Najmuddin Erbakan, Moulana Moududi and Hasan al Banna Shaheed

The departure of Najmuddin Erbakan (Necmettin Erbakan) is a great tragedy of our times. Najmuddin Erbakan could be truly called as the modern icon of Islamic Movement. He was a epoch making personality and one of the architects of modern history. The way vast multitudes of people thronged in his last journey and the way young and old, known and unknown people showered their love and affection towards their departed leader speaks volumes about the stature of the leader. It epitomises the overwhelming sway he held over the Islam loving people throughout the world. It also illustrates the deep impact he made throughout the Muslim world with his untiring struggle for the cause of Islam.

One of the famous poems of Allama Iqbal is Tulu Islam (The Rise of Islam). In it Allama succinctly and beautifully depicts the rise and renaissance of Islam throughout the world once again. The words mellow you. The poet of the East has listed out various factors leading to the renaissance of Islam in the world. One of the factors highlighted by the Allama is as follows:

Ataa momin ko phir dargaah-e-haq sey honay walaa hai

Shikoh-e-turkmaani, zahan hindi, nataq aaraabi

The Muslim is to be endowed again from the God’s  Court with

Turkman’s grandeur, Indian’s wisdom, Arab’s eloquence

The prophecy of the Allama had blossomed into reality soon after his demise. Moulana Syed Abul A'ala Moududi personified Zahan hindi (Wisdom of Indian) in the 20th century. Undoubtedly Moulana's real and major contribution could be termed as idealogical and intellectual contribution. He stimulated the intellect and presented the Islamic thought in its glorious form. At those times the critics of Islam were hell-bent in attacking Islam in all possible ways. Moulana effectively silenced them with his thought provoking, down to the earth and intellectually stimulating rejoinders. Besides he gave shape to the Islamic Idealogy and with his endeavours Islam rose to greater heights as an Ideological power house.


During the same period the Arab world witnessed the rise of two towering personalities viz Hasan al Banna Shaheed and Syed Qutb Shaheed in Egypt. These legendery leaders known for their superb communicaion skills, eloquence and power of speech mesmerised the Islamic world. They were the primary architects of Islamic renaissance in the Arab world.


Twentieth century witnessed Islamic revival in larger scale throughout the world. Infact it could be easily termed as the century in which Zahan Hindi (Wisdom of Indian) and Nataq A'arabi (Eloquence of Arab)  flourished and had lasting impact. The mammoth contribution of Moulana Moududi in the intellectual arena pointed to the dream of Allama Iqbal's Zahan Hindi (Wisdom of Indian). Similarly the emotional appeal and action packed contribution of Hasan al Banna and the Ikhwan symbolised Allama Iqbal's Nataq A'arabi. The beautiful and forceful convergence of Intellect and emotion triggered a new wave of Islamic Renaissance throughout the Islamic world. This new wave of synergy influenced and altered the course of the century.

The outcome of that synergy of intellect and emotion could be seen everywhere. Some eighty years back, Muslims were wary of revealing their Muslim identiy. They were diffident and hesitant to proclaim themselves as Muslims. But, today one can see mind boggling confidence and exuberance among the Muslims throughout the world.

The rise of Islam as the biggest force in the intellectual and idealogical world is one of the fruitful culmination of thes two great men. Infact Islam has emerged as the Idealogical super power of our times.
In this way the dream of Zahan Hindi and Nataq A'arabi of Allama Iqbal were fulfilled. Shikoh Turkmani was the one which needed to be fulfilled. And it take long time. It got culminated in the fag end of the twentieth century with the rise of Marhoom Najmuddin Erbakan as the symbol of Shikoh Turkmani. He gave new vigour and power to Islam and created shock and awe among the Baatil.

The role of the Turks had been significant in the entire history of Islam. They were in the forefront in propagating and safeguarding Islam. They had plaved a major role in the history of Islam. Allama Iqbal had symbolised the grandeur, dignity and respect as Shikoh. Turks had increased the grandeur to manifold.

The return of the Turks to the Islamic camp, I feel, is the biggest event of the twenty first century. And Najmuddin Erbakan had played a vital role in this historic turnaround.

What is Shikoh-e-Turkmani?

If you want to feel the impact of Shikoh-e-Turkmani just go through the numerous write-ups, comments and observations published in American and western magazines. They scream with the provocative heading "The return of Ottomans" and depict the shock and awe that has engulfed the western psyche.

If you want to feel the Shikoh-e-Turkmani go to You Tube and just see the mesmerising speech of Tayyip Erdogon which he delivered in the Summit held at Davos. He lambasts the Israelie Prime Minister.

From a speech delivered by Sadatullah Husseini in a Taziyati Function held at Hyderabad. 

Translated by T Azeez Luthfullah

To be continued.....

Deve Gowda, Allama Iqbal and a photo

 

Here in this photo an overly reverential party worker does not hesitate to show Janata Dal (Secular) national president H.D. Deve Gowda‘s his diving skills at a meeting of the party in Chikamagalur on Tuesday.

Allama Iqbal said:

Yeh ek sajda jise tu giraan samajtha hai!
hazaar sajde se deta hai aadmi ku najaat

You find it very labourious to submit and surrender before God
It will liberate you from thousands of prostration

Those who do not fear God, fear EVERYBODY AND EVERYTHING. Those who fear God alone. fear nothing. They don’t have the need to bow before other humanbeings.

Everest team forced to leave sick British climber to die

At one o'clock in the afternoon, the British climber Peter Kinloch was on the roof of the world, in bright sunlight, taking photographs of the Himalayas below, "elated, cheery and bubbly".

But Mount Everest is now his grave, because only minutes later, he suddenly went blind and had to be abandoned to die from the cold.

As the team descended, Mr Kinloch's guides noticed that he seemed to lose co-ordination. He would slip and stumble, then resume walking normally. After an hour, he made a surprising request to the team leader, David O'Brien, to be shown how to get down the ladders. At first he said he was having difficulty seeing, then he admitted that he could not see anything.

It took four hours for Mr O'Brien and a sherpa to help the stricken climber down to Mushroom Rock, barely 1,000ft below the summit. Two more sherpas arrived and for the next eight hours they all struggled to bring Mr Kinloch,28, down the mountain, administering drugs and oxygen. But they were now dangerously close to needing rescue themselves, and had to abandon him and struggled back into camp at 5.30am, exhausted and suffering from hypothermia and frostbite.

Mr Kinloch's body is still in Mount Everest's "death zone" and may never be recovered. He is the 30th climber to die on the mountain in the past five years. He died last Wednesday but the news was made public only yesterday, on the EverestNews website.

"Peter seemed to be a fit young Scotsman with an interesting life of experiences," one of his fellow climbers wrote. "On the way up the final obstacles, Peter was in good spirits, moving steadily and sure-footedly together with our team. Everyone was in fine spirits and good health.

"On the summit Peter was elated cheery and bubbly. Earlier, during the expedition, while dining with the team, he had said that climbing Everest would be the realisation of a dream. While standing atop Everest, Peter took summit photos with the team. Conditions were sunny, but extremely cold, windy, with blowing snow."

The IT specialist, who worked for Merseyside Police, had an ambition to climb the highest peak on each of the seven continents. He had conquered four. Everest, at 29,035ft, was the fifth. After that, he planned to tackle Carstensz Pyramid in Indonesia and Mount Vinson in Antarctica. His plan was that on every summit he would wear the team hat of Inverness Caledonian Thistle FC. He was using the climbs to raise awareness for the charity OCD Action, which aids people with obsessive compulsive disorder.

Dangers at Altitude

* Retinal haemorrhages – bleeding from the cells at the back of the eye – are a relatively common complaint of mountain climbers. High altitude causes the blood to thicken, increasing blood pressure, which can lead to the seepage of blood from cells into surrounding tissues.

* Some researchers have found that more than a quarter of climbers on an Everest expedition are affected by retinal haemorrhages. Normally, they are minor, with no noticeable effect on vision, and resolve themselves within weeks of a return to low altitudes. But in Peter Kinloch's case it appears the effects were acute and extreme, causing total loss of vision, which led to deadly consequences.

From Andy McSmith's article in The Independent 

Read More


Peter Kinloch is not the first climber to die at that snow laden mountains. Climbers have been dying there season after season. Way back in 2006 another mountaineer David Sharp was left to die there. When David Sharp was struggling with his life 40 climbers passed by. Nobody made any attempt to rescue him. For those climbers conquering Everest was paramount than saving a man struggling to live.
The callous behaviour of the climbers is not something new. The western civilisation is notorious for this attitude.

Allama Iqbal in his famous Madras lectures mentions one such instance. It was about a raging debate going on and on in one of the European dailies at those times. The daily had asked its readers to express their views in a touchy subject.

The Daily declared in its first page : "Let us assume that a big fire erupts in the historic museum. In a critical situation it so happens that an infant got caught in a room engulfed with fire. There was also a precious, timeless painting of great personality. You could here the wails of the crying infant too. But there is a twist. The fire fighters were in a position to save either the crying infant or the precious painting. They cannot save both. What should be the choice of the fire fighters? What would you do in such a situation?". Readers were asked to respond to this query.

The daily was flooded with hundreds of letters. Allama Iqbal laments that majority of them were in favour of rescuing the precious painting. Their line of thinking was, "You could always give birth to a child. But from where the hell could you bring such a priceless painting?". Allama Iqbal asserts that a Muslim's choice would always be to save other human beings. The Holy Quran declares that "He who saves a life shall be as if he had given life to all mankind" (5 : 32).

But for the western society a painting was more precious than a human life. This callous attitude shows itself time and again. The fact that David Sharp was left to die there and not even one of those 40 climbers prefered to help him over their desire to conquer the peak is an ample testimony to this bitter truth. God bless the mankind.

A love affair with Arabia

Allama Iqbal passionately believed in the Islamic renaissance and argued that the rejuvenation of the civilization that ruled the world for nearly a thousand years would start in its birthplace at the hands of desert Arabs.

Iqbal made the prediction at a time of great turmoil and utter chaos in the Muslim world after the collapse of the Ottoman caliphate. I’ve often wondered what exactly Iqbal had in mind when he pitched for the Arabs at a time when they seemingly offered no hope for optimism. Sir Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands offers the answer.

Thesiger’s book, reissued by Motivate to mark the centenary of the British traveller and explorer this year, is a powerful tribute to those Arabs and their way of life.   It is one of the finest books I’ve read and enjoyed in years – absolutely riveting even for someone who often finds himself reading up to three to four books at the same time. Thesiger is no great writer. He is completely innocent of the little games that modern travel writers play to make their book a best seller.  His language is matter-of-fact and tone dispassionate although there are some flashes of the self-deprecating British humour. Yet it remains a pioneering, trend-setting project to understand the Arabs, especially Bedu, their life style, culture and what makes them so different from the rest of us.  What makes Thesiger so eminently readable and his work a reference point to generations of travellers and Middle East experts is his genuine empathy for his subject and passion for a region where time has stood still for thousands of years. Or at least, it did until the discovery of oil.

While Muslims around the world hide a soft corner for Arabs in their hearts because of their association with the Prophet, the Arabs’ image around the world, especially in the West, is nothing to write home about. This is not a new phenomenon and has nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks or Shaikh Osama.  The demonisation of Arabs and Muslims in Western literature and culture is as old as the Crusades.  This is why Thesiger’s love for Arabs comes as a whiff of fresh air.

He saw the Arabs as the guardians of tradition and culture passed down for centuries in the region described as the Cradle of Civilization: “All that is best in the Arabs came from the desert: their deep religious instinct, their sense of fellowship; their generosity and hospitality; their dignity and the regard which they have for the dignity of others as fellow human beings; their humour, their courage and patience, their language and their passionate love of poetry. But the Arabs are a race which produces its best only under extreme hardship and deteriorates progressively as living conditions become easier.”

 It’s a miracle of history that the desert Arabs with the power of their new faith, created a new civilisation, uniting into one society the incompatible cultures of the Mediterranean, Persia, India and Far East.  He says: “Wherever I went among Muslims, whether it was in Nigeria or in China, I found much that was familiar to me in the pattern of their lives. If the civilizations of today were to disappear as completely as those of Babylon and Assyria, a school history book two thousand years hence might devote a few pages to the Arabs and not even mention the United States of America.”

Will the Arabs ever rediscover the qualities and the glory that once conquered the world? I don’t know about that but I wish this British love affair with Arabia would never end. 

From Aijaz Zaka Syed's article "A love affair with Arabia" in Khaleej Times. 

To read the full article click here.

Aijaz Zaka Syed is Opinion Editor of 
Khaleej Times. Write to him at 
aijaz@khaleejtimes.com