factual are those on which all accounts, Muslim and non-Muslim, agree.


Muhammad’s father was of the Hashem (or Hashim) family, a minor but respected clan within the powerful tribe of the Quraish. Later generations of Hashemites, collateral descendants of the Prophet through the line of his great-grandfather, claimed the status of nobility among Arab families. The Quraish, who dominated Meccan commerce and controlled the lucrative traffic in pilgrimages to the idols enshrined in the Kaaba, later became Muhammad’s most determined opponents and are condemned in the Koran as unbelievers. Muhammad’s father, Abdullah, died before Muhammad was born. The Prophet’s mother, Amina, died when the boy was six, and he was entrusted to the care of his grandfather, Abdel Muttalib. The grandfather was a distinguished personage, said to have been a descendant of Ishmael, and was the custodian of the Kaaba. Abdel Muttalib is honored in Muslim tradition as the man who rediscovered and excavated the well of Zamzam, which had been filled during a tribal dispute. Abdel Muttalib died only two years later, and the boy Muhammad was passed on again, this time to an uncle, Abu Talib. The Koran’s stress on justice and charity toward orphans is apparently attributable to these events of Muhammad’s childhood, though of course those who believe that the Koran is entirely and only the eternal revealed word of God would minimize the extent to which its contents were influenced by the personal experience of the man chosen as the conduit for the revelation.

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The Prophet Muhammad (1)

Islam is like Christianity in that it originated in the life and works of one well-known historical figure and is inseparable from him. The fundamental difference is the humanity of Muhammad. The most basic tenet of Islam is that Allah is the one God and that no person, creature, or thing may be associated with him or accorded divine attributes. The Koran stresses that Muhammad was a mortal, born of earthly parents, destined to die, and be judged by the Creator.
Muhammad worked no miracles and raised no one from the dead. His achievements were a manifestation of the will of God, not of any supra-mortal essence in himself. Muslims never refer to themselves a Muhammadans, because the word implies that they worship Muhammad as Christian worship Christ, which they do not. As an inspired man, the vessel of divine revelation, prophet, guide, leader, commander, exemplar, and lawgiver, Muhammad is revered, admired, and imitated, but he is not worshiped. There are many times and places where this distinction seem to be eroded by an excess of zeal among Muhammad’s followers. At the great mosque in Delhi, the attendants who display putative relics of the Prophet, including a sandal he is said to have worn, exhibit an unctuous reverence inappropriate for any mortal. The reason Handbook of Hajj advises pilgrims who visit Medina not to pray to Muhammad for any miracles or earthly benefits is precisely that Muslims have a traditional tendency to invoke the Prophet’s aid as if he in fact had supernatural powers. Edward W. Lane, in the 1836 classic Manners and Custom of the Modern Egyptians, noted that “the respect which most modern Muslims pay to their Prophet is almost idolatrous. They very frequently swear by him; and many of the most learned, as well as the ignorant, often implore his intercession”—even though the Koran teaches that no one, not even Muhammad, can intercede with God on behalf of men. Lane reported that one Imam Ahmad Ibn-Hanbal “would not even eat watermelons because, although he know that the Prophet ate them, he could not learn whether he ate them with or without the rind, or whether he broke, bit or cut them.” I never encountered any imitation of the Prophet quite so absurd, but it is certainly customary to invoke his name at any time and any occasion—even giving directions to a cab driver. (“To the university, by the Prophet!”) These, however, are pious irrelevancies, derived not from any Islamic claim of Muhammad’s divinity but from the tradition of devotion to a holy, divinely guided man.
The Prophet, whose name means “highly praised,” was born about 570 A.D. in Mecca, a trading post in the Arabian peninsula, well outside the mainstream of contemporary events in Europe and around the Mediterranean. Arabia was a violent and licentious semi-primitive corner of the world, where religion took the form of pagan worship of tribal gods and idols. Many Jews and Christians lived in what are now Saudi Arabia and Yemen, but most of the population had not adopted monotheistic beliefs. Mecca was not only the commercial but also the religious center for the tribes of the peninsula. They all had their own gods and idols, but some gods were common to all of them, and the shrine of those deities was in Mecca. That shrine was the Kaaba, from which Muhammad would soon expel all idols and images and which he would establish as the central shrine of Islam. The world beyond Arabia, at the time of Muhammad’s birth, was entering an era of violent transition. Europe was descending into Dark Ages. The Merovingian descendants of Clovis I were dividing the Frankish kingdom. The Lombards invaded Italy, meeting little resistance and establish a capital at Pavia. Rome was reduced to a minor duchy, important only as the seat of the Papacy. New ideas and cultures were rising in parts of the world untouched by the decay of the Roman Empire; the Mayan empire flourished in Mexico, and Buddhism spread through China and Japan. It is an instructive period of world history for those of us accustomed to a Ptolemaic view of civilization in which all cultures are thought to revolve around our own.

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Five Pillars of Islam (5)

Ritual Prayer (3)
Friday is the one day when attendance at a mosque for group prayer is required (though many who consider themselves Muslims attend irregularly, if at all). The Koran says, “Believers, when you are summoned by Friday prayers, hasten to the remembrance of Allah and cease your trading” (62:9). Muslims believe that the Koran is the literal word of God and therefore the choice of Friday was dictated by God himself. Phillip Hitti suggests that Muhammad made the choice for reasons more mundane than spiritual.
Angry at the Jews who rejected his message, the Prophet prescribed that shops should be closed at midday on Friday because that was when Jews were stocking up for the Sabbath. Muslims countries generally observe Friday as the weekly official holiday, though practice varies. Since Friday is not ordained as a day of rest, it is not a religious requirement that Friday be a work holiday. Until recently, in Algeria, the weekly holiday was observed on Sunday, a relic of French colonial days. Egypt, which has a large Christian minority, state-owned banks and shops, state factories, and government offices are closed on Friday, but privately owned shops are usually open on Friday and closed on Sunday, even if their owners are Muslims. In Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, a few shops are open on Friday mornings, but no official business is transacted. Even in those countries, however taxis and other public services operate and newspapers are published on Friday. It is not the same as Saturday in Israel, when public transit halts, restaurants close, and newspapers do not publish. Muslims also have prescribed prayers to be said on holidays, while traveling, and on special occasions such as funerals, the most common occasion for group prayer aside from Friday gathering.
Believing as they do in resurrection of the body, Muslims bury their dead reverently and quickly, treating the bodies with care and respect. When death occurs, the body is washed and shrouded and buried as soon as possible, preferably within a day. The standard prayer for this last journey is, “Gratitude is due to God. Prayers and peace be upon the Messenger of God. O Lord! He (the deceased) was indeed Your worshipping servant, and the son of your servants. He witnessed that there is no God but You; You alone; there is no partner for you. And that Muhammad was your servant and messenger. And indeed, you know him better than we. O Lord! If he was a doer of good, please increase the reward of his deeds. If he was misbehaving, please forgive his misdeeds. O Lord! Deprive us not of his reward. And let us not be misguided after him. And forgive us and forgive him.” Though the service for the dead is standard, with minor variations according to the practices of various schools, burial customs vary. In Saudi Arabia, the body of the deceased is laid in a shallow grave scooped out of the desert. In Egypt, the body is sealed in a coffin and entombed in a mausoleum. The tombs of some wealthy Egyptians are among Cairo’s most prominent architectural landmarks; some of them are so elaborate that poor families have taken up residence in them as squatters.
The ritual prayer gives oral expression to the believer’s submission to God; its spiritual value is negated by misconduct or inattention. Talking, clearing the throat, moaning, laughing, and movements other than those prescribed by tradition are to be avoided, and in fact Muslims may never be more discipline and orderly than when they are gathered for communal prayer. In Cairo, the biggest and most turbulent city of the Islamic world, where overcrowding in the mosques forces worshipers to conduct Friday prayers on the sidewalks, the men at prayer—undistracted by tourists or the whizzing traffic—perform their devotions with a deep concentration that bespeaks their sincerity.

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Five Pillars of Islam (7)

Fasting
The fourth pillar of the faith is the fast of the month of Ramadan. Ramadan is the one of the twelve months of the lunar calendar, used by Muslims since the seventh century, the first century of the Islamic era. Because it is set according to the lunar calendar, Ramadan occurs on different dates in each year of the Gregorian calendar. It is the month in which the first Koranic verses were revealed to Muhammad and in which Muhammad’s small band of followers achieved their first important military success, at the Battle of Badr in 624 A. D. During Ramadan, Muslims are obliged to refrain from eating, smoking, drinking, and the pleasures of the flesh from first light to last light unless they are ill, traveling, nursing, or pregnant.
Islam is not an ascetic religion. The Koran encourages the use and enjoyment of the blessings that God has bestowed on mankind. But Islam does teach control of the appetites and discipline of the passions. The requirement of fasting, laid down in the Koran, contributes to the Muslim’s mastery of his worldly concerns and to the community’s collective sense of conforming with God’s commands. The fast fosters compassion for the hungry and thirsty.
The time of fasting begins, according to the Koran, when it becomes possible to tell a white thread from a black one in first light of dawn. During the daylight hours, Muslims are urged to pray at mosque and commanded to avoid all food and drink. Sexual intercourse is also prohibited in daylight. These requirements affect the pattern of life in the entire Muslim world, disrupting the normal schedules of work and study. Public life, commerce, and government slow to a crawl, especially when Ramadan falls in the long, hot days of summer, because the rigors of the fast inevitably result in curtailed work hours. Many a Western businessman has learned the hard way that Ramadan is the wrong time to travel to Kuwait or Libya; not only are work hour shortened but also influential offices with the authority to make decisions and sign contracts often leave for Europe when Ramadan arrives.
The strictness with which the fasting requirement is enforced varies from country to country, some governments and societies being more easygoing or secular than others. In Kuwait, where few hotels that cater to Westerners were allowed to serve food and drink, but even the ground floor coffee shop at the Sheraton Hotel, a popular gathering place for young men about town, was closed until evening. In Egypt, some restaurants and snack bars stay open but discretion is advisable, and most of the Muslims who choose not to fast take their refreshment in private. In the latitude of Amman or Jeddah, daylight during a summer Ramadan can last as long as sixteen hours. The fast is onerous and difficult. The people compensate after dark for the rigors of the day with a feast called the iftar, “break-fast.” When radio stations broadcast the cannon-shot that signals the sunset and the evening prayer follow, the iftar brings sweet relief as families dig in and children run through the dark street singing and waving lanterns.

At the end of the month, Muslims celebrate a holiday known as Eid al-Fitr, after which, life returns to normal. The end of Ramadan and the start of the holiday are proclaimed officially only when the new moon—the rising of which marks start of the next month—has actually been sighted by the appropriate religious authorities. The rising of the new moon is of course predictable with mathematical certainty through astronomical observations that Muslim scholars helped to develop, but tradition holds that human sightings are required before events keyed to the calendar can begin. Printed calendars and schedules list future events and holidays as “tentative” or “subject to official confirmation.” This tradition usually makes little practical differences, but occasionally it results in confusion, when the people of one community observe an event a day earlier or later than the people of another or make a false start on a holiday that is rescheduled at the last minute because the moon has not been sighted.
The Muslim calendar, which in a few countries is also the official public calendar, consists of a 354-day year divided into twelve lunar months. A day is added to the last month eleven times in every thirty years, so that in a century the Muslim calendar diverges from the Gregorian calendar by just over two years. The first day of the first year corresponds to July 15, 622 A. D. the year in which Muhammad and his followers migrated from Mecca to Medina. The months are Muharram, Safar, Rabi al-Awwal (Rabi I), Rabi al-Thani (Rabi II), Jumada I, Jumada II, Rajab, Shaban, Ramadan, Shawwal, Dhu’l-Qadah, and Dhu’l-Hijjah. The years are designated “A. H.,” Anno Hegirae, “After the hijra” (the Arabic word for the migration). The extent to which these months and the Muslim calendar are used in contemporary life varies from country to country. In general, business and international affairs are conducted by the Western calendar, and religious affairs are according to the Muslim calendar. Sometimes they are used side by side. In Cairo, a new bridge over the Nile is named “Sixth of October,” and a new town in the nearby desert is called “Tenth of Ramadan,” both dates marking the same event, the start of the 1973 war against Israel.
Ramadan is collective and unifying experience, in which workers fast together and families and friends feast together in affirmation of their obedience to God. The other great annual event that inspires mass participation is the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, the fifth pillar of the faith.

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Five Pillars of Islam (6)

Zakat (Alms-Tax)
The third pillar of the faith is the zakat, ‘alms-tax,’ a mandatory donation to charity. The Koran defines the righteous as those who “attend to their prayers, pay the alms-tax and firmly believe in the life to come. (31:4)” The obligation to share what one has with those less fortunate is stressed throughout the Holy Book. Islam teaches that the riches of this world are transitory and stresses that those who have abundant blessings should share with the less fortunate. The Muslim definition of the virtuous life includes charitable support of widows, wayfarers, orphans, and the poor. The zakat institutionalizes that duty.
The Koran does not specify how much should be given. Nor does the Koran say how the requirement to pay the tax should be enforced, since it assumes that the command of God and the rule of the state are one and therefore the state has no enforcement power other than divine will. In some Muslim countries, the zakat is entirely voluntary. In others, it is enforced by the government, but according to Islamic law, it is not a state tax because it is not to be used to support the public treasury and the government does not set the rate. Some scholars argue that the zakat should not be collected by state, because it has spiritual merit only if voluntary.
Islamic legal tradition, which rooted in the Koran and in the deeds and words of the Prophet, has produced a complex set of technical regulations about how much zakat is due and upon what property it is to be levied. No tax is payable on a herd of less than five camels, for example. Possession of twenty-five to thirty camels requires the donation of a young she-camel; discovery of buried treasure requires the donation of one-fifth of the value. In practice, the most common measure is 2.5 percent of the amount of cash an individual holds in savings or investment for a year. An additional tax of one’s day food for one person is to be paid on the occasion of Eid al-Fitr, the holiday that ends the annual month of fasting, so that the poor also may eat.
The law also prescribes the purposes for which the state or organization that collects the tax is to use it—to help the poor, give aid to travelers and the homeless, relieve debtors, finance the propagation of Islam, and pay the wages of the collectors. These principles, which originated in early Islam, before the disintegration of the purely Islamic state, do not necessarily prevail in contemporary Muslim nations. Laws and practices vary; what remains constant is the obligation of the good Muslim to do what he can in the name of God to help those less fortunate. The particular duty of paying the alms-tax is part of the general requirement to be charitable and generous and to live in a way that contributes to the general welfare of the community.

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Five Pillars of Islam (4)

Ritual Prayer (2)
The wording of the prayers follows established formulas of praise and obedience to God, such as this: “Glory be to Thee, O Allah, and blessed be Thy name and exalted Thy majesty. There is no deity to be worshipped but Thee. I seek the protection of Allah against the accursed Satan.” Another is this: “My Lord, forgive me. Bestow mercy upon me. Guide us right. Relieve me and absolve my sins.” Passages from the Koran, which many Muslims have memorized in its entirely, are also recited. The leader of the prayers is not a priest. His relationship with God is the same as that of the other worshipers and he has no special ritual or sacramental powers.
In large mosques, the leader may be an imam, an individual with religious training who is learned in the Koran and who, on Fridays, gives a sermon. The title Imam is the same as that used in Shiite Islam to mean the spiritual leader of the entire community. The level of knowledge, eloquence, and training of the leader varies according to the size and wealth of the mosque where the prayers are said. In a poor village, he may be no more than a local artisan who has had a few years of study at a religious school.
The Koran requires that the worshipers be clean in body as well as soul when praying. Ablution is prescribed, usually a symbolic sprinkling of water but always a full washing after sexual intercourse or a long illness. Most mosques have fountains or water taps where the worshipers may clean their hands and feet, again according to a prescribed ritual, before they enter the pray. The act of cleansing is traditionally performed with the left hand, leaving the right hand for eating and salutation. A mosque—masjid in Arabic—is not a church. God is no more present there than He is anywhere else. There is no altar, no tabernacle, no baptismal font, no statuary, no choir loft. A mosque is simply a building where the faithful gather to pray as a group. Because all men are equal before Allah, mosques have no reserved places or pews for dignitaries. As the worshipers arrive, they line up in rows behind the imam with no distinction by social class, wealth or race.
The first mosque was the courtyard of Muhammad’s house in Medina, the town to which he moved from Mecca when his prophetic message was rejected by his native city. According to Phillip Hitti, in Islam: A Way of Life, it was a quadrangular courtyard open to the sky, partially roofed with palm branches as protection from the sun. A palm stump served as a podium for Muhammad. Later it was replaced by an actual pulpit at the suggestion of a Muslim who had seen one in the Christian church. The quadrangular open area for the gathering of believers, and the pulpit, are still characteristic features of almost all mosques. In the early years of Islam, Muslims adapted places of worship from other religions for use as mosques. Zoroastrian temples in Persia and Christian churches in Syria were converted. The architectural variations increased in subsequent centuries as domes, porticoes, colonnades, and ornamentation were added to the basic configuration. The mosques of Islam are as diverse in style and elegance as the faith itself. In most mosques built by the Persians and the Turks, the main congregational area is roofed or domed. Other great mosques—Ibn Tulun in Cairo, the principal mosques in Mecca, Lahore, and Delhi—are open to the air, vast patios and devotion surrounded by enclosed porches where the faithful may rest or talk, seated on the rugs or mats that covers the floor. Traditionally the mosques have served the faithful as meeting hall, shelter, and library. Large mosques often contain space for religious school, madrasas, where the students are instructed in the Koran, religious law and Arabic.
Two features common to almost all mosques are the mihrab and the minaret. The mihrab is a niche or indentation in the wall indicating the direction of Mecca, toward which the believers face as they pray. The minaret, the tower from which faithful are called to prayer, is the universal architectural symbol of Islam. Minarets vary as greatly in material, height, and style as the mosques from which they rise. In the Arabian peninsula, a village mosque may have a single unadorned cylindrical tower. A great Turkish-style mosque, such as the Blue Mosque in Istanbul or the mosque of Muhammad Ali that dominates the skyline of Cairo, will have multiple pencil-shaped minarets. Whatever the style, the minaret is to the eye what the call of Allahu Akbar is to the ear: a universal link in the chain of faith and culture that binds all Muslims. The construction of mosques may be financed by governments, charitable organizations, or individuals. The person or group that finances the construction of a mosque often pays for its upkeep as well. In a poor country such as Egypt, where the government’s resources are limited and the mosques overcrowded, a certain shabbiness characterizes the state-run mosques, while those endowed by the wealthy are often spotless and handsomely landscaped. The arrangements for building and maintaining mosques and for paying the salaries of those who work at religious institutions vary from country to country. Frequently the degree of political docility of the imams and theologians is a function of their financial dependence on the state. (One source of the political power of the Iranian Mullahs who helped overthrow the Shah was their financial, and therefore political, independence of the government.)
Except for the Shiite mosque at Karbala in Iraq, a unique shrine where the mirror-glass interior walls seem to amplify the zealous frenzy of the pilgrims, most of the mosques were marked by a cool, restful atmosphere conducive to prayer and contemplation. At Cairo’s al-Azhar, at the Umayyad mosque in Damascus, and at the great mosque in Delhi, the tranquility and peace offer physical and spiritual relief from the turmoil of the surrounding bazaars, and the Muslim can find the dignity and social equality that may not be his in the world outside. It is customary to doff the shoes upon entering a mosque, and the function of the mosque as social and economic leveler, a place where all are equal in the sight of God, can be seen in the racks of footwear outside any mosque in Cairo or Alexandria. Battered sandals, army boots, and polished pumps are aligned side by side as their owners—separated in daily life by a vast economic and social gulf—worship together as one congregation.

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Five Pillars of Islam (3)

Ritual Prayer (1)
“Prayer,” says the Koran, “is a duty incumbent on the faithful, to be conducted at the appointed hours” (4:103). It is the second of the five pillars of the faith. Those prayerful hours are not specified in the Holy Book, but in practice they are recognized as occurring five times daily: at dawn, midday, afternoon, evening, and night. The exact times vary from country to country and even, in large countries, from town to town according to the time of sunrise and sunset. In many countries newspapers print daily charts showing prayer times in the major cities, all different by several minutes.
Tradition holds that the five-a-day schedule is a compromise between the twice-daily prayer suggested in an early chapter of the Koran and the forty times a day said to have been demanded of Muhammad by God. While only five are required. Muslims are urged to pray at all times and on any occasion.
The believers may say his prayer wherever he is, alone or in a group, so long as he faces Mecca and the Kaaba. Congregational prayer in a mosque is required only on Friday at midday and on two major religious holidays—and then only men are required to attend—but group prayer is always considered more meritorious than individual devotion. In some countries, especially Saudi Arabia, offices and shops generally close during prayer time, but in most they do not. The individual, if he wishes to pray, simply does so, on the spot or at the mosque, while the activities of those who do not pray continue about him.
This creates situations that may strike newcomers to the Islamic countries as incongruous but that are taken for granted by the participants. In Cairo, the policeman who stands guard at the rear door of the Central Bank droops to the grimy sidewalk to worship at the appointed hour, leaving the door unwatched. The place of prayer should be clean, so he uses a battered piece of cardboard as a mat over the pavement. (Other Muslims use small rugs, the source of the term “prayer rug.”) In the composing room at the newspaper Al-Ahram, it is not unusual for some printers to walk away from their typesetting machines to pray, leaving their work to be resumed after their devotions, while their colleagues who are less devout continue to work as if nothing was happening.
When President Jimmy Carter visited Saudi Arabia in January, 1978, the call to prayer went up while preparations for his arrival were still being made at Riyadh airport. All the members of the military band on duty laid down their instruments and dropped to their knees right on the tarmac for their devotions. It made a bizarre photograph in American newspapers the next morning, men and trombones prostate together, but it did not strike the Saudis as odd in any way. It was prayer time, so they prayed, as God commands. The scene was characteristic of the prevailing lack of self-consciousness about prayer among Muslims. It insulates the faithful from cynicism. Those who do not pray may be embarrassed and apologetic not those who do.
The believers knows when the hour of prayer is at hand because the call to prayer is sounded from the minaret, or tower, on every mosque. The call is chanted, always in Arabic, by a muezzin; this word is a corruption of mu’adhdhin, “he who recites the adhan (call).” Usually there is nobody actually up in the minaret. Nowadays the call to prayer is commonly tape-recorded and amplified through speakers mounted on the minarets. What is lost in charm is gained in range and volume.
The call always includes the shahada in a declaration such as this: “God is great, God is great. I testify that there is no god but God. I testify that Muhammad is the Messenger of God. Come to prayer, come to prayer. Come to prosperity, come to prosperity. God is great, God is great. There is no god but God.” At dawn, the call also reminds Muslims that “Prayer is better than sleep.” The opening phrase of the chanted Arabic—“Allahu Akbar” (al-LAhu AKbar), “God is great”—is the dominant cultural chord of Islam, the declaration that punctuates all life, the reason to believe, the motive for action, inspiration for soldier and revolutionary, consolation for the oppressed.
Whether the individual is praying alone or in a group, the format and context of his prayer are the same. It is not an individual appeal to or communication with God, improvised by the believer to address his own needs, but a ritual, communal recognition of Allah’s power.
The worshiper offers rakatin, “bendings,” so called because each part of the prayer ritual is marked by a change of position: standing, bending to put hands on knees, kneeling with palms in thighs, kneeling with forehead on floor. Each rakah comprises a certain number of prescribed acts and words, which make up a unit of prayer: each prayer period consists of two, three, or four rakatin, depending on the time of day. In the traditional prayer ritual, the positions of the hands are prescribed as well as those of the body: right over left at the chest, touching the earlobes, at the sides.
At the mosque, the worshipers align themselves in rows, spaced so that they may kneel and bow without touching those in front of them. The positions assumed in the ritual would be awkward for women if they prayed among the men, but they generally do not. In some countries, they worship in specially designated areas of the mosque and in others they are excluded from public prayer by tradition if not by law, and they perform their devotions at home.

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Five Pillars of Islam (2)

The Profession of the Faith (2)

From time to time throughout history, Allah has revealed his power, his oneness, and his commands to men through various prophets and books. The last of these prophets was Muhammad of Mecca, whom God used as a conduit for the last revelation, the Koran, the written records of the words spoken by God to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel. The succession of prophecies ends with Muhammad, because the Koran reveals all that need be known and synthesizes all that went before.
Islam teaches that Muhammad’s mission was twofold: to bring knowledge of the one God and His book of truth to the Arabians, a pagan people who had no scripture and hence no knowledge of divine truth, and to correct the errors and falsehoods into which earlier “people of the book”—Jews and Christians—had fallen.
The God who revealed Himself to Muhammad is described at the beginning of each chapter of the Koran as “the Compassionate, the Merciful.” But the text makes clear that beyond mercy and compassion lies justice, in the form of inexorable, eternal damnation for sinners, unbelievers, backsliders, and those who fail to follow God’s commands. On the inevitable, terrible Day of Judgment, there will be no second chance for those who waited too long to repent. While the believers are admitted to Paradise, “a garden watered by running streams,” the sinners will be cast into the torment of fire, their anguish compounded by their knowledge of their guilt and the justice of their fate. They will not be able to say they were not warned.
The most arresting language of the Koran is in those sections describing the Day of Judgment, “the event which will overwhelm mankind,” when the earth will be destroyed, human society will end, every soul will stand before God, and the bodies of the dead will be resurrected to dwell forever in Paradise or in Hell.
“when the sun ceases to shine; when the stars fall down and the mountain are blown away; when camels big with young are left untended and the wild beasts are brought together; when the seas are set alight and men’s souls are reunited; when the infant girl, buried alive, is asked for what crime she was slain; when the records of men’s deeds are laid open and the heaven is stripped bare; when Hell burns fiercely and Paradise is brought near; then each soul shall know what it has done.” (81:1)
This is the God of Islam: Jehovah reexamined, one, omnipotent, the generous Creator who bestowed upon mankind all the blessings of earth and who demands obedience in return, the vengeful One who will extract a terrible price from those who spurn Him.
Throughout the Koran, the principal motivation for accepting God and believing in His revelation appears to be fear: fear of the last judgment and fear of eternal damnation. Though God is described as generous and beneficent, He is always the God who punishes unbelievers and destroys corrupt societies. Islam places less stress upon love of the Deity as a motivation for piety than does Christianity. So while there is a rich tradition in Islam of spirituality and love of God, it is rooted in mysticism and must be considered separately from the traditional faith.
Believe in the one God and acceptance of His word as revealed to Muhammad requires acceptance of the body of duties and obligations recorded in that message. These duties are both spiritual and legal, both societal and devotional, regulating each individual’s relationship with God and with his fellow men. The first duty is the profession of faith. The second is prayer, the second of the five pillars of the faith.

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Five Pillars of Islam (1)

Five Pillars of Islam
Islam’s fundamental duties, practices, and beliefs are summarized in the “five pillars” of the faith, laid down in one of prophet’s hadith, and accepted by all Muslims. The five pillar are the profession of faith, daily prayer, payment of the zakat (alms-tax), fasting in the month of Ramadan, and the pilgrimage to Mecca. These are religious obligations. By themselves they are not sufficient to define the virtuous life, because a good Muslim must also observe a relationship of charity and justice with other members of his community, but the five pillars are the obligatory fundamentals of Islamic practice.
The Profession of Faith (1)
The first pillar is the shahada, the profession of faith: There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God. This was a revolutionary proposition when Muhammad preached it in seventh-century Arabia, for despite the Arabians’ claim of descent from Abraham and their extensive contacts with monotheism, they were pagan polytheists.
The shahada, the basic statement of Islam, is now emblazoned on the flag of Saudi Arabia, but in Muhammad’s time there was no Arabian nation. The people of the Arabian peninsula were grouped in tribes and families, some city-dwellers, some nomads, and their spiritual allegiance was parceled out to a variety of local deities and idols.
Among these pagan deities one commanded a wider loyalty than the others and was known as Allah, which is the Arabic word for god. Cesar Farah, in his book Islam, calls Allah “the paramount deity of pagan Arabia,” recognized from Yemen to the Mediterranean. Enshrined as the principal god of the Kaaba, the pagan pantheon at Mecca, he was accorded as status above the petty gods and idols worshiped by individual tribes and local groups. He was more than equal gods, but less than unique.
That Allah, however, is not the God of Islam. Muhammad used the same word, Allah, but he taught that Allah is the One God, the God of Abraham and Moses, and that is was an error to worship any other. Embracing monotheism, he swept away all the lesser gods and their idols. Worshiping the one God, he taught that the local deity falsely called Allah should be abandoned and that Allah, the one God, the God of the Jews and Christians, should be worshiped.
The Koran clearly identifies Allah with the God of the Hebrews. The God who spoke to Moses during the wanderings in the desert, the God who watched over Joseph when he was betrayed by his brothers, the God who saved Noah from the deluge, is Allah, God of the Jews and God of the Muslims. “He has knowledge of all things,” the Koran says. “He has ordained for men the faith He has revealed to you and formerly enjoined on Noah and Abraham, on Moses and Jesus, saying, ‘Observe this faith and be united in it.’”(42:13)
As described in the Koran, God is unique, everlasting, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, eternal, and living. He knows everything, created everything, and controls all destinies. He is not a formed body or a substance; He is not bounded by dimensions. He sees without eyes, hears without ears, knows without a brain. (Because He has no physical attributes, there can be no portrait or statue of Him. Muslims regards all statues, icons, and representations of the Deity as sacrilegious).
God created the earth, the heavens, the element, men, angels, and jinn. The Jinn are mysterious creatures, invisible to man, defined by the Islamic scholar Fazlur Rahman in his Islam as “an invisible order of creation, parallel to man, but said to be created of a fiery substance, a kind of duplicate of man which is, in general, more prone to evil and from which the Devil is also said to have sprung.” The Koran says God created the jinn, but tells us little about them. They seem to be spirit-creatures, whose impact on the lives of men is only tangential.
The God of the Koran is never seen but always felt, because everything that exist and everything that happens is a sign of Him. He is “Sovereign Lord, the Holy One, the Giver of Peace, the Keeper of the Faith, the Guardian, the Mighty One, the All-powerful, the Most High! He is Allah, the Creator, the originator, the Modeler.” (59:23) His knowledge of all things is both universal and detailed. “Are you not aware that Allah knows what the heavens and earth contain? If three men talk in secret together, He is their fourth; if four, He is the fifth; if five, He is the sixth. Whether fewer or more, wherever they may be, He is with them” (58:17)
What God is not is progenitor or offspring. The Christians concept of the Son of God as one with God and equal to God is specifically and repeatedly repudiated in the Koran, which describes Jesus as a prophet and no more. The uncompromising monotheism of Islam is incompatible with the Trinitarian deity. To Muslims, acceptance of the three-natured God is tantamount to worshiping three deities, when there is only one. The association of any person or object with the Deity is the one sin that Allah will not forgive, according to the Koran.
“Allah is one, the Eternal God,” the Koran says, in Sura 112. “He begot none, no was he begotten. None is equal to Him.” As for the divine Son of God, the Koran is unequivocal: “Those who say, ‘The Lord of Mercy has begotten a son,’ preach a monstrous falsehood, at which the very heavens might cracks, the earth break asunder and the mountains crumble to dust. That they should ascribe a son to the Merciful, when it does not become Him to beget one!.”(19:88)

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Cultural System of Philippines (2)

A Clustering of Cultural Forms
Overlapping religious and linguistic cleavages—most notable in the cases of tribal populations and the Muslims of Sulu and Mindanao—are not the only instances in the Philippines in which cultural forms have tended to cluster. In the case of landowners and their tenants or farm-workers, for example, patrons and clients may both be fluent in the regional language, reinforcing other commonalities. However, the landowner is more likely also to have mastered Filipino, English, or in an earlier era, Spanish. Access to these other languages has been a significant advantage in economic and legal affairs. It also intensifies the social cleavages between landlords-cum-patrons and tenants-cum-clients.
Patron-client ties have typically reinforced and been reinforced by regional and religious identities. As a legacy of Spanish colonialism, landowners and their tenants or farm-workers have generally shared the Catholic faith. However, religious identities have recently become more complicated. With the Church’s post-Vatican II commitment to social action, elements of the traditional socioeconomic elite have grown disenchanted with the Church. There appears to have been a surge in elite membership in evangelical Protestant denominations and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons). If this trend continues, the rural Philippines may witness the emergence of class-based religiosity, heightening elite-poor tensions to the extent that religious groups address concerns for social justice.
While the development of nationwide class or group-based organizations may be hindered by linguistic and regional attachments, these cultural features appear to pose fewer constraints on the emergence of local or provincial-level social organizations. The evolution of the Huk movement in Central Luzon in the 1930s to 1950s, of current national-level peasant organizations such as the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP = Peasant Movement of the Philippines) and the Federation of Free Farmers (FFF), and of regional organizations such as the Agrarian Reform Alliances Of Democratic Organizations (ARADO) and the National Federation of Sugar Workers (NFSW), evidences an organizational tendency in which local or regional organizations are united in a larger confederation. Local or regional organizations enjoy considerable autonomy in their activities vis-à-vis national leadership. This phenomenon is also reflected to a degree in the organization of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA). Although headed by a central committee, the CPP/NPA has adopted a strategy of “centralized leadership, decentralized operations” in response to Philippine geography and ethnic and linguistic diversity.

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Cultural System of Philippines (1)

The context for democracy and redistributive reforms in the Philippines is a function, not only of the country’s political evolution, but of the cultural systems that shape Philippine life. The issues of how people identify themselves, and for what purposes, are complex and not readily reducible to single dimensions such as class, ethnicity, or religion. Multiple, cross-cutting identities—family, ethnic, region, religion, political party, patron-client, class—operate simultaneously, some changing over time. These identities constitute multiple claims on an individual’s loyalty, just as they afford access to a variety of vantage points from which to interpret and respond to a changing economic, political, and social environment. These competing identities are the subject of constant negotiation, and some become more salient at times than others. Moments of economic or political crisis can help select of foreground aspects of individual identities. The very existence of powerful, cross-cutting class and group cleavages in Philippine society makes national reform problematic. The democratic class struggle presupposes that class is the most politically salient identity. Where it is not strong, class-based political parties are unlikely to emerge to pursue fundamental redistributive reform.
The Linguistic Cleavages
Cultural identifications based on regional origin, language, and ethnicity have long worked against development of a national identity and nationwide peasant action in the Philippines. Reflecting the country’s archipelagic land-base, linguistic diversity in the Philippines is extreme, with some 80 languages and dialects in use in the archipelago. No single language is common to all Filipinos. Filipino, a revised form of Tagalog, is the national and most common language and is spoken by some 55 percent of the population. English remains the language of major businesses, the government, and secondary and higher education.
Nationalist sentiment prompted constitutional recognition of Filipino as the national language in 1987. The Constitution further directed the government to initiate the use of Filipino as the medium of official communication and as the language of instruction in the educational system. The University of the Philippines has already taken steps to introduce the use of Filipino in instruction. The use of Filipino as the medium of instruction at the elementary school level remains more complicated. The initial years of public schooling are typically conducted in the regional languages. As many rural children abandon schooling in the course of grades 1-4, they are largely beyond the reach of instruction in the national language and whatever national socialization is attendant thereto. Linguistic diversity is also an impediment to nationwide dissemination of information concerning peasant rights under various government programs, including agrarian reform.
The national print media are overwhelmingly English. Television is somewhat more varied in its linguistic choice; local dramas, variety shows, and news broadcast are in Filipino; imported dramas, of which there are many, and at least one nightly news program per network, are broadcast in English. Radio broadcast are also mixed linguistically, with somewhat greater use of Filipino than is true of television broadcasts.
Linguistic identity remains an important pat of Philippine political life. A pre-martial law (1969) survey found dialect to be a much more significant determinant of voter behavior than party affiliation. Inter-provincial migration, intermarriage, and urbanization are argued to have reduced the importance of linguistic identity among Christian Filipinos, but regional/linguistic distinctions remain a common theme of Philippine political analysis.

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Philippines in the Pre-independence Time (5)

Wartime Occupation and Collaboration
Japanese occupation of the Philippines during the World War II brought the issue of elite collaboration with foreign powers into sharp relief. Confronting the dilemma of collaboration with the Japanese or resistance in the name of the Philippine Commonwealth and its colonial ruler, the United States, many members of the Philippine elite opted for collaboration. Among the most prominent collaborators were Jose Laurel, Sr., and Benigno Aquino, Sr. Wartime profiteering afforded substantial gains to some of the nation’s foremost families.
At the War’s end, the machinations of General Douglas MacArthur, and the President Harry Truman’s initial inattention to the collaboration issue and subsequent deference to MacArthur, effectively undermined President Sergio Osmena’s limited resolve and capacity to mete out punishment to wartime collaborators. David Steinberg argues that Filipinos decided against punishment of collaborationists out of concern that thus purging the elite would “decapitate” the society at a time of extreme destruction and social disruption. This decision was, however, a product of Philippine elite and U.S. policy; the Philippine masses had no voice in the matter. Four decades later, the Aquino government’s treatment of former Marcos loyalists and rebellious military officer would sound a variant on this theme of non-punishment for the supposed sake of national unity.
Collaboration with the Japanese struck at then-prevailing perceptions of Philippine national identity, an identity closely tied to the United States. Elite collaboration thus called into question the legitimacy of elite political dominance. In their grievances against collaborators, peasants received some support from elements of the Philippine elite and for a time, from official U.S. policy. The issue of past and present collaboration with the foreign powers, and the benefits that have thereby accrued to the Philippine to the Philippine elite, are thus another basis for the gulf between elite and mass in Philippine society.

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Philippines in the Pre-independence Time (4)

American Colonial Rule
Three hundred years of Spanish colonial rule ended with the Philippine war of independence in 1896. Philippine independence was no sooner proclaimed than it was lost to the United States—a casualty of the Spanish-American War. The American colonial era saw little change in the patterns of elite-dominated politics in the Philippines. American colonial administrators repeatedly acknowledged the poverty and social, political, and economic inequities attendant on the prevailing patterns of landownership and distribution of wealth. Yet they concentrated on less controversial education, public health, and infrastructure programs rather than on fundamental societal reform.
As had their Spanish predecessors, U.S. colonial administrators (1898-1946) relied upon the Filipino landowning elite and their clientelist networks for social control. The contest for relative power continued between Manila and the localities. U.S. introduction of periodic elections facilitated elite penetration of the state by creating a wide range of elective offices at the local and provincial levels. In capturing these offices, the Philippine elites founded many of the political dynasties that dominate present-day politics. The clientelist networks of the landowning elite became the foundation for national political alliances. The sugar bloc was particularly effective in utilizing its considerable economic resources to build patron-client networks and exercise regional and national political power. Many of the bloc’s most prominent figures were from Negros Occidental. The power of the provincial landowning elite thus continued to frustrate efforts to develop a strong central state. As Willem Wolters notes, “The classic state monopolies known from European history, namely those over violence and taxation, have never been fully developed in the Philippines.”
The stage was thus set for a post-independence Philippine “democracy” in which the vast majority of the population exerted little influence, and from which they derived little benefit. Electoral campaigns wee not mass appeals to voters nor forums for the discussion of societal issues, but negotiations between provincial elites and national political personalities.” In the period 1907-1941,Philippine politics in general, and in the independence movement in particular, was dominated by the Nacionalista Party, whose members and leaders came from the wealthiest Philippine families. The only calls for agrarian reform emanated from a few radical parties, whish were small, under-funded, and operative only in parts of Luzon. In voting, tenants and landless laborers—dependent and new to politics—typically followed the lead of their landlord or patron.
At the same time, the 1938 union of the Socialist Party and the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP = Communist party), under the PKP banner, provided a vehicle for mobilizing a portion of the disgruntled peasantry in Central Luzon. They helped inspire strikes and the Sakdal uprisings in the later years of American rule. These were the precursors to the Hulk rebellion of the 1940s and 1950s.

To Be Continued…

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Philippines in the Pre-independence Time (3)

The Historical Development of Negros Occidental
As part of the regional specialization in agriculture, the province of Negros Occidental became the focus of Philippine sugarcane production. Located 300 kilometers south of Manila, Negros is in the center of the Philippine archipelago. Technological innovations—the introduction of foreign sugarcane varieties and furnaces fueled by bagasse (waste cane)—and foreign-financed sugar-mill construction led to the rapid expansion of sugarcane production in Negros Occidental beginning in the mid nineteenth century. In the 1920s, the American colonial government facilitated significant further expansion of Negros sugar production by financing the construction of six centrifugal mills (centrals) through the Philippine National Bank. The provinces of Negros Occidental and Oriental have generally accounted for over two-thirds of Philippine sugarcane production. Sugar exports, primarily the United States, supplied roughly 20 percent of Philippine foreign exchange earnings in the 1960s and 1970s.
Expansion of sugarcane production in Negros was marked by extreme concentration of landownership. Spanish barriers to foreign capital—restrictions on Protestants landownership, inter-island migration, and inter-island travel by foreigners—prompted reliance on part-Chinese mestizos as brokers between European commercial interests and sugar planters. In turn, these mestizos came to dominate the sugar industry in Negros. Sugar production was organized around haciendas employing hired labor.

To Be Continued..

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Philippines in the Pre-independence Time (2)

The Emergence of regional power centers
Although Spanish rule was administratively centralized, the members of the various religious orders enjoyed considerable de facto autonomy at the village (barangay) level, autonomy that increased with time. Until late in the Spanish colonial era, the parish priest was the sole Spaniards in more than half the Philippine villages, the only representative of colonial authority. Where present, the priest became “judge, mentor, landlord, and symbol of foreign power.” At the same time, local elites, whose power increasingly became a function of personal landownership, were able to consolidate their influence at the local and provincial levels.
In the Philippines, the regionalized pattern of growth in intra-Asian trade in the late eighteenth century and the explosion in trade with European and American markets in the mid nineteenth century unleashed powerful centrifugal forces, which have fostered fragmented social control and reinforced regional identities at the expense of a strong national identity. Anglo-American trading concerns, rather than the Spanish colonial regime, dominated the development of the Philippine export economy. With the opening of provincial ports to foreign trade after 1855, the Anglo-American trading houses were able to establish direct links with different parts of the archipelago, emphasizing distinct regional crops, and working with a variety of region-specific production systems.
Geography, colonial policy and the particular nature of commercialization of Philippine agriculture thus assured continued fragmentation of social control. This social organization limited, but did not eliminate the possibilities for concerted rebellion against the colonial power and hindered the emergence of Philippine nationalism. Furthermore, it played a prominent role in the undoing of the national revolution (1896-1902). Most important for our current analysis, this regional fragmentation of social control has frustrated the development of a centralized state organization capable of effecting nationwide redistributive reform.
In assessing the present-day capabilities of Third World states, Migdal highlights the role of colonial powers in shaping contrasting patterns of social control:
Of all distinctions in the local population these policies fostered, one stands out in its long-term effect on state-society relations. Colonizing rulers could either give preferential access to resources to many local indigenous leaders, each of whom could establish social control in only a circumscribed part of the society, or the foreigners could support those in a position to create central, countrywide institutions capable of forming an eventual, centralized state.
In the Philippine case, we would want to modify the thesis slightly, according greater recognition to international forces and powers distinct from the colonial power. The patterns of economic development and resulting social control that emerged in the nineteenth-century Philippines were arguably more reflective of the influence of Anglo-American trading concerns, and the relative weakness of the central colonial (Spanish) government, than of purposive action by the colonial power.

To Be Continued…

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Philippines in the Pre-independence Time (1)

Spanish Colonial Rule
The Spaniards defined the Philippine nation geographically and introduced a centralized political and administrative system. In the absence of a language common to the entire archipelago, Spanish clerics translated the Christian doctrine into the various local vernaculars, thereby preserving, albeit with changes; the myriad indigenous languages. In turn, Philippine ethno-linguistic identities have persisted, competing with a national identity.
Although Spanish rule had vast cultural implications, its most important impacts were on the locus of social control and patterns of Philippine land tenure. As the most remote of the Spanish colonies, and in the absence of obvious mineral or other treasured resources, the principal roles of the Philippines in the Hispanic colonial order were as a transshipment point for galleon trade between Mexico and China and as a military outpost. Apart from Catholic missionaries, few Spaniards settled in the Philippines, and those who did were prohibited from residing outside of Manila until 1768. For much of the Spaniards period, there was no appreciable colonial development of domestic industries or agricultural resources. Nonetheless, the Spaniards were to have a profound influence on the evolution of land-tenure patterns.
The Spaniards sought to minimize the administrative costs of colonial governance in the Philippines, Spain’s most distant and poorly endowed colony. Colonial rule outside of Manila was founded on a limited bureaucracy, Catholic missionaries, a native constabulary, and the collaboration of traditional datus (village chiefs). In the position of pre-colonial datu, we see the historical origin of leadership tied to reciprocity and indebtedness. The datu was the “one most capable of securing the surplus with which to engage in a series of reciprocal exchanges with others in the community.” Other villages evidenced their deference to the datu through various behaviors, including contributing labor for cultivation, ritual, or military activities. For colonial convenience, the datus were accorded appreciably greater political status than had been their traditional right. With Spanish rule, the village social system was resituated in a complex bureaucracy, the authority of which was premised on royal and in turn divine patronage.
As part of the encomienda system—an arrangement whereby individual Spaniards were granted administrative jurisdiction over specified regions—the datus (renamed cabezas de barangay or more generically, caciques) were made responsible for local collection of the tribute, organization of conscript labor, and administration of justice. Encomenderos and caciques frequently abused these powers for purposes of personal gain, in turn occasioning continual peasant resistance and periodic peasant rebellion. These abuses were at odds with the idealized Spanish ideology of domination, providing a basis fo peasant radicalism linked to criticism of that ideology in its own terms. For their part, the colonial and local authorities repeatedly turned to the military for enforcement of the objectionable practices. In the absence of a large Spanish military force, these “police” actions were conducted by local constabularies consisting of native mercenaries from other regions of the country. This hiring practice both reflected and reinforced regional identities at the expense of national or class identities.

To Be Continued

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The Long Journey of Philippines

The transformation of Philippine society occasioned by colonial policies and the penetration of the world market economy, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had a lasting impact on Philippine cultural traditions and the nature of state-society relations. Spanish and later U.S., colonial policies dramatically recast land-tenure patterns. With the commercialization of agriculture came important changes in social mores and institutions, peasant survival strategies, and the strengthening of regional economy elites. The mode of colonial rule—indirect rule through collaborating elites—had equally important implications for elites-mass social relations and for patterns of social control.
Although there is continuing fluidity in the composition of the Philippine elite, many of the leading families first prospered under Spanish colonial rule and then consolidated their economic and political power under American colonial rule. While governmental authority was formally concentrated in Manila, local caciques strengthened their influence over local behavior, constraining the power of the state.
Philippine peasants have responded to the varying impacts of commercialization and Spanish, American, and Japanese rule with episodic rebellions, in addition to “everyday forms of peasant resistance.” This legacy and its cultural underpinnings are important to our understanding of present-day peasant activism and the role peasant-based organizations have played, and can play, in advancing redistributive reform in Philippines. One theme that runs through much of the analysis is the existence and persistence of powerful, crosscutting class and group cleavages in Philippine society. These cleavages make national reform of any sort problematic. One concern of the analysis, then, is the salience of various identities and cleavages in explaining the outcome of reform under the Aquino and Ramos regimes.
Philippine history is not characterized by a dominant or unifying cultural tradition of the type found in other Southeast Asian o East Asian countries. Since the fourteenth century, the Philippine people have felt the successive influence of Islamic, Spanish, American, and Japanese cultures. One consequence is the continuing search for a Philippine national identity, reflected both in scholarly work and in the nationalist appeals of a series of Philippine social and political movements. In recent decades, Philippine historians have reexamined their national history, rejected the dominant paradigms of colonial scholarship, and given new emphasis to the rule of the working class in the struggle for independence, and the harmful influence uncritical acceptance of an alien language and values has had on Filipino identity.
Nationalism was a prominent theme in the fight for independence from Spain, in the resistance to American intervention and conquest, in the rise of the Nacionalista Party during the commonwealth period, in the resistance to the Japanese occupation during World War II and most recently in the armed struggle of the Communist Party of the Philippines/New People’s Army (CPP/NPA). Yet even as Filipinos have sought a national identity, there have been important centrifugal forces—regional, linguistic, and religious—at work.

To Be Continued…

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Islam’s Basic Beliefs and Practices

A Muslim is one who believes that ‘there is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.” A Muslim worships one all-powerful and eternal deity, called Allah in Arabic, who revealed His will and His commandments to the prophet Muhammad of Mecca in the seventh century A.D. Those revelations are recorded in the Koran, the Holy Book of Islam.
Allah has no physical attributes. He has no age, no shape, no mother, no appetites; but neither is He an abstractions. He is an immediate and constant presence, cognizant of every person’s deeds and thoughts, aware of who follows His commands and who does not. Those commands require acceptance of Muhammad’s message, social justice, personal honesty, respect for others, and restraints of earthly desires, as well as the performance of devotional duties such as praying and fasting.
Islam (Is-Lam) is an Arabic word that means submission—submission to the will of God. Moslem, or Muslim, its participial form, means one who submits. The root is the same as that of the word for peace, salaam.
Because of God’s will is not to be determined by any human endeavor, no one, however devout and pious, can be sure of winning God’s favor. But no Muslim can doubt what God expects him to do in this life if he is to have any hope of being admitted to Paradise in the next: accept the one God and the message He sent though Muhammad, pray to Him, be honest, speak truthfully, practice mercy and charity, live modestly, avoid arrogance and slander, and defend the faith against unbelievers.
All rules of beliefs and conduct come from God through Muhammad. Men make laws in accordance with God’s commands, but there are no “commandments of the church, “as there are in Catholicism, because there is no church. Islam is not an organized religion in the sense that Catholicism is, because it is theoretically a faith without clergy, saints, hierarchy, or sacraments. No man stands between the believer and God.
A Muslim confesses directly to God. No man has the power to confer or withhold forgiveness, just as no man has the power to confer or withhold the membership in the community of believers. There is no sacramental entry into the faith. Because Islam does not espouse the doctrine of original sin, there is no rite of baptism to wash it away, and consequently no excommunication. Islam teaches that the sinner alone, the individual person and not his ancestors or descendants, is responsible for his actions; there is no inherited stain on the soul to be purged as a condition of entry into the faith.
The Koran, taken as the literal word of God, not written by Muhammad but only transmitted through him, is the fundamental, immutable source of Islamic doctrine and practice. A second source, inferior in authority but decisive on matters not specifically addressed in the Holy Book, is the sunna, “path,” the way of the Prophet, his example and teaching as expressed in his deeds and words. These words of Muhammad (as opposed to those of God uttered by Muhammad in the Koran) are recorded in the hadith (pronounced ha-DEETH), compilations of his utterance on religious practice, social affairs, and Koranic interpretation.
Islam, the youngest of the world’s major religions, originated in the seventh century with the life and mission of Muhammad, but it was not a totally new creed invented out of the blue. Its conceptual roots are in Judaism and Christianity. Muslims see their religion as a continuation and rectification of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Jewish scriptures and the prophetic mission of Jesus are incorporated by reference in the Koran. The Koran teaches that God, the same God known to the Arabians as Allah, favored Jews and Christians by revealing His truth to them in holy books, but they deviated from what was revealed and fell into error and corruption. Muslim believe there is and has always been since Abraham only one true religion, a consistent faith in the one omnipotent God, who from time to time has sent various messengers and prophets to reveal Himself to men and tell men what He expects of them.
These revelations were recorded in a hundred and four books, of which only four are extant: the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Gospels, and the Koran, given successively to Moses, David, Jesus, and Muhammad. No more are to be expected, as Muhammad was the last prophet and in the Koran, “all things are revealed.” Thus Islam is part of and traceable to the monotheistic tradition of Judaism and Christianity, and its ethical code is similar to that of Old Testament Judaism. Islam happens to be generally practiced by dark-skinned, impoverished peoples, whom Europeans in their colonial phase despised, but it is hardly the outlandish heathen cult depicted in European commentaries since the time of the Crusades.

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Towards A Pacific Peace: No Clash of Civilization

The assumed opposition between Western and Asian values is more of a political than a cultural issue. I see no ‘clash of civilization’ of the kind imagined by Samuel Huntington impending in East Asia (although Singapore’s senior minister Lee Kuan Yew suggest there may be racialist undertones in America’s attitude toward a resurgent China). Cultural differences between East Asia and West are not the critical determinants of politics, economics, or manners. As societies get more complex, they must increasingly be ruled by compromise and majority rule if society is to become both free and orderly. And to the extent that countries (East or West) accept these consensual methods, their political cultures will converge.

As political cultures converge, the differences between countries will arise largely from the civic values that specific cultures prize, and also from the deliberate efforts that East Asia’s modernizers are making, to avoid the mistakes the early modernizers in the West made; for example, in failing to restrain the egotism of individualistic capitalism, and in allowing both the deterioration of family ties and the extreme secularism of society and of human life.
China must be incorporated peacefully into this Pax Pacifica. Apart from military reach, economic impact, and political muscle, a superpower must have a message of worldwide relevance derived from an inner moral code of its own, defining a ‘shared standard of conduct as an example to others.’ The Asia-Pacific as a community must impress on China that military reach, economic impact, and political muscle by themselves can no longer command respect. Respect must be earned and China can deserve the region’s respect only if it has a message that transforms power into a leadership that commands moral legitimacy. How China behaves in Hong Kong, in the South China Sea, on Taiwan, and in Korea will define for the Philippines its message to the region and the world. In the past, states moved effortlessly from economic strength to military power and then to imperialism. But today no state need aspire to hegemony, because it can attain its goal of wealth and prestige through peaceful commerce and integration in the community of nations. The long-term objective should be to replace security arrangements based on the military balance with mutual security based on economic cooperation (on mutually beneficial trade and investment). A Pax Pacifica must be founded on the stability imposed not by any hegemonic power but on the peace of virtual equals: the product of security cooperation that comes from reasoning together.

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The Philippines and the Spratlys Dispute

The Chinese encroachment on Mischief Reef the Philippines regards as the concern of all the powers interested in the stability of the South China Sea and its strategic sea-lanes. The Philippine government sees no substitutes for consultations that produce a consensus among six littoral states claiming portions of the Spratlys. President Ramos has proposed demilitarizing the South China Sea and placing each disputed island under the stewardship of the claimant-country closest to it. The claimant states can then undertake multilateral ventures in oil expansion, marine research, fishing enterprises, joint policing, environmental protection, and so forth, perhaps under a joint development authority.
Chinese leaders have several times reassured the Philippines that China poses no threat to the growth and stability of the Asia-Pacific. But the Philippines is still not completely at ease in its bilateral relationship with China. It cannot reconcile Beijing’s avowals of neighborliness and friendship with its continued presence on Mischief Reef.

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The Special Philippine-U.S. Relationship

Since the 1900s the U.S. presence had insulated the Philippine state from disturbances to its social stability and shielded it against any sense of an outside threat. Successive generations of Filipino politicians manipulated the colonial relationship to their advantage, using Washington to prop up a corrupt and inefficient political and economic system. Now the free ride is over. From Washington’s point of view, the Philippines may have been reduced from a strategic ally to just another poor client in need of American benevolence. But both sides should welcome the evolution of the relationship to one governed by straightforward economic and strategic considerations.

Relations with the United States will remain a major aspect of Philippine foreign policy: the former colonial power remains the country’s top trading partner. But the Philippines now have the chance to design the course of this relationship if it develops a strong and outward-looking economy. U.S. resources will then come into the country no longer as handouts but as revenues from trade and tourism, and as direct investment, joint-venture capital, and commercial loans. And the Philippines should welcome even the winding-down of U.S. aid, because it forces the country to face up to structural reforms needed in the economy.
The bases for this new beginning are sound. The historical association of the two countries has resulted not only in a shared belief in liberal democracy but in a large and growing Filipino American community. By 1990 Filipinos had become the United States’ most numerous ethnic Asians. The Filipino American community is potentially important as a source of investment and a lobby for Filipino interest in Washington, D.C. It also ensures that for many Filipino families, Philippine relations with the United States will remain special whatever turn the official relationship may take.
And while it may be fashionable to belittle the representative system the Americans transplanted to the Philippines, ordinary Filipinos do put their faith in it. Walden Bello, a left-wing scholar inquiring into why the communist rebellion has become marginalized, found one reason to be “to continuing vitality of the tradition of formal democratic electoral politics as a source of political legitimacy, not only among the middle class but also the peasantry and workers.
If the new relationship is to prosper, Filipinos will of course have to soothe U.S. anxieties about the Philippines. These include commercial piracy and violation of intellectual property rights, and the country’s increasing role in trans-shipping narcotics to the American market. And security cooperation must mean more than the passive kind of dependence on the U.S. that the Philippines developed in the postcolonial period.

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The Spreading of Islam

As Islam spread, the dominant clan in Mecca, the Umayyad, saw the new faith which brought by Muhammad pbuh. as a threat to their political power and to their religious power held by controlling the polytheistic shrines at Ka'ba. As the religion spread, Muhammad grew to be further threatened by the Umayyads. Muhammad was perceived as a danger similar to the conditions in Yathrib, where two religions (Judaism and the Bedouin religion) fought for power. Because of the danger for Muhammad and his followers in Mecca, they left Mecca in favor of Yathrib. This event is known as the hijra. Muhammad was jubilantly welcomed in Yathrib, and the city was renamed "Medina", due to his ability to end the religious quarrels in the city. Islam spread rapidly in Medina, and became a center of the new faith. Muhammad's power grew in the city of Medina.

Under Muhammad's leadership, Medina strengthened in power and soon rivaled Mecca. Muslim raids on Meccan traders further endangered the Umayyads. The Quraysh fought with the Muslims in the mid-620s. In 628, Muhammad signed a peace treaty with the Umayyads. In 629, Muhammad and 10,000 converts returned to Mecca. Claiming to have proven the power of Allah, the shrine at Ka'ba was smashed. The Umayyads and others in Mecca converted to Islam in time. Muslim armies conquered most of Arabia by 633, further spreading Islam. Muslim armies soon conquered North Africa, Mesopotamia and Persia, significantly shaping the history of the world through the spread of Islam there.
Now, Islam is one of the biggest religions all over the world with some 1.5 billion adherents scattered in different countries. While the biggest adherents are in Asia hemisphere, Islam has already scattered in other region like Africa, Europe, and America. Almost we can say, there is no single land where Moslem do not exists. Despite the fact that some war was occurred, most of Islam spreading was done peacefully. Islam was built by strong faith and knowledge not by sword and blood. Have we read about the real history and teaching of Islam from Islamic literature before we read the history of Islam made by those who want put Islam in the corner and smashes it brutally?

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What does the Word “Muslim” Means To You?

A casual reader of the daily newspapers could be forgiven for thinking that the word “Muslim” is an adjective used to explain violent events in remote parts of the world that are otherwise incomprehensible.
“Muslim Militants” rebel in Algeria, “Muslim guerillas” battle each other in Afghanistan, “Muslim extremists” attack airliners in the Philippines, a British novelist lives in the shadow of a death sentence proclaimed by a “Muslim cleric,” “Muslim extremists” attack tourists in Egypt and seize power in Sudan.

It fosters the impression that Muslim (that is, those who practice the religion of Islam) are generally trouble-making fanatics whose penchant for working out religious conflict through violence is a menace to the rest of the world. It oversimplifies complex events in which religion is only one element. It validates the belief that Islam promotes violence, which is at best a half-truth. And it belittles Africans, Arabs, and Asians by imputing to them primitive or irrational motivation that we may not ascribe to the participants in violent upheavals in non-Muslim countries. Press accounts of the turmoil in El Salvador did not, for example, describe the rightwing hard-liners as “Christian extremists.”
Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam, embraces about one billion people of every face race, from Senegal to China, from Nigeria to the former Soviet Union, and more than six million Americans as well. All are Muslims, sharing common religious beliefs, but they vary widely in behavior. Most of them are not leftist or fanatics or revolutionaries or extremists. They cannot be stereotyped in the image of one race or one kind of political or social conduct. Certainly it is absurd to identify Islam with Arabs luxuriating in oil wealth. The vast majority of Muslims are not Arabs and not wealthy. The three biggest Muslim nations are Indonesia, with about 172 million Muslims; Pakistan, with 118 million; and Bangladesh, with 100 million. The list of countries of which the population is more than half Muslim includes Mali, Afghanistan, Malaysia, Albania, and of course, Iran—none of them Arab. And many Arabs in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine are Christian, not Muslims.
to be continued...

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You Get Ranked or You Get Bombarded

What is your first think if I mention name of some countries like Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Iran, and North Korea. You might think about the communist country, petrodollar, or nuclear energy. Yet all these countries share one thing in common: they prohibit or impose conditions on foreign investment and imports. That includes US investment and US exports. It would hardly be surprising that the US state, dominated by business interests, where the majority of cabinet members are, and have, for at least the past century, been corporate directors or members of corporate law firms, would be hostile to countries that interfere with, or prohibit, activities related to the accumulation of capital by US-based trans-nationals.
Accordingly, Iran prohibits private ownership of power generation, postal services, telecommunications and large-scale industry – hardly an inviting place for a foreign investor looking to expand his capital. Add to that the fact that Iran’s constitution severely restricts foreign ownership in the petroleum sector and mandates that the banking sector be state-owned. There’s also the reality that the government uses its ownership stake in over 1,500 companies to influence pricing to meet social policy (not trans-national profit-making) goals. Top these multiple crimes against the potential for fat profits with a trade policy that fosters the development of domestic industry by discouraging imports, and the conclusion is clear: Iran isn’t the kind of place a capitalist scouring the globe for markets and investment opportunities is going to warm up to.
So, is alarm over Iran acquiring the means to develop nuclear weapons, and Ahmadinejad’s reputed “violent anti-Semitism,” a cover for an effort to pry open the Iranian economy to move it up the Index of Economic Freedom?
To answer the question above, we can make an analogy toward Iraq. Before the US installed itself as the effective ruler of the country, Iraq had a largely state-owned economy, imposed restrictions on foreign ownership of key economic sectors, and subsidized necessities, such as fuel, cooking oil and staples, to meet social policy objectives. Like Iran today, Iraq had all the features of a largely closed, dirigiste economy, so richly at odds with the expansionary requirements of US capital. But Iraq, under US guidance, is in the midst of an economic makeover. State-owned enterprises are to be sold off. Subsidies for fuel and oil are being eliminated. The country is under the control of the IMF. Foreign investors are to be allowed to enter the state-run oil-export business, and promises are being made to open up downstream infrastructure, like refining, to private investors. (New York Times, August 11, 2005) So, yes, Iraq is being transformed from an economy much like Iran’s into one much like Hong Kong’s.
That’s one reason to believe that alarm over Iran is contrived, a cover for pursuing a new economic makeover project to benefit the economic elite of the US imperialist alliance. But there are others. Lay aside the monumental hypocrisy of rich, industrialized countries, some teeming with nuclear weapons, all with the capability of producing them, most with their own civilian nuclear power industries, demanding that Iran relinquish its right under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to independently develop nuclear power for civilian use. Ignore, too, that the same demands are not made of other less developed countries, higher on the index of economic freedom, and more accommodating to the profit-making interests of Western investors and trans-national corporations.

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Every Time, Every Second

Every time, every second
When you read this written, in every second that had passed
Every second, 8 million cells in your body are died
Every second, 8 million new cells are built to replace it
Every second, each cell creates about 2000 proteins
Every second, more than 2.5 million blood cells are produced in your body
Every second, your heart is pumps 83 cc blood
Every second, blood in main artery flew about 33cm
Every second, five thousands neuron cells built in fetus on mother womb
Every second, ten thousands signal transported from a single cell
Every second, four babies born
Every second, two people die
Every second, light from the moon reach your eyes
Every second, every photon particle which comes from the sun reach 300000 km far
Every second, 16 million tons of water vapor and lift up to the sky
Every second, 16 million tons of rain water drops to the earth
Every second, 616 million ton of hydrogen change into 612 million tons of helium
Every second, 100 thunder smashes earth

Have you think of all this?Had we done something for ourself or anyone else in our limitative time?Do it now...there is no word 'late' in doing something good except death..

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The Facts about Lion

In historic times the habitat of lions spanned the southern parts of Eurasia, ranging from Portugal to India, and most of Africa except the central rainforest-zone and the Sahara desert. Around the beginning of the current era, they died out from Western Europe, and they had become extinct in Greece by AD 100. In the Caucasus, their last European outpost, lions were found until the 10th century. Between the late 19th and early 20th century they also became extinct from North Africa and the Middle East. Now, most of the population lives in eastern and southern Africa, and their numbers are rapidly decreasing, estimated as between 16,000 and 30,000 living in the wild, down from an estimated 100,000 in the early 1990s. The population is even more in jeopardy because the remaining populations are often geographically isolated from each other, which causes inbreeding.
The Asiatic Lion (Panthera leo persica), which in historical times ranged from Turkey to India through Iran (Persia) and from the Caucasus to Yemen, was eradicated from Palestine by the Middle Ages and from most of the rest of Asia after the arrival of readily available firearms in the 18th century. In Iran the last lion was shot in 1942. The subspecies now survives only in and around the Gir Forest of northwestern India. About 300 lions live in a 1412 km² (558 square miles) sanctuary in the state of Gujarat, which covers most of the forest. Their numbers remain stable.
Until the late Pleistocene, lions were also found in the Americas and in northern Eurasia. The most famous of these prehistoric subspecies were the Cave Lion (Panthera leo spelaea) and the American Lion (Panthera leo atrox) (not to be confused with the Cougar, which is also known as the Mountain Lion). The oldest fossil record of cat, which strongly resembles a lion, is known from Laetoli in Tanzania and is perhaps 3.5 million years old. Some scientists identify the material as Panthera leo. However, these records are not well-substantiated, and all that can be said is that they pertain to a Panthera-like felid. The oldest confirmed records of Panthera leo in Africa are about 2 Ma younger. 700,000 years ago, Panthera leo appeared in Europe for the first time with the subspecies Panthera leo fossilis at Isernia in Italy. From this lion derived the later Cave lion (Panthera leo spelea), which appeared about 300,000 years ago. During the upper Pleistocene the lion spread to North and South America, and developed into Panthera leo atrox, the American lion. Lions were common in northern Eurasia and America during the upper Pleistocene, but died out there at the end of the last glaciation, about 10,000 years ago. Did you ever know those facts actually? Take it easy, I just know it too.

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Avatar: The Last Airbender

Avatar: The Last Airbender (also known as Avatar: The Legend of Aang in several countries) is an American animated television series that currently airs on the Nickelodeon television network. Set in an Asian-influenced world of martial arts and elemental magic, the series follows the adventures of the successor to a long line of Avatars, Aang, and his friends in their quest to save the world from the ruthless Fire Nation. The series is written in the form of a book series, with each episode serving as a "chapter" and each individual season as a "book." Originally slated to begin airing November of 2004, Avatar: The Last Airbender debuted on TV on February 21, 2005. Avatar: The Last Airbender is co-created/produced by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko at Nickelodeon Animation Studios in Burbank, California. It is animated in South Korea. The first episode of Avatar was created six years following its original conception, a period much longer than the norm for animated shows. While it was originally set to premier in November of 2004, the first episode of Avatar aired in February 2005. Following the conclusion of the first season of Avatar, Nickelodeon promptly ordered a second twenty-episode season that premiered on March 17, 2006, and concluded on December 1. A third season will begin airing in September 2007.
Avatar: The Last Airbender takes place in a fantasy world, home to humans, fantastic animals, and supernatural spirits. Human civilization is divided into four nations, the Water Tribes, the Earth Kingdom, the Air Nomads, and the Fire Nation. Within each nation, an order of men and women called "Benders" have the ability to manipulate their native element. These Bending arts combine a certain style of martial arts and elemental mysticism. The Bending types are Waterbending, Earthbending, Firebending, and Airbending.
In each generation, one person is capable of bending all four elements; this is the Avatar, the spirit of the planet manifested in human form. When the Avatar dies, he or she is reincarnated into an unborn baby native in the next nation in the Avatar Cycle, which parallels the seasons: winter for water, spring for earth, summer for fire, and autumn for air. While legend holds that the Avatar must master the elements in order, starting with their native element, this can sometimes be compromised when the situation requires it. Learning to bend the element opposite one's native element is extremely difficult because opposing Bending arts are based on opposing fighting styles and doctrines.
The Avatar possesses a unique power that resides within him or her, called the Avatar State. It is a defense mechanism that empowers the Avatar with the skills and knowledge of all the past Avatars. When the Avatar enters this state, his or her eyes and mouth begin to glow. The glow is the combination of all the Avatar's previous incarnations focusing their energy through his or her body. However, if the Avatar is killed in the Avatar State, then the reincarnation cycle will be broken, and the Avatar will cease to exist. Through the ages, countless incarnations of the Avatar have served to keep the four nations in harmony and maintain world order. The Avatar also serves as the bridge between the physical world and the Spirit World, home of the world's disembodied spirits.
(From Wikipedia, free encyclopedia)

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