Much has been said with respect to Islam by those who are ardently opposed to it, without any real analysis or deep thought may I add. Yet there are others who are able to see its principles and teachings and weigh them against the (r)evolutionary course of human nature, as well as the continuous challenges of the context that we live in and the environment that surrounds us all. From this worldview, it becomes crystal clear that Islam as a “Way of Life” is suited to the inherent nature and yearning of man: to adopt higher principles of living and relating, to gain nearness to purity and piety in both thought and conduct, and to honour timeless values of justice, peace, fairness and neighbourliness. With the fullnes of time, these aspects will become further clear in the West, where champions of this call and its better practice will emerge more-so. Prince Charles is one such sensible champion, but there are many others..

Here is the trasncipt of this delivery by Prince Charles,

A speech by HRH The Prince of Wales titled Islam and the Environment, Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford
9th June 2010

Vice Chancellor,
Your Royal Highnesses,
Director,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a very great pleasure for me to be here today to help you celebrate the Oxford Centre’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Whereas bits of your Patron are dropping off after the past quarter of a century, I find quite a few bits of the Centre still being added! However, I cannot tell you how encouraged I am that in addition to the Prince of Wales Fellowship, the number of fellowships you now offer continues to grow and also that this Summer you will welcome the fifth group of young people on your Young Muslim Leadership programme which is run in association with my charities. This is a vital contribution to the process of boosting the self-esteem of young Muslims – about whom I care deeply.

It has been a great concern of mine to affirm and encourage those groups and faith communities that are in the minority in this country. Indeed, over the last twenty-five years, I have tried to find as many ways as possible to help integrate them into British society and to build good relationships between our faith communities. I happen to believe this is best achieved by emphasizing unity through diversity. Only in this way can we ensure fairness and build mutual respect in our country. And if we get it right here then perhaps we might be able to offer an example in the wider world.

I am slightly alarmed that it is now seventeen years since I came here to the Sheldonian to deliver a lecture for the Centre that tried to do just this. I called it “Islam and the West” and, from what I can tell, it clearly struck a chord, and not just here in the U.K. I am still reminded of what I said, particularly when I travel in the Islamic world – in fact, because it was printed, believe it or not, it is the only speech I have ever made which continues to produce a small return!

I wanted to give that lecture to address the dangers of the ignorance and misunderstanding that I felt were growing between the Islamic world and the West in the aftermath of the Cold War. Since then, the situation has both improved and worsened, depending on where you look. Certainly the sorts of advances made by the Oxford Centre have helped to build confidence and understanding, but we all know only too well how some of the things I warned of in that lecture have since come to pass, both here and elsewhere in the world. So it is tremendously important that we continue to work to heal the differences and overcome the misconceptions that still exist. I remain confident that this is possible because there are many values we all share that have the powerful capacity to bind us, rather than what happens when those values are forgotten – or purposefully ignored.

Healing division is also my theme today, but this time it is not the divisions between cultures I want to explore. It is the division that poses a much more fundamental threat to the health and well-being of us all. It is the widening division we are seeing in so many ways between humanity and Nature.

Many of Nature’s vital, life-support systems are now struggling to cope under the strain of global industrialization. How they will manage if millions more people are to achieve Western levels of consumption is highly disturbing to contemplate. The problems are only going to get much worse. And they are very real. Whatever you might have read in the newspapers, particularly about climate change in the run up to the Copenhagen conference last year, we face many related and very serious problems that are a matter of accurate, scientific record.

The actual facts are that over the last half century, for instance, we have destroyed at least thirty per cent of the world’s tropical rainforests and if we continue to chop them down at the present rate, by 2050 we will end up with a very disturbing situation. In fact, in the three years since I started my Rainforest Project to try and help find an innovative solution to tropical deforestation, over 30 million hectares have been lost, and with them this planet has lost about 80,000 species. When you consider that a given area of equatorial trees evaporates eight times as much rainwater as an equivalent patch of ocean, you quickly start to see how their disappearance will affect the productivity of the Earth. They produce billions of tonnes of water every day and without that rainfall the world’s food security will become very unstable.

But there are other facts too. In the last fifty years our industrialized approach to farming has degraded a third of the Earth’s top soil. That is a fact. We have also fished the oceans so extensively that if we continue at the same rate for much longer we are likely to see the collapse of global fisheries in forty years from now. Another fact. Then there are the colossal amounts of waste that pollute the Earth – the many dead zones where nothing can live in many major river estuaries and various parts of the oceans, or those immense rafts of plastic that now float about in the Pacific. Would you believe that one of them, off the coast of California, is made up of 100 million tonnes of plastic and it has doubled in size in just the last decade. It is now at least six times the size of the United Kingdom. And we call ourselves civilized!

These are all very real problems and they are facts – all of them, the obvious results of the comprehensive industrialization of life. But what is less obvious is the attitude and general outlook which perpetuate this dangerously destructive approach. It is an approach that acts contrary to the teachings of each and every one of the world’s sacred traditions, including Islam.

What surprises me, I have to say, is that, quite apart from whether or not we value the sacred traditions as much as we should, the blunt economic facts make the predominant approach increasingly irrational. I imagine that few of you are familiar with the interim report of the United Nations study called The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity Study which came out in 2008. It painted a salutary picture of what we lose in straightforward financial terms by our destruction of natural systems and the absence of their services to the world. In the first place they calculated that we destroy around 50 billion dollars worth of a system that produces these services every year. By mapping the loss of those services over a forty year period, their estimate is that, in financial terms, the global economy incurs an annual loss of between 2 and 4.5 trillion dollars – every single year.

To put that figure into some sort of perspective, the recent crash in the world’s banking system caused a one-off loss of just 2 trillion dollars. I wonder why the bigger annual loss does not attract the same kind of Media frenzy as the banking crisis did?

This should demonstrate the flaw in the sum that does not need an Oxbridge mathematician to understand – that Nature’s finite resources, divided by our ever-more rapacious desire for continuous economic growth, does not work out. We are clearly living beyond our means, already consuming the Earth’s capital resources faster than she can replenish them.

Over the years, I have pointed out again and again that our environmental problems cannot be solved simply by applying yet more and more of our brilliant green technology – important though it is. It is no good just fixing the pump and not the well.

When I say this, everybody nods sagely, but I get the impression that many are often unwilling to embrace what I am really referring to, perhaps because the missing element sits outside the parameters of the prevailing secular view. It is this “missing element” that I would like to examine today.

In short, when we hear talk of an “environmental crisis” or even of a “financial crisis,” I would suggest that this is actually describing the outward consequences of a deep, inner crisis of the soul. It is a crisis in our relationship with – and our perception of – Nature, and it is born of Western culture being dominated for at least two hundred years by a mechanistic and reductionist approach to our scientific understanding of the world around us.

So I would like you to consider very seriously today whether a big part of the solution to all of our worldwide “crises” does not lie simply in more and better technology, but in the recovery of the soul to the mainstream of our thinking. Our science and technology cannot do this. Only sacred traditions have the capacity to help this happen.

In general, we live within a culture that does not believe very much in the soul anymore – or if it does, won’t admit to it publicly for fear of being thought old fashioned, out of step with “modern imperatives” or “anti-scientific.” The empirical view of the world, which measures it and tests it, has become the only view to believe. A purely mechanistic approach to problems has somehow assumed a position of great authority and this has encouraged the widespread secularisation of society that we see today. This is despite the fact that those men of science who founded institutions like the Royal Society were also men of deep faith. It is also despite the fact that a great many of our scientists today profess a faith in God. I am aware of one recent survey that suggests over seventy per cent of scientists do so.

I must say, I find this rather baffling. If this is so, why is it that their sense of the sacred has so little bearing on the way science is employed to exploit the natural world in so many damaging ways?

I suppose it must be to do with who pays the fiddler. Over the last two centuries, science has become ever more firmly yoked to the ambitions of commerce. Because there are such big economic benefits from such a union, society has been persuaded that there is nothing wrong here. And so, a great deal of empirical research is now driven by the imperative that its findings must be employed to maximum, financial effect, whatever the impact this may have on the Earth’s long-term capacity to endure.

This imbalance, where mechanistic thinking is so predominant, goes back at least to Galileo’s assertion that there is nothing in Nature but quantity and motion. This is the view that continues to frame the general perception of the way the world works and how we fit within the scheme of things. As a result, Nature has been completely objectified – “She” has become an “it” – and we are persuaded to concentrate on the material aspect of reality that fits within Galileo’s scheme.

Understanding the world from a mechanical point of view and then employing that knowledge has, of course, always been part of the development of human civilization, but as our technology has become ever more sophisticated and our industrialized methods so much more powerful, so the level of destruction is now potentially all the more widespread and un-containable, especially if you add into this mix the emphasis we have on consumerism.

It was that great scientist, Goethe, who saw life as the masculine principle striving endlessly to reach the “eternal feminine” – what the Greeks called “Sophia,” or wisdom. It is a striving, he said, fired by the force of love. I am not sure that this is quite the way things happen today. Our striving in the industrialized world is certainly not fired by a love of wisdom. It is far more focussed on the desire for the greatest possible financial profit.

This ignores the spiritual teachings of traditions like Islam, which recognize that it is not our animal needs that are absolute; it is our spiritual essence, an essence made for the infinite. But with consumerism now such a key element in our economic model, our natural, spiritual desire for the infinite is constantly being reflected towards the finite. Our spiritual perspective has been flattened and made earthbound and we are persuaded to channel all of our natural, never-ending desire for what Islamic poets called “the Beloved” towards nothing but more and more material commodities. Unfortunately we forget that our spiritual desire can never be completely satisfied. It is rightly a never-ending desire. But when that desire is focussed only on the earthly, it becomes potentially disastrous. The hunger for yet more and more things creates an alarming vacuum and, as we are now realizing, this does great harm to the Earth and creates a never ending unhappiness for many, many people.

I hope you can just begin to see my point. The utter dominance of the mechanistic approach of science over everything else, including religion, has “de-souled” the dominant world view, and that includes our perception of Nature. As soul is elbowed out of the picture, our deeper link with the natural world is severed. Our sense of the spiritual relationship between humanity, the Earth and her great diversity of life has become dim. The entire emphasis is all on the mechanical process of increasing growth in the economy, of making every process more “efficient” and achieving as much convenience as possible. None of which could be said to be an ambition of God. And so, unfashionable though it is to suggest it, I am keen to stress here the need to heal this divide within ourselves. How else can we heal the divide between East and West unless we reconcile the East and West within ourselves? Everything in Nature is a paradox and seems to carry within itself the paradox of opposites. Curiously, this maintains the essential balance. Only human beings seem to introduce imbalance. The task is surely to reconnect ourselves with the wisdom found in Nature which is stressed by each of the sacred traditions in their own way.

My understanding of Islam is that it warns that to deny the reality of our inner being leads to an inner darkness which can quickly extend outwards into the world of Nature. If we ignore the calling of the soul, then we destroy Nature. To understand this we have to remember that we are Nature, not inanimate objects like stones; we reflect the universal patterns of Nature. And in this way, we are not a part that can somehow disengage itself and take a purely objective view.

From what I know of the Qu’ran, again and again it describes the natural world as the handiwork of a unitary benevolent power. It very explicitly describes Nature as possessing an “intelligibility” and that there is no separation between Man and Nature, precisely because there is no separation between the natural world and God. It offers a completely integrated view of the Universe where religion and science, mind and matter are all part of one living, conscious whole. We are, therefore, finite beings contained by an infinitude, and each of us is a microcosm of the whole. This suggests to me that Nature is a knowing partner, never a mindless slave to humanity, and we are Her tenants; God’s guests for all too short a time.

If I may quote the Qu’ran, “Have you considered: if your water were to disappear into the Earth, who then could bring you gushing water?” This is the Divine hospitality that offers us our provisions and our dwelling places, our clothing, tools and transport. The Earth is robust and prolific, but also delicate, subtle, complex and diverse and so our mark must always be gentle – or the water will disappear, as it is doing in places like the Punjab in India. Industrialized farming methods there rely upon the use of high-yielding seeds and chemical fertilizers, both of which need a lot more energy and a lot more water as well. As a consequence the water table has dropped dramatically – I have been there, I have seen it – so far, by three feet a year. Punjabi farmers are now having to dig expensive bore holes over 200 feet deep to get at what remains of the water and, as a result, their debts become ever deeper and the salt rises to the surface contaminating the soil.

This is not a sustainable way of growing food and maintaining the well-being of communities. It does not respect Divine hospitality. The costs it incurs will have to be borne by those who will inherit what is fast becoming the ruined and frayed fabric of life. So for their sake, we have to acknowledge that the immediate, short-term financial benefits of our predominant, mechanistic approach are too expensive to continue to dominate our way of life.

This happens when traditional principles and practices are abandoned – and with them, all sense of reverence for the Earth which is an inseparable element in an integrated and spiritually grounded tradition like Islam – just as it was once firmly embedded in the philosophical heritage of Western thought. The Stoics of Ancient Greece, for instance, held that “right knowledge,” as they called it, is gained by living in agreement with Nature, where there is a correspondence or a sympathy between the truth of things, thought and action. They saw it as our duty to achieve an attunement between human nature and the greater scheme of the Cosmos.

This incidentally is also the teaching of Judaism. The Book of Genesis says that God placed Mankind in the garden “to tend it and take care of it,” to serve and conserve it for the sake of future generations. “Adamah” in Hebrew means “the one hewn from the Earth,” so Adam is a child of the Earth. In my own tradition of Christianity, the immanence of God is made explicit by the incarnation of Christ. But let us also not forget that throughout the Christian New Testament, Christ often refers to Himself as “the Son of Man” which, in Hebrew, is “Ben Adam.” He, too, is a “son of the Earth,” surely making the same explicit connection between human nature and the whole of Nature.

Even the apocryphal Gnostic texts are imbued with the same principle. The fragments of one of the oldest, ascribed to Mary Magdalene, instructs us that “Attachment to matter gives rise to passion against Nature. Thus, trouble arises in the whole body; this is why I tell you; be in harmony.” In all cases the message is clear. Our specific purpose is to “earth” Heaven. So, to separate ourselves within an inner darkness, leads to what the Irish poet, WB Yeats, warned of at the start of the Twentieth Century. “The falcon cannot hear the falconer,” he wrote, “things fall apart and the centre cannot hold.”

The traditional way of life within Islam is very clear about the “centre” that holds the relationship together. From what I know of its core teachings and commentaries, the important principle we must keep in mind is that there are limits to the abundance of Nature. These are not arbitrary limits, they are the limits imposed by God and, as such, if my understanding of the Qu’ran is correct, Muslims are commanded not to transgress them.

Such instruction is hard to square if all you do is found your understanding of the world on empirical terms alone. Four hundred years of relying on trying and testing the facts scientifically has established the view that spirituality and religious faith are outdated expressions of superstitious belief. After all, empiricism has proved how the world fits together and it is nothing to do with a “Supreme Being.” There is no empirical evidence for the existence of God so, therefore, Q.E.D, God does not exist. It is a very reasonable, rational argument, and I presume it can be applied to “thought” too. After all, no brain scanner has ever managed to photograph a thought, nor a piece of love, and it never will. So, Q.E.D., that must mean “thought” and “love” do not exist either!

Clearly there is a point beyond which empiricism cannot make complete sense of the world. It works by establishing facts through testing them by the scientific process. It is one kind of language and a very fine one, but it is a language not able to fathom experiences like faith or the meaning of things – it is not able to articulate matters of the soul. This is why it consistently elbows soul out of the picture.

But we do have other kinds of “language,” as Islam well knows, and they are much better at dealing with the realm of the soul and matters of meaning. Each is a different aspect of our language, in fact. Each deals with different aspects of the truth and if you put empiricism, philosophy and the spiritual perception of life together, just as the Islamic tradition at its best and richest has always done, then they tend to complement each other rather well.

Take the difference this made in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries, as an example, during the so-called “Golden Age of Islam.” It was a period which gave rise to a spectacular flowering of scientific advancement, but all of it was underpinned by an age-old philosophical understanding of reality and grounded in a profound spirituality, which included a deep reverence for the Natural world. Theirs was an integrated vision of the world, reflecting the timeless truth that all life is rooted in the unity of the Creator. This is the testimony of faith, is it not, embodied in the contemplative implication of the formless essence of the Qur’an’s haqîqa? It is the notion of Tawhîd, the oneness of all things within the embrace of the Divine unity.

Islamic writers express it so well. Ibn Khaldûn, for instance, who taught that “all creatures are subject to a regular and orderly system. Causes are linked to effects where each is connected with the other.” Or the great Shabistâri in Fourteenth Century Persia, who talked of the world being “a mirror from head to foot, in every atom a hundred blazing suns where a world dwells in the heart of a millet seed.” Words that resonate, don’t you think, with William Blake’s famous lines, “to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower.”

Other Western poets have captured this truth too. William Wordsworth, perhaps one of the greatest of all our Nature poets, describes “a sense sublime of something far more inter-fused… a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of thought and rolls through all things.” I quote the poets because they help us identify this “sense sublime” and inspire reverence for the created world.

Reverence is not science-based knowledge. It is an experience always mediated by love, sometimes induced by it; and love comes from relationship. If you take away reverence and reduce our spiritual relationship with life, then you open yourself up to the idea that we can be little more than a chance group of isolated, self-obsessed individuals, disconnected from life’s innate presence and un-anchored by any sense of duty to the rest of the world. We are free to act without responsibility. Thus we turn a blind eye to those islands of plastic in the sea, or to the treatment meted out to animals in factory farms. And it is why the so-called “precautionary principle” is so often thrown out of the window.

This is the principle that would make us think twice if, say, we were to climb into a vehicle that happens to have a ninety per cent chance of crashing. Instead, because the danger is not proven beyond doubt, we think it is safe to embark upon the journey. This is how we proceed in many significant fields – in matters like genetic modification or climate change. We go on denying that there may be side-effects, even if our intuition warns us to be cautious, or even if there is some related evidence. Recently, for instance, the news emerged that, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of honey bee colonies in the United States failed to survive the Winter. More than three million colonies in the U.S. and billions of honeybees worldwide have died. Scientists say they are no nearer to knowing what is causing this catastrophic collapse, but there is plenty of evidence that modern pesticides have played their part. Given that bees, like nearly every other bug, are insects, I would have thought it was rather obvious. And yet we carry on with a narrow-minded, mechanistic approach to industrialized farming with all its focus on high yields at whatever price. So we lace the fields with pesticides that kill insects. It is quite bizarre how we continue to entrust our food security to the very substances that are destroying the harmonic cycle which produces our food. It really is a form of collective hubris and I often wonder if those who practise such well-exercised scepticism in these matters will ever see that “the Emperor is wearing no clothes?”

This, then, is why the wisdom and learning offered by a sacred tradition like Islam matters – and, if I may say so, why those who hold and strive to preserve their sacred traditions in different parts of the world have every reason to become more confident of their ground. The Islamic world is the custodian of one of the greatest treasuries of accumulated wisdom and spiritual knowledge available to humanity. It is both Islam’s noble heritage and a priceless gift to the rest of the world. And yet, so often, that wisdom is now obscured by the dominant drive towards Western materialism – the feeling that to be truly “modern” you have to ape the West.

To counter that tendency I have done what I can with my School of Traditional Arts to nurture and support traditional and sacred craft skills – not least those of Islam – because they keep alive a perspective that we sorely need, even though short-term fashion deems them to be irrelevant. The geometry and patterning that are taught at the School are the basis of the many crafts that have been all but abandoned in many parts of the world, including the Islamic world. It is a tragedy of monumental proportions that they are being forgotten because they reflect the spiritual mathematics found everywhere in Nature. As Islam teaches very specifically, it is a patterning that reflects the very ground of our being. It is the Divine imagination, so to speak; the ineffable presence that is the sacred breath of life. As the Seventeenth Century mystic, Ibn Âshir, puts it, by the practice of these arts you “see the One who manifests in the form, not the form by itself.”

For many in the modern world this is hard to understand because the view of God has become so distorted. “God” is seen as being, somehow, outside “His” creation, rather than part of its unfolding – what the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, called “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” Being the principle that underlines the Cosmos, the Cosmos is the result of God knowing it and of it knowing the uncreated God. Notice the emphasis there on “un”-created. It is of profound importance. The basis of all existence is in this relationship.

I suspect the reason why this is such an unfashionable view is that the deep-seated experience of participation in the living, creative presence of God is offered to us in all traditions not by empiricism, but by revelation. This is a rare and precious gift and only given to those whose supreme humanity and capacity for great humility achieves a mastery over the ego. It comes at the moment when “the knower and the known” become one – the moment when the mind of Man comes into union with the mind of God.

This, of course, is not deemed possible from an empirical point of view, but revelation is a very different kind of knowing from scientific, evidence-based knowledge, and I cannot stress the point strongly enough; by dismissing such a process and discarding what it offers to humankind, we throw away a very important lifeline for the future.

I must say, once you do blend the different languages – the empirical and the spiritual together as I am suggesting, and as I have been trying to say for so long – then you do begin to wonder why the sceptics think the desire to work in harmony with Nature is so unscientific. Why is it deemed so worthwhile to abandon our true relationship with the “beingness” of all things; to limit ourselves to the science of manipulation, rather than immerse ourselves in the wider science of understanding? They seem such spurious arguments, because, as Islam clearly understands, it is actually impossible to divorce human beings from Nature’s patterns and processes. The Qur’an is considered to be the “last Revelation” but it clearly acknowledges which book is the first. That book is the great book of creation, of Nature herself, which has been taken too much for granted in our modern world and needs to be restored to its original position.

So, with all this in mind, I would like to set you a challenge, if I may; a challenge that I hope will be conveyed beyond this audience today. It is the challenge to mobilize Islamic scholars, poets and artists, as well as those craftsmen, engineers and scientists who work with and within the Islamic tradition, to identify the general ideas, the teachings and the practical techniques within the tradition which encourage us to work with the grain of Nature rather than against it. I would urge you to consider whether we can learn anything from the Islamic culture’s profound understanding of the natural world to help us all in the fearsome challenges we face. Are there, for instance, any that could help preserve our precious marine eco-systems and fisheries? Are there any traditional methods of avoiding damage to all of Nature’s systems that revive the principle of sustainability within Islam?

To give you an idea of what I mean, let me offer a few examples drawn from the work done by my School of Traditional Arts, where project workers have shown that re-introducing traditional craft skills brings a coherence to peoples’ daily lives, perhaps because they fuse the spiritual with the practical.

Since I founded it, the School has helped restore these skills in places as far afield as Jordan and Nigeria. It also helps to build bridges within communities in this country which have suffered the worst fractures. In Burnley in Lancashire, for instance, project workers have been teaching children from many backgrounds an integrated view of the world using the patterns of Islamic sacred geometry. This has not just inspired the imagination of the children taking part, but their teachers too. They tell me they have discovered a much more integrated approach to education, where maths and art are not alien to one another, but are seen as two sides of the same coin and directly rooted in Nature’s patterns and processes.

In Afghanistan, I have only recently managed to see the work being done under the umbrella of what we have called “the Turquoise Mountain Foundation” – an initiative I launched some four years ago – which is running similar education programmes and craft training courses. It is also helping with the urban regeneration of the old historic quarter of the city by guiding people to start businesses using the craft skills they have learned.

For example, in the building of schools, people are being shown how to use mud-bricks which are a quarter of the price of the concrete blocks used by other agencies. They are also resistant to earthquakes, whereas concrete is not. And they cope much better with extremes of temperature – mud-brick buildings are cooler in the Summer and warmer in the Winter. What is more, they use local labour and local, natural materials. So these schools are a good example of how traditional wisdom blends with modern needs. After all, you can still use computers and other modern technology in a mud-brick building! And more comfortably, too, given it is more suited to local conditions.

When I finally did manage to reach Kabul earlier this year – after several years of trying – what I saw was truly remarkable. It proved to me that teaching and employing traditional crafts is an effective way of re-introducing the kinds of techniques that are benign to the natural environment. They are also capable of restoring a cultural balance in peoples’ minds. By encouraging a wider celebration of the traditional, ancient culture of Afghanistan, these skills help in a very practical way to counteract the oppressive effects of extremism in all its forms, both religious and secular. This is how traditional wisdom works. It is not a theory or a science written down. Its wisdom is discovered through practice and in action.

These are schemes that are close to my heart, but the Oxford Centre keeps me informed of many others. Working in Muslim countries, the World Wildlife Fund has found that trying to convey the importance of conservation is much easier if it is transmitted by religious leaders whose reference is Qur’anic teaching. In Zanzibar, they had little success trying to reduce spear-fishing and the use of dragnets, which were destroying the coral reefs. But when the guidance came from the Qur’an, there was a notable change in behaviour. Or in Indonesia and in Malaysia, where former poachers are being deterred in the same way from destroying the last remaining tigers.

And it is not just such interventions that are important. It is mystifying, for instance, that the modern world completely ignores the time-honoured feats of engineering in the ancient world. The Qanats of Iran, for example, that still provide water for thousands of people in what would otherwise be desert conditions. These underground canals – unbelievably 170,000 miles of them – keep the water from the mountains moving down the tunnels using gravity alone. And the water in every village is then kept fresh by the way the storage towers keep the air flowing freely, moved by the wind.

In Spain, the irrigation systems constructed 1200 years ago also still work perfectly, as does the way in which the water is managed by the local population – a way of operating devised before the Muslim rule in Spain disintegrated. The same sorts of Islamic management schemes operate in other parts of the world too, like the “hima” zones in Saudi Arabia which set aside land for use as pasture. These are all examples of how prophetic teaching, in this case framed by the guidance of the Qu’ran, maintains a long term view of things and keeps the danger of a self-interested form of short-term economics at bay.

I am sure that if an organization like the Oxford Centre could help to establish a global forum on “Islam and the Environment” many more very practical, traditional approaches like these could become more widely applied. They may range from science and technology to agriculture, healthcare, architecture and education. Think what could be achieved if mothers and fathers, the teachers in madrassas and Imams, all sought to demonstrate to children how to translate Islamic teachings into practical action – how to blend traditional knowledge and awareness of Nature’s needs with the best of what we know now.

This is certainly something I feel we have to do in the one final issue I have to mention as I close. Perhaps a few facts and figures might demonstrate why.

When I was born in 1948, a city like Lagos in Nigeria had a population of just three hundred thousand. Today, just over sixty years later, it is home to twenty million. Thirty-five thousand people live in every square mile of the city, and its population increases by another six hundred thousand every year.

I choose Lagos as an example. I could have chosen Mumbai, Cairo or Mexico City; wherever you look, the world’s population is increasing fast. It goes up by the equivalent of the entire population of the United Kingdom every year. Which means that this poor planet of ours, which already struggles to sustain 6.8 billion people, will somehow have to support over 9 billion people within fifty years. In the Arab world, sixty per cent of the population is now under the age of thirty. That will mean, in some way or other, 100 million new jobs will have to be created in that region alone over the next ten to fifteen years.

I am well aware that the very long term prediction is that population may go down. 150 years from now the trends suggest there may be as few as four billion people, maybe even just two billion, but there is no getting away from the fact that in the short term, in the next fifty years, we face monumental problems as the figures rocket. No mega-city can ever hope to catch up with the present expansion in their numbers to provide adequate healthcare, education, transport, food and shelter for so many. Nor can the Earth herself sustain us all, when the demands and pressures on her bounty worldwide are becoming so intense.

I know it is a complicated issue. The experts suggest that, in theory, the Earth could support 9 billion people, but not if a vast proportion is consuming the world’s resources at present Western levels. So the changes have to be essentially two-fold. It would certainly help if the acceleration slowed down, but it would also help if the world reduced its desire to consume.

I have been following carefully the findings of my British Asian Trust in India which has been helping to run a women’s education project in a drought-prone region of Maharashtra called Satara. They have noticed that a real difference can be made when women are able to become more involved in the running of the community. This is also the experience in Bangladesh. I have long been fascinated by Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank of Bangladesh. It operates micro-credit schemes that offer loans to the poorest communities through a bank which is now ninety per cent owned by the rural poor. Interestingly, where the loans are managed by the women of the community, the birth rate has gone down. The impact of these sorts of schemes, of education and the provision of family planning services, has been widespread. Whereas in the 1980s, the average family in Bangladesh had six children, now the average figure is three. But with mega-cities growing as they are, I fear there is little chance these sorts of schemes can help the plight of many millions of people unless we all face up to the fact more honestly than we do that one of the biggest causes of high birth rates remains cultural.

It raises some very difficult moral questions, I know, but do we not each one of us carry the same responsibility towards the Earth? It is surely time to ask if we can come to a view that balances the traditional attitude to the sacred nature of life on the one hand with, on the other, those teachings within each of the sacred traditions that urge humankind to keep within the limits of Nature’s benevolence and bounty.

Ladies and gentlemen, you have endured all this with patience and fortitude. You have also given a very good impression of listening to my own personal thoughts on the perspective opened up by Islamic teaching. I have wanted to convey them to you because it always moves me to be reminded that, from the perspective of traditional Islamic teaching, the destruction of the Earth is represented as the destruction of a prayerful being.

Whichever faith tradition we come from, the fact at the heart of the matter is the same. Our inheritance from our Creator is at stake. It will be no good at the end of the day as we sit amidst the wreckage, trying to console ourselves that it was all done for the best possible reasons of development and the betterment of Mankind. The inconvenient truth is that we share this planet with the rest of creation for a very good reason – and that is, we cannot exist on our own without the intricately balanced web of life around us. Islam has always taught this and to ignore that lesson is to default on our contract with Creation.

The Modernist ideology that has dominated the Western outlook for a century implies that “tradition” is backward looking. What I have tried to explain today is that this is far from true. Tradition is the accumulation of the knowledge and wisdom that we should be offering to the next generation. It is, therefore, visionary – it looks forward.

Turning to the traditional teachings, like those found in Islam that define our relationship with the natural world, does not mean locking us into some sort of cultural and technological immobility. As the English writer G.K. Chesterton put it, “real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them as a root.” I would also remind you of the words of Oxford’s very own C.S. Lewis, who pointed out that “sometimes you do have to turn the clock back if it is telling the wrong time” – that there is nothing “progressive” about being stubborn and refusing to acknowledge that we have taken the wrong road. If we realize that we are travelling in the wrong direction, the only sensible thing to do is to admit it and retrace our steps back to where we first went wrong. As Lewis put it, “going back can sometimes be the quickest way forward.” It is the most progressive thing we could do.

All of the mounting evidence is telling us that we are, indeed, on the wrong road, so you might think it would be wise to draw on the timeless guidance that comes from our intuitive sense of the origin of all things to which we are rooted. Nature’s rhythms, her cycles and her processes, are our guides to this uncreated, originating voice. They are our greatest teachers because they are expressions of Divine Unity. Which is why there is a profound truth in that seemingly simple, old saying of the nomads – that “the best of all Mosques is Nature herself.”

So as I have maintained, any person would be much better off by developing an Eye of Veneration, so that the essence of all organic things is sensed for what it acutally is: transitory and purposeful; inter-dependent and sublime.

For Continued ‘Correct’ Success and ‘True’ Contentment,

Asad R Khan

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The son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett has an old-world spiritual message for today’s money-rich parents: teach your children values and do not give them everything they want.

Musician and now author Peter Buffett preaches the message in his new book “Life is What You Make it: Finding Your Own Path to Fulfillment”. Recently released in the United States, it describes how he wound up a “normal, happy” person instead of a spoiled child to one of the world’s richest people.

Buffett, 52, teaches the rewards of self-respect and pursuing one’s own passions and accomplishments rather than buying into society’s concepts of material wealth.

“I am my own person and I know what I have accomplished in my life,” he said. “This isn’t about wealth or fame or money or any of that stuff, it is actually about values and what you enjoy and finding something you love doing.”

People who are born with a silver spoon in their mouth can fall victim to what Buffett said his father has called a “silver dagger in your back,” which leads to a sense of entitlement and a lack of personal achievement.

“Entitlement is the worst thing ever and I see entitlement coming in many guises,” he said. “Anybody who acts like they deserve something ‘just because,’, is a disaster.”

But Buffett wasn’t always this wise. His own family gave him $90,000 (59,840 pounds) in stock when he was 19, a small sum from such immense financial wealth. After studying at Stanford University, he moved to San Francisco and lived in a studio apartment with just enough room for his musical instruments.

“I was really searching,” he said, adding that he began his musical career by working for free writing music for a local television station.

“I was kind of lost, but trying to find myself. It was definitely this strange period where I didn’t really know where I was going,” he said.

LOOKING AT THE BIG PICTURE

As well his musical passions, the values taught to him growing up and a sense of a bigger picture in life stayed with him during those trying times, he said.

“I was not only not handed everything as a kid, I was shown that there are lots of other people out there with very different circumstances,” he said.

Although many people he encounters assume that his father wanted him to go into finance, he said his father accepted his choice to become a musician beginning with commercials then his own albums and composing for television shows and films.

“It was encouraged for a moment when I was open to the idea,” he said about pursuing finance. But he added that as he grew older, it became clear the financial world “was not speaking to my heart.”

Along with the book, Buffett has embarked on a “Concert & Conversation” tour in which he plays the piano, talks about his life and warns against consumerist culture and damaging the environment.

He said he eventually inherited more money after his mother died in 2004, but by then he had learned his lessons. Now he works on giving back to the world — another of his life philosophies — which includes through working for his father’s NoVo charitable foundation.

“Economic prosperity may come and go; that’s just how it is,” he writes in the book. “But values are the steady currency that earn us the all-important rewards.”

(editing by Bob Tourtellotte)

I’m glad he’s found his own way to an enlightened path.

For continued Success & Contentment,

Asad Khan

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As we are in the season for sharing gifts and kind words, especially with ones who are near and dear to us, I thought what would be better than us knowing more about some of the names, virtues and characteristics of our amazing and beloved Creator? After all, anytime we refer our issues to Him, the Wisest and most Merciful that He is, then our issues automatically dissipate into a vast nothingness when we truly rely on Him to resolve them for us. So, we cared to pick Al-Ghazali’s translation and interpretation on the meaning of some these Glorious Names, so that we can appreciate them even more, from his rendering “The Ninety Nine Beautiful Names of God“, and typed here by Shanaz Ali:-

Al-Hasib [41] - The Reckoner- is the one who suffices, for He is all one needs who belongs to Him. God- may He be praised and exalted-is the measurer of every single thing and the one who suffices for it. And it is inconceivable that this attribute, in its essential reality, be said of anything else, since for anything to be sufficient it must itself be all that it needs, for its existence, the permanence of its existence, and the perfection of its existence. And there is nothing in existence which by itself suffices for anything, except God-great and glorious, for He alone suffices for everything, not for some things only. He alone suffices, that is, in that things attain existence from Him and their existence perdures and is made perfect by Him.

Do not imagine that when you need food, drink, earth, sky, sun, or the like, that you need something other than Him, or that He is not all you need. He is the one who supplies all you need by creating food and drink, heaven and earth, so He is all you need. Nor should you think that God is not the one who protects and suffices in the case of an infant who needs his mother to nurse him and care for him. Indeed God-great and glorious-suffices for him, since He created his mother and the milk in her breasts, as well as the guidance needed for him to swallow it. He also created the tenderness and love in the heart of the mother, so that she [will] enable him to devour her milk, calling him to it and prompting him to do so. Now sufficiency is only attained by these means, and God the most High alone possesses the ability to create it for the infant. Should it be said to you that the mother alone is sufficient for the infant and that she is all he needs, you would believe that and not say: but she is hardly sufficient for him since he needs milk and how can a mother suffice for him when there is no milk? Rather you would say: indeed, he needs milk, but milk also comes from the mother, so he needs no-one else except the mother. But you should know that milk does not come from the mother, but together with the mother comes from God-may He be praised and exalted, and from His graciousness and generosity. For He alone is all that each thing needs; nothing [except He] exists which alone suffices for anything at all. Rather things depend on each other, while everything depends on the power of God-may He be praised and exalted.

Counsel: There is no access to this attribute for men except by way of a remote metaphor, or as part of a prevalent popular opinion which does not think twice about it. Metaphorically, it is like this: even if one were sufficient for his infant in sustaining his care, or sufficient for his student in educating him to the point where he is no longer in need of assistance from someone else, he would be but a means to sufficiency and not himself sufficient.  For it is God-may He be praised and exalted-who suffices, and since man neither subsists by his own power nor is sufficient unto himself, how can he suffice for another?

As part of a prevalent opinion, it is like this: even if one be deemed to be sufficient in himself and not as a means, nevertheless he is not alone sufficient since he needs, a place to receive his action and sufficiency. Moreover, this is the least of the things at issue, for the heart, which is the locus of knowledge, is clearly necessary in the first place so that he maybe sufficient in giving instruction. And the stomach which is the receptacle for food is needed to enable him to be sufficient in conveying food to his body. All this alone, along with many other things one needs, are beyond one’s reckoning, nor do any of them fall under his free choice. For the lowest rank of actions requires an agent and a recipient, and the agent will not suffice at all without a recipient. This is only fulfilled in God-great and glorious, since He creates actions as well as creating the place to receive it, the conditions pertaining to its reception and whatever surrounds it. Nevertheless, it maybe that one would turn spontaneously and unreflectively to the agent, without considering the situation surrounding it, and deem the agent alone to be sufficient to the task, but such is not the case.

Indeed, the religious (of faith) fruit from this for a man is that God alone suffices for him, in connection with his intentions and his will, so that he wants only God-great and glorious. He should not want paradise nor should his heart be preoccupied with hell, trying to be on guard against it, but his intentions should be absorbed by God alone, the most high. And if God reveals Himself in His majesty, he should say:

“This is sufficient for me, for I do not want anything other than Him, nor do I care whether something escapes me or not.”

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“Be the Change You Want to See in the World.”

At every stage and level of life we encounter relationships that help us to become more of who we truly need to become: a person leading a life of authentic ambition and purpose. But is this just an ideal and a fantastic thought, or is it practicable in our everyday lives?

I believe that some people are naturally gifted in dealing with other people in a way that readily breaks down barriers and helps create an air of trust. With their smooth, authentic interaction they engender mutual feelings of cooperation and dialogue and friendship is built easily. They do this without necessarily realising that they are doing anything special – and this is true of most masters in skills which they are either naturally gifted with or develop over time. Such people don’t carry any agenda’s, deploy techniques or skills, nor are they seeking any particular gain. It is the purer action of theirs that carries with it the hallmarks of sincerity and kindness that touches the other person with whom they are relating. Of course, these masters will have their share of troubles and we’ll see later how they have incorporated certain strategies at the sub-conscience level to deal with obstacles as well as difficult people and circumstances.

Yet there are many of us who struggle to get our points across at the best of times and leave meetings with feelings of distrust, doubt and false impressions. No matter how hard we try, there are things we just can’t seem to complete, tasks we can’t get done, people we upset endlessly, challenges that crop-up over and over again, and end-up with one bad encounter that leads to a souring of the mood and distraction from work all day!

As with most things in life, there are certain aspects which are inherent, internal and natural and there are other aspects that are out of direct control, unenforceable, independent. Your task should be to recognise this difference and learn to work on things that are directly under your control:

Things You Can Control

• Focus
• Self-Discipline / Time
• Behaviour & Habits
• Feelings & Intentions
• Communications Methods

Things You Don’t Control

• Other People & Their Thinking
• Their Availability (Time)
• Their Moods and States
• Their Behaviour/s & Values
• Environmental Circumstances

Even a regular glance at this list will help you to refresh the timeless aspects of things that you can control and things that you cannot. Far too often, people trip-up in their work, relationships, duties and goals because they worry too much about things that are out-of their control and don’t help themselves to grow by working on those things that are.

Here is an example for you: when you were a baby, or indeed in your mother’s womb, which aspects did you control? Did you control what others felt, how they lived, what they did or didn’t do, what happened in the society, timings, events, context, circumstances or any of the other things around you. No. You simply did what you were biologically designed to do: grow physically. But as your eyesight strengthened so did your awareness of the world. As it did, it became clearer to you that not all things are perfect, people don’t always understand what you mean, nor do you get what you want when you want it.

You also realised that certain people meant more to you than others. A special bonding with the ones who were in primary care over you led to the understanding that they can do for you as much as you liked, but then there were some expectations placed upon you that you had to deliver in accordance to. A greater realisation led you to the understanding that self-interest meant that the more you wanted to get, or do something, the more you could attempt to please others in order to obtain that objective. Without meaning to do it, you learned you could bend a situation to serve your purposes, but it just wasn’t so sure to work all the time…

Now, as an adult you know that there are several relationships at multiple levels and the fulcrum of them all is you. Your attitude and skills combined will help to foster relationships of mutual cooperation, of need, of love, of neighbourliness, of generosity and not just those of temporary convenience.

Great relationships – be they professional, social or intimate – are all dependent on one key aspect: your ability to communicate effectively, both- verbally and non-verbally. And the key to communication is having a good understanding of other people: their culture, backgrounds, context, time/stage in life, evaluating (inner-processing) styles, current priorities and commitments, pressures and challenges, etc. Of course you may not learn all of this overnight, but one Golden Formula that you can internalise now is:

“Behaviour Begets Behaviour”

If you want to achieve something with someone then carry a pure intention, a smile, and positive expectations. This will help induce into the other person the same characteristics and ensure a safer passage towards your goals. This is why the “The Magic of Relation-ships” is in understanding that a:

“A ’Relation’ is a ‘Ship’ that helps carry you to your desired destination.”

The more free and authentic you are, the greater the likelihood of achieving your aims. Not to hold other people in contempt is the surest way of freeing yourself of self-imprisonment, as the ‘ship’ won’t then travel anywhere fast!

Earlier, I said some people effortlessly get on in life as though all was made to happen for them. But as a matter of fact, we just don’t see the problems they encounter in life, work, health and relations and how they cope / respond to them. So what do they do? Well, in brief (because I want to elaborate on such aspects in future postings), they realise that relations are an asset, just as knowledge is capital, and they appreciate not only levels of authority, but also degrees of care, respect, trust and acceptance. In addition, they have a better idea of the things that are under there control and those that are not. So whether in leadership, management, at home, outdoors or at work, know the:

3 keys to Successful Relations & Happiness

1. Get a real vision of what you want and make a plan;
2. Understand what you may have to give-up to get it;
3. Take action and deal with people in the best manner possible;

Focus on the infinite possibilities of your relationships, work, life and goals. Be aware of the things that lead to distraction, worry and bitterness:

Things That Take Away Your Focus:

1. Unwarranted Fears
2. Immediate pleasures (instant gratifications) & urgency addictions
3. Other people’s demands and meddling in their affairs

“Travel Lighter, Let Go of Unwanted Concerns.”

Till next time,
For Success & Contentment,
Asad Khan

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As I was reading some passages of the Final Testament this morning, a certain aspect became clearer to me than the light of day: just how much do we need to live in this world? In Chapter 76, Mudaththir (The Wrapped One) we read the following -

8. Finally, when the Trumpet is sounded,

9. That will be- that Day - a Day of Distress,-

10. Far from easy for those without Faith.

11. Leave Me alone, (to deal) with the (creature) whom I created (bare and) alone!-

12. To whom I granted resources in abundance,

13. And sons to be by his side!-

14. To whom I made (life) smooth and comfortable!

15. Yet is he greedy-that I should add (yet more);-

16. By no means! For to Our Signs he has been refractory!

So look here, there are several points of consideration:

(a) God created man - and each will return to Him bare and alone just as he was first created; (b) God alone gives to whom he pleases, as He pleases; (c) For those who reject, and worse openly rebel against God’s signs and bounties, warn them of the consequences and then leave them to God to deal with; (d) The Sinner may be self-complacement now, but what will be his position when the reckoning comes? (e) Man’s adventitious advantages - wealth, power, position, talents - are NOT due to his own merits. They are gifts from God, Who created him. In himself he came bear and alone - and will return as such; (f) Despite what others have, one should be content with what one has been allotted for them, to use one’s time, energy, resources and talents to discharge one’s responsibility to oneself, fellow mankind and to the Creator of all; (g) Those that have been given “in abundance” - children, honour, prestige, power, wealth, facilitation - have an equal responsibility just as any one else, perhaps more-so; (h) The more such a type of person is given, the MORE he wants, without recognising the Source of all Goodness, and this is the Sinners way.

The appetite of man is not quenched from desiring more because the faith in higher matters is missing. There is no spiritual link with the One Who originated life and death in order to test us in our deeds. What will any person take with them from this temporary world except their deeds? To serve God and His creature’s is a privilege and a responsibility, a real investment into one’s eternal future. Look at Pharaoh - immortalised by God as a sign of one who thought himself as god, all-powerful and self-sufficient. He rejected the warnings of one who was raised in his own home (Moses) and suffered the lasting punishment in this life and the next. In the previous chapter (Muzzamil, 75) this is mentioned -

14. One Day the earth and the mountains will be in violent commotion. And the mountains will be as a heap of sand poured out and flowing down.

15. We have sent to you, (O men!) an apostle, to be a witness concerning you, even as We sent an apostle to Pharaoh.

16. But Pharaoh disobeyed the apostle; so We seized him with a heavy Punishment.

17. Then how shall ye, if ye deny (God), guard yourselves against a Day that will make children hoary-headed?-

18. Whereon the sky will be cleft asunder? His Promise needs must be accomplished.

19. Verily this is an Admonition: therefore, whoso will, let him take a (straight) path to his Lord!

We can see that Pharaoh could not escape his end; he had to face what he deserved despite all the luxuries surrounding him, and not one of them came to his aid when the stark Reality came to light. This world we live in here in Earth is in a solar system, which is part of a galaxy that is only one galaxy amongst many millions, and the universe is ever-expanding, yet this is only the first level of the seven heavens above. Looking at your situation, life and circumstances from this perspective, doesn’t it make you wonder what all this struggle is worth..? One day, the world as we know it will crumble and disappear - metaphorically as we end this journey on Earth - or physically as we read in the verses above when all is transformed after the final trumpet is blown…

So let us have pure contentment in what we have, what we have been given, what we are being tested with, before our time is over, and we only gasp in utter regret!

For Success & Contentment,

Asad Khan

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We all know that a true dream is not always easy to realise; it takes time, effort and persistence. We’ve spoken about adapting previously when at times things are not going to plan. Adapting is a great way of keeping the dream alive whilst you work on other things for a while. But one should not forget to work on the plans in order to bring them to fruition. Its easier to let go and walk away towards that which seems to be within grasp, yet that which is beyond the grasp always requires more - both from within and without.

The time and effort that has been put into the work should not be regarded as ‘wasted’ because its necessary to make you into what you need to be in order do what you have to do. Look at the current Prime Minister Gordon Brown as an example. He felt that he should have been the Prime Minister in 1997 rather than Tony Blair, yet he had to work as Chancellor of the Exchequer (Head of British Treasury) before he could become what he thought he deserved he ought to have been earlier. Even if he thought he was ready for it, Tony Blair was perhaps ‘better’ prepared to take on the role than Gordon was, and is..?

What’s important here is that focus must be maintained whilst the dream is transpiring. The periods of incubation, design, invention, testing etcetera are all necessary to create the backbone of the product or service that you intend to deliver as well as strengthen your own backbone!

So its worthwhile to remain steadfast on what you truly believe, to stand firmer on whats true and right for you. Otherwise, the ’slings and arrows’ of the environment will always pull and push you around. If that is something that you are happy with, or you prefer to settle for something that is routine, that’s fine, and many are. But if you want to establish something that you believe in your heart to be true, right and needed, it will require you to take a firm stand and persist. Moreover, if you believe in your dream to be inspired from the heavens, and you hold a reliance in your Creator to deliver those things that in your best interest, then all that happens in such times are aspects necessary to prepare you for the future.

Believe in yourself and your dream and stand firm. Results will follow as a product and money, recognition and other things will follow that as a by-product.

As I said, if you believe in your dream then take a stand and then get ready to take-off!! Michael Jordan knew all about standing tall, taking a stand, moving gracefully, adapting, taking off, and holding the air, all as and when necessary; “Enjoy the flight!”

[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltOixu6ZZ3c - a song on "Take a stand for something, or you'll fall for anything.." ]

For Success and Contentment,

Asad Khan

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Here is an interesting article re-produced from Time - By Reihan Salam

Middle-class kids are taught from an early age that they should work hard and finish school. Yet 3 out of 10 students dropped out of high school as recently as 2006, and less than a third of young people have finished college. Many economists attribute the sluggish wage growth in the U.S. to educational stagnation, which is one reason politicians of every stripe call for doubling or tripling the number of college graduates.

But what if the millions of so-called dropouts are onto something? As conventional high schools and colleges prepare the next generation for jobs that won’t exist, we’re on the cusp of a dropout revolution, one that will spark an era of experimentation in new ways to learn and new ways to live.

It’s important to keep in mind that behaviour that seems irrational from a middle-class perspective is perfectly rational in the face of straitened circumstances. People who feel obsolete in today’s information economy will be joined by millions more in the emerging post-information economy, in which routine professional work and even some high-end services will be more cheaply performed overseas or by machines. This doesn’t mean that work will vanish. It does mean, however, that it will take a new and unfamiliar form.

Look at the projections of fiscal doom emanating from the federal government, and consider the possibility that things could prove both worse and better. Worse because the jobless recovery we all expect could be severe enough to starve the New Deal social programs on which we base our life plans. Better because the millennial generation could prove to be more resilient and creative than its predecessors, abandoning old, familiar and broken institutions in favour of new, strange and flourishing ones.

Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiralling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias.

Rather than warehouse their children in factory schools invented to instil obedience in the future mill workers of America, bourgeois rebels will educate their kids in virtual schools tailored to different learning styles. Whereas only 1.5 million children were homeschooled in 2007, we can expect the number to explode in future years as distance education blows past the traditional variety in cost and quality. The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials. To avoid the tax man, dozens if not hundreds of strongly encrypted digital currencies and barter schemes will crop up, leaving an under-resourced IRS to play whack-a-mole with savvy libertarian “hacktivists.”

Work and life will be remixed, as old-style jobs, with long commutes and long hours spent staring at blinking computer screens, vanish thanks to ever increasing productivity levels. New jobs that we can scarcely imagine will take their place, only they’ll tend to be home-based, thus restoring life to bedroom suburbs that today are ghost towns from 9 to 5. Private homes will increasingly give way to cohousing communities, in which singles and nuclear families will build makeshift kinship networks in shared kitchens and common areas and on neighbourhood-watch duty. Gated communities will grow larger and more elaborate, effectively seceding from their municipalities and pursuing their own visions of the good life. Whether this future sounds like a nightmare or a dream come true, it’s coming.

This transformation will be not so much political as anti-political. The decision to turn away from broken and brittle institutions, like conventional schools and conventional jobs, will represent a turn toward what military theorist John Robb calls “resilient communities,” which aspire to self-sufficiency and independence. The left will return to its roots as the champion of mutual aid, cooperative living and what you might call “broadband socialism,” in which local governments take on the task of building high-tech infrastructure owned by the entire community. Assuming today’s libertarian revival endures, it’s easy to imagine the right defending the prerogatives of state and local governments and also of private citizens — including the weird ones. This new individualism on the left and the right will begin in the spirit of cynicism and distrust that we see now, the sense that we as a society are incapable of solving pressing problems. It will evolve into a new confidence that citizens working in common can change their lives and in doing so can change the world around them.

We see this individualism in the rise of “freeganism” and in the small but growing handful of “cage-free families” who’ve abandoned their suburban idylls for life on the open road. We also see it in the rising number of high school seniors who take a gap year before college. While the higher-education industry continues to agitate for college for all, many young adults are stubbornly resistant, perhaps because they recognize that for a lot of them, college is an overpriced status marker and little else. In the wake of the downturn, household formation has slowed down. More than one-third of workers under 35 live with their parents.

The hope is that these young people will eventually leave the house when the economy perks up, and doubtless many will. Others, however, will choose to root themselves in their neighbourhoods and use social media to create relationships that sustain them as they craft alternatives to the rat race. Somewhere in the suburbs there is an unemployed 23-year-old who is plotting a cultural insurrection, one that will resonate with existing demographic, cultural and economic trends so powerfully that it will knock American society off its axis.

Salam is a policy adviser at the nonpartisan think tank e21, a blogger for the National Review and a columnist for Forbes.com

For Success & Contentment,

Asad

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One thing is certain - a healthy mind is for a healthy body and vice versa. Here’s a little something to help you start thinking about your internal energy levels and strengths…

Start to pay a little more attention to your bodies immense abilities and you may be surprised at what you might achieve…

For Success & Contentment,

Asad

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Wanted to share thoughts with you directly from one of the richest and most successful people in the world, Richard Branson, Chairman of Virgin Group…

1:45 So I decided to run start a magazine run by young people for young people, called Student, that would campaign on issues that we felt strongly about.

2:58 I was honestly not interested in business

3.02 I love creating things

3:06 The idea with the magazine was to try and change the world, have young people influence what was going on in the world.

5:40 Try to be in a position where we can actually make a difference in the world.

So there it is - Richard Branson is really a Campaigner at heart - He lives with this purpose and mission constantly, this is the driving force within him.

For Success & Contentment,

Asad Khan

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Just want to share with you some Principles from “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie:-

1. Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.
2. Give honest, sincere appreciation.
3. Arouse in the other person an eager want.
4. Become genuinely interested in other people.
5. Smile.
6. Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
7. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
8. Talk in terms of the others person’s interests.
9. Make the other person feel important - and do it sincerely

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