“Be More & Achieve More!”

“Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.” JFK

We all know when a child asks a parent for money to buy something, or to get the actual item itself, it naturally has high expectations that the parent will fulfil the wish. At the top of the child’s mind is the object that it wants - a bike, a doll, a game, or whatever it may be - and it keeps on asking ’till it gets an acknowledgement, a confirmation or an assurance that it will happen. Now let’s suppose that the parent does not have the full money at the time of request, but if with sincerity the father or mother says “I can give you this much now, save it, and later I can give you the rest“, the child will be appeased and happy that the parent is responding in a reasonable manner and though the item is not yet obtained, the negotiations have been amicable and the answer is fair. If, however, the parent out-rightly rejected the request of the child without any justification it will leave a bitter taste in the mouth of the child and questions of acceptability in his or her mind. Now, a step worse than this would be if the parent rejected the request on grounds of ‘lack of money’, only shortly thereafter to buy something for him/herself! One would wonder “Where is the fairness?” or rather, “Where is the love?” Being rejected without explanation is one thing, but being lied to is simply wrong, for it leaves a dark hole in the heart of the betrayed.

This is precisely how many in the nation of United Kingdom (as well as large parts of the rest of the world including the United States) feel in relation to Tony Blair and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan: a bitter taste has developed because their collective voices were not heard when making earnest requests to not follow the gun-ho attitude of George Bush. Contrary to the confident impressions being made by Mr Blair, the collective sentiments were proven to be correct: there are no wmd’s. So the people’s concerns - just like that of a child in the above example - were, and are, absolutely valid; at the time they felt that the image being presented was distorted, as a result we wanted to be satisfied with proper evidence, a thorough examination of the situation and legal protocols in place primarily with UN-sanctioned military action as the very last resort. Moreover, our initial shock and disbelief over the validity of the claims of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (wmd’s) and the subsequent realisation of the truth were never settled, at the very least through an unconditional apology, and so in the end we’ve all simply being lied to and are to continue coping with ‘a gaping hole in our combined heart’.

The consequences of this deception has been utter devastation of sovereign states, killings of hundreds and thousands of people, reversal of economic growth and trade, impediments to public services including education, health, transport, judicial as well as the others, a rise in unemployment, depression, familial loss, and all sorts of chaos and mayhem.

Wasn’t this the objective anyway some may ask? Well certainly some would say this could have been part of it, as one of the major criticisms was the lack of post-invasion development. And what are the pay-off’s for the metaphorical ‘father-figure’ and his friends? Well, we have come to know about the lucrative developmental, security and other contracts and of course, the access to oil.

This kind of self-interest, biased action is going on all the time, just take a look at NATO’s course of action in Libya despite the same turmoil in Yemen and Syria, but of course Libya has the oil reserves. Similar accounts were leaked regarding Mr Weritty and his arms/defence negotiations in the comfortable surroundings of Dubai with businessman Harvey Boulter, who was led to believe that Mr Werritty was ex-Defence Secretary Dr Fox’s official advisor. Mr Boulter was also paying Mr Werritty’s London lobbying firm Tetra Strategy thousands of pounds a month for help to secure contacts in defence. A company also set-up by the same in 2005, the year Dr Liam Fox became UK’s shadow defence secretary, was called ‘Security Futures’, which boasted that it promoted “a better understanding of asymmetric ’security’ risks that the UK faces“.

So what exactly is this, securing economic interests over Public interests - I’m a tad confused - for it goes against the British schooling and the home-grown values I’ve had all these years. And how befitting to do it in a Muslim country - isn’t that one of the home-land of those awful, pitiful, treacherous terrorists….? Oh, and supporting the Libyan rebels, well who would have thought?! Good heavens! It’s just like we supported, along with the CIA, Osama bin Laden against the Russians. We know there was a never a link between the twain: OBL and Saddam. Yet they both suffered a humiliating death, and now we can add Gadaffi to the list. All of them one time favourites, indeed allies, finally turned against, pounced upon and annihilated, Halleluiah!

Am I speaking rather bluntly? Well yes, as I’ve been asked to, not least because for the past decade the ‘Asian’s / Arab / Muslim-named’ individuals (including white-folks) have all been broad-brushed as terrorists by the media, governing parties, establishments and inter-connected institutions. This is precisely what the images were depicting in the wake of the 7/7 bombings in London, 2005. Television news reports showed images of Muslim women dressed in traditional clothing walking around the streets of British cities and shopping in open-markets. Clever shots of their feet scurrying around were shown as though they could not be trusted - “they’re probably carrying suicidal bombs under their garbs!” was the sinister projection. In my view, juxtaposing such images with terror alerts was a just shoddy journalism; I wouldn’t even call it sensationalism.

Are we forgetting the numerous ways in which these so-called terrorists actually contribute towards the welfare of British and other societies around the globe: think for a moment of the teachers, pharmacists, doctors - whom you entrust your lives to - pilots, technicians, lecturers, police officers, shop-keepers, traders, carers, artists, writers, musicians, developers, engineers, governors, bankers, taxi-drivers, accountants, sports people, and the list goes, everyone, more or less, trying their best to grow in life and raise their families in the best way possible, some paying for it with their lives whilst honourably defending the community at large. It doesn’t mean there aren’t issues and problems, indeed we are all human beings, and issues will be forever here. But to tarnish the good reputation of whole religious, faith-based and ethnic groups with preposterous slurs is not intelligent.

And this is what worries me most about such sub-standard practices; it is the level and quality of intelligence that we process, perceive as true, begin to shape our beliefs around and consequently base our actions upon. I’m now going to give two accounts of this. One on the governmental level, and the other the popular or mass level and help us to see the connection between the two.

Intelligence - or the lack of it
As Remembrance Sunday comes and goes and the debate of wearing the poppy arises, yet again, let us remind ourselves that we are still living the sad legacy of invading Iraq and Afghanistan, actions that could be instantly stopped by a complete withdrawal of British troops from these places as the reasons for presence there have long-evaporated. Plenty of dissenting sentiments have been voiced over this, most notably near the beginning of the propaganda, prior to invasion, as the very seeds of planning in the minds of Blair and Bush as far back as 2002 became clearer to those around them. The ongoing Chilcott Inquiry is due to publish its report in early 2012 which is claimed to criticise the style of ’sofa-government’ that Mr Blair chose in order to exclude some senior cabinet ministers from critical decisions which were being handled as ‘under-the-table’ deals. It will also show how the invasion was a for-gone conclusion regardless of protocols, intelligence or legitimacy.

I recently visited the library in Cheltenham and came across a number of interesting articles and books. One of them was of the late Mr Robin Cook, Leader of the House of Commons and former Foreign Secretary, who resigned from the Cabinet in objection to the coming war in Iraq; his resignation speech prompted the first standing ovation in the history of the House. In “The Point of Departure” he recounts his personal interactions with then Prime Minister Mr Blair and covers his personal disillusionment with the whole case for war. In short, Mr Cook says ‘Britain has got to be seen on side with Blix. You will never carry British opinion with you if it is we who are seen to be sidelining the work of the inspectors.’ Hans Blix himself, Chief Weapons Inspector, shrewdly sensed what Washington wanted from him: ‘They would say I was too compliant with the Iraqis when in reality they meant I was not compliant enough with what the US wanted.’

Mr Cook further adds, “They had been given plenty of cause to come to doubt their own claims. The scepticism about the September Dossier which has surfaced from within the UK intelligence community is a pale reflection of the raging controversy in the US. There the case against Iraq had been subcontracted to the Office of Special Plans which had been set up by Donald Rumsfeld to find the right kind of intelligence. The official agencies who had been marginalised by this development struck back. The Defense Intelligence Agency reported that there was ‘no reliable information’ that Iraq possessed or was producing chemical weapons. CIA veterans subsequently protested to the President at what they described as “a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions”.

In his epilogue (pp. 359-60), Mr Cook wrote: “Neither he (Mr Blair) nor Britain will be able to put the war on Iraq into the history books unless we recognise that mistakes were made. This is not simply a matter of putting the record straight. The reason why it is important to face up to mistakes is that only then is it possible to learn lessons from them. In the case of Iraq it is essential we learn the lessons that will prevent Britain ever again committing troops to military action on the basis of faulty intelligence.”

With the huge loss of life, many question the integrity of our leaders, or the soundness of their judgement, when they enter oil-rich countries (now Libya) on any claimed basis: humanitarian, political, alliance-based, democracy-enforcing, and so on. We are all used to the rhetoric. Perhaps it’s high-time to do the sensible thing and put a stop to this kind of madness; I know in some quarters they are asking to call Bush and Blair to a War Crimes Tribunal to prevent similar uni-lateral imperialistic action. In the memories of Mr Cook and Dr David Kelly, in addition to all the level-headed people who resigned because they were facing stubbornness - and not to mention the thousands upon thousands of vulnerable Iraqi and Afghani men women and children, as well as the many brave British and American troops who have paid with their lives, this may not be such a bad thing to do…

Faulty intelligence, or deliberately lying and risking so many lives, is plainly wrong. Continuing to lie, deny, and refuse to admit mistakes puts one further into the wrong: it is tantamount to murder itself. There has to be justice, as best as we can humanly obtain, for the sake of our humanity’s future and as a consequence, the perpetrators of any unjust war must be punished.

Hans Blix was scathing about the useless character of the intelligence fed to him: ‘I thought, “My God, if this is the best intelligence they had and we find nothing, what about the rest?”‘

And one of the key pressing aspects, as Mr Cook sincerely points out, is related to correction: “This is turn leads to the gravest of political questions. The rules of the Commons explicitly require ministers to correct the record as soon as they are aware that they may have misled Parliament. If the government did come to know that the State Department did not trust the claims in the September Dossier and that some of even their own top experts did not believe them, should they not have told Parliament before asking the Commons to vote for war on a false prospectus?”

British and Good Western Values
So here in Cheltenham is where I came nearer to understanding the mechanism of information being fed to ministers and their subsequent policy-formulation. Here is also the historical home of Government Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ) where hundreds of workers are busy monitoring all the airwaves, phone calls, sms text messages, cyber-space, internet links, emails, social media sites, Bank accounts, etc. for information that maybe of concern to national security and potential leads that possibly enhance or undermine it. I’m personally happy to have such a huge and important infrastructure as part of our heritage. The major problem is when messages, signals and movements are mis-interpreted, as demonstrated in the above devastating examples at individual, national or international scales.

Further, it does not help one iota to our society if supplementary British institutions follow suit of similar corruption by adorning an attitude of blanket dis-regard for verification of the truth over false notions; entertaining poor speculative thought or fanciful imaginations; or worse still, pursuing objectives for economic, personal and vested interests.

If attempts can be made by a select, corrupt few to mislead whole nations into believing that there is an imminent threat of some sort on one occasion, then this can happen over, and over again. And it is exactly what is happening in principle across the board in many sectors: private, public, community. Power, earned or conferred, is preventing proper judgement, fair analysis and reasonable action. We like to hail time-distilled British standards and values such as transparency and accountability but find ourselves at the opposite end in practice to what we profess with our mouths, particularly when we have power, influence or resources ready to be exploited at our fingertips.

And when there are people not at such privileged ends of the spectrum making a jab at decency, we witness the collision of class, structure and inequality out-pouring into the streets. Here I’d like to draw upon the recent riots in Britain, which haven’t occurred like that in many a decade - since 1981 to be precise. Much analysis has been given to it and some of it, as presented in the accompanying link to the article by Peter Oborne is pretty much on the mark: “Our politicians - standing sanctimoniously on their hind legs in the Commons yesterday - are just as bad. They have shown themselves prepared to ignore common decency and, in some cases, to break the law. David Cameron is happy to have some of the worst offenders in his Cabinet…. These double standards from Downing Street are symptomatic of widespread double standards at the very top of our society. It should be stressed that most people…continue to believe in honesty, decency, hard work, and putting back into society at least as much as they take out… But there are those who do not. Certainly, the so-called feral youth seem oblivious to decency and morality. But so are the venal rich and powerful - too many of our bankers, footballers, wealthy businessmen and politicians… The culture of greed and impunity we are witnessing on our TV screens stretches right up into corporate boardrooms and the Cabinet. It embraces the police and large parts of our media. It is not just its damaged youth, but Britain itself that needs a moral reformation.”

The point here is absolutely clear as the light of day: the little thieves on the streets as we saw them in the riots - regardless of the so-called assigned class they actually belong to (lower/middle) - cannot be blamed for the moral degradation of our society when the ‘father-figures’, whom they are required to look upon, are acting as big thieves themselves!

These self-styled privileged ones are actually the ones who are really poor. They have all the opportunities surrounding them to make a positive and lasting contribution towards the welfare of our societies but prefer to put personal gain ahead of Public Interest. It is this corruption, I strongly believe, that is decaying the very moral-fibre of our society, not the lesser actions of those who ‘have-not’ - who want to close the gap of the inequality of the capitalistic structure albeit through petty crime and wanton destruction. Though is not an exoneration of their individual responsibility, they do have the role-models to help justify their actions and shape their values of greed, fraud, deception, violence and corruption. The only distinction is that the small thieves had a one-time chance to grab what they could, and some got punished, whereas the big thieves have sustained opportunities to exercise wilful corruption and immorality often with impunity, until that is, it gets ridiculously out of proportion.

Systemic Corruption
So when corruption begins to get both systemic and trans-sector it becomes seriously dangerous. Take the media and police as two key pillars in our society. Both were in collusion in the phone-hacking debacle that led to resignations of key personnel at the very top of these institutes respectively. Whether it was journalists or police officers, each had a moral and public responsibility to do the right thing, in the right place, at the right time, in the right way. This also goes for the counter-terrorism support these institutions are lending to the government of the day. If we, as a nation, have been giving credence to the police and media for their accounts of the terrorist threats on mainland Britain due to their moral authority well it’s time it needs to stop. And not only because the phone-hacking issues continue to unfold and show how ominous and immoral this systemic corruption and fear-mongering is, but because the voices of dissent, scepticism and questioning of the official versions of events have been going on at least since Lady Diana Spencer’s mysterious death to the 9/11/01 attacks in New York.

Take Tony Benn for example, a man who entered the Commons in 1950 and with Edward Heath held the record for post-war service as an MP; he has held four cabinet posts and has twice contested the leadership of the Labour Party, of which he has also been chairman. He writes his memoirs in one of his publications called Diaries 2001-2007 - More Time for Politics, in which he shows two interesting pictures after page 112: Tony Blair meeting George W. Bush “The Conspirators” and Dr David Kelly “Victims of War” (along with the people of New York).

As I skim Mr Benn’s memoirs, I notice many anecdotes of interest. One that has caught my eye is an entry on Friday 4 November (p. 275) where he inputs “David Shayler, the former MI5 officer, spoke at a Stop the War meeting in Hammersmith this evening. He was the first speaker, and he devoted himself entirely to trying to establish that 9/11 was a fraud - the buildings would never have collapsed, the Pentagon was penetrated probably by a bunker-busting bomb, not by an aeroplane. The trouble about the security services is that they live completely in a conspiratorial atmosphere. I don’t know that it registers much with the public. Probably, in their heart of hearts, most people think the attack was genuine, but I don’t rule anything out.”

On Wednesday 9 November, 2005 (p. 278) Mr Benn states: “Heard Blair on the radio saying, ‘I don’t understand how Labour MPs could have voted against the ninety days’, and of course it’s true, he didn’t understand. He doesn’t understand anything - he doesn’t listen to anybody!”

A year earlier on Thursday 11th November 2004 he wrote “Yasser Arafat had died, the Palestinian leader, and his body was flown back with full military honours from Paris to Cairo for the funeral….Of course Arafat was hated by Sharon, and distrusted and disliked by Bush. The coverage of his death, you know, made him out as a terrorist, whereas Sharon is a prime minister - it’s so disgusting!”

I won’t give a detailed account of Mr Benn’s statements and views, but will finish his contributions with snippets of a rather interesting interaction he has with the former president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. On the afternoon of Sunday 2 February (p. 91) shortly after 4.30pm, a filmed interview commenced between Mr Benn and Saddam Hussein:-

TB: Mr President, may I ask you some questions. The first is: does Iraq have any weapons of mass destruction?
SH: Most Iraqi officials have been in power for over thirty-four years and have experience of dealing with the outside world. Every fair-minded person knows that when Iraqi officials say something, they are trust-worthy. A few minutes ago when you asked me if I wanted to look at the questions beforehand, I told you I didn’t feel the need so that we don’t waste time, and I gave you the freedom to ask me any question directly so that my reply would be direct. This is an opportunity to reach the British people and the forces of peace in the world. There is only one truth and therefore I tell you, as I have said on many occasions before, that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction whatsoever. We challenge anyone who claims that we have to bring forward any evidence and present it to public opinion.

TB: I have another which has been raised: do you have any links with al-Qaeda?
SH: If we had a relationship with al-Qaeda and we believed in that relationship, we wouldn’t be ashamed to admit it. Therefore, I would like to tell you directly, and also through you to anyone who is interested to know, that we have no relationship with al-Qaeda.

TB: May I broaden the question out, Mr President, to the relations between Iraq and the UN, and the prospects for peace more broadly, and I wonder whether, with all its weaknesses and all the difficulties, whether you see a way in which the UN can reach that objective for the benefit of humanity?
SH: The point you raised can be found in the United Nations Charter. As you know, Iraq is one of the founders and first signatories of the Charter. If we look at the representatives of two superpowers - America and Britain - and look at their conduct and their language, we would notice that they are more motivated by war than by their responsibility for peace.

I can understand the protection of certain personal, corporate and state interests when done in a dignified and satisfactory manner. However, it’s when one picture is presented to suit personal prejudices - whilst the reality is completely something else - that I have a natural difficulty swallowing such version of events whilst at the same being made to accept it as morally authoritative.

Moral Leadership
I fully respect the tasks which some of our leading establishment workers have to do; the information they need to sift through, and accordingly make sense of, is often complex. One such person was George Tenet, who, at the most controversial and challenging times in recent history, had the lead role in the “most important intelligence organization in the world”. As Director of Central Intelligence appointed in 1997, he had the onerous task of dealing with high turbulence across Arabia and Asia with imminent threats back towards the coastline of both sides of the Atlantic. In his account, “At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA”, he recounts the difficulty of assessing the ‘truth’ and provides dramatic insight and background on the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and the true context of Tenet’s own now-famous “slam dunk” comment regarding Saddam’s WMD program; as well as the CIA’s critical role in an administration predisposed to take the country to war. Through it all, Tenet paints an unflinching self-portrait of a man caught between the warring forces of the administration’s decision-making process, the reams of frightening intelligence pouring in from around the world, and his own conscience.”

Everyone appreciates a person who does his or her level best to deliver trustworthy, honourable and reliable work. We all want to give, and be given, credit for upholding such principles and standards. It is not the difficulty of the job pertaining to the ‘man in the arena’ to borrow Theodore Roosevelt’s term given in his speech at the Sorbonne, “Citizenship in a Republic” (April 23, 1910). Rather, it is the deliberate attempts to jar the public perception from the true picture by distorting reality to suit political and personal bias.

In “On War” (first published in 1832), Carl von Clausewitz observes: “The great uncertainty of all data in war is a peculiar difficulty, because all action must, to a certain extent, be planned in a mere twilight, which in addition not infrequently - like the effect of a fog or moonshine - gives to things exaggerated dimensions and unnatural appearance.”

Despite the ‘fog or moonshine’ there are people who are reasonable and true-to-principles who come around to seeing the reality, and at times it can happen once they are out of the ‘arena’. Such is the case with former MI5 chief Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller who believes dialogue with terror groups, including al-Qaida, requires courage but ‘is necessary’. There is a question she said at the time she was head of MI5, “whether the UK supped with a sufficiently long spoon”. She made it clear in an earlier Reith lecture that, in her view, the activities of MI6 were wrong. Subsequently, and interestingly, the current terror threat level in the UK has been decreased from ’severe’ to ’substantial’ based on criteria of intent, capability and time-scale.

Whether they make a statement whilst they are in the arena or out of it is not the point. But crucially, the point is for rationally-minded people who are concerned about the veracity of truth over political expediency to voice their views with confidence, in the best manner available, at the most appropriate time. This, I believe, is how the systemic corruption in our institutions will begin to gradually fade out. And as tough as might be to stay within the system whilst taking such a position, people like Clare Short, ex-Secretary of State for International Development, would serve British interests better, in the longer term, whilst helping to steer, amongst other aspects, the Foreign Policy towards just causes. This is what she wrote about in her book, “An Honourable Deception?” in an attempt to change the way British politicians and politics is conducted. Incidentally, in February 2004 she was also remarkably involved with whistle-blowing the fact that GCHQ workers had allegedly tapped into ex UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s phone calls and felt strongly that he needn’t be spied on.

Such authentic leadership, as with Clare Short, lends itself better, in my view, to containing the various ills and harms that spring in, around and on our society. Dignified anti-war voices of millions shouting “Not in our name!” ought to be listened to respectfully with direct impact on policy and governmental action. After all, this is the democracy we want others around the Middle East and elsewhere to adopt isn’t it? As stated earlier, it is not too late. British troops can still be withdrawn peacefully today. The imperialistic, ‘forward-presence’ strategies of the G. W. Bush and allying neo-cons need not be sustained. Why are they? I am still wondering about this!?

I feel that the imbalance in our society will not be re-dressed until proper, un-corrupted leadership is in place in every corner of our society. There is absolutely no fairness in bailing-out private banks to the tunes of billions of pounds and then saying there is no money for healthcare, or unfairly increasing student tuition fees under the guise of equality. This simply reeks of impropriety, incredulousness and insults the common intelligence. No wonder people have once again taken to the street and are saying “enough is enough” as witnessed in the world-wide Occupy (Wall Street) Movement aimed at “Reclaiming the Economy and Recreating Our Democracy”. On both sides of the Atlantic, and indeed across the world, people are taking a stance to the economic and social inequalities.

It does not surprise me that the spirit of the Arab Spring is spilling over to Europe. Though the student fees issue has less to do with direct Foreign Policy as it does internal state affairs, people are making quick and valid assessments to the flow-through liability. On the States side, one sociology graduate student Jonathan Gomez has said “This is one of the few times where corporations are sitting on the most money they have ever sat on in the history of this country; we pay more than we ever have and we get less.” Here in the UK another one called Glynn told BBC News he had come to protest against a “corrupt government” which was fuelled by “corrupt money and bankers”.

I sense that the people at the top, who love to dish-out punishments to the lesser privileged and blame them for the inadequate behaviours they demonstrate from time-time, are not really paying attention to their own code of conduct.

Why, for instance, has it taken so long for the likes of Rupert Murdoch, who has been allowed to crash public opinion in his own favour for several years, without being challenged for his views on local or global issues, only now being called somewhat to account? It is clear that he has amassed billions in personal wealth during the process of public manipulation, collusion with corrupt establishment members, and throughout he probably had a significant part to play in recent global military wars!

Just how and why do we come to trust these sources and people who purport false reports? Why should people who have names such as Donald (Rumsfeld), Dick (Cheney), Paul, (Wolfowitz), George (Bush), Tony (Blair), Ian (Blair), Paul (Stephenson), John (Yates), Andy (Coulson), James (Murdoch), etc. be trusted? Solely because their names are corresponding to your own, or they dress in a similar style or drive the same car, is that it? Or that they might drink in the ‘local’ near you, or their children may study at the same school/college or university as yours? This simply is not good enough; such types of people have repeatedly broken Public trust by either squandering Public wealth, embarking on slur campaigns, manipulation of evidence, fear-mongering or, as in some cases, directly responsible for the deaths of innocent lives.

The best of British and Western values are being eroded, as we have seen in the recent riots, which may be put down to ‘years of liberal dogma‘, but more-over, in my view, it’s due to the lack of authentic, versatile and proper leadership at the helm of our public and private institutes. Even the hasty Hutton Inquiry into Dr Kelly’s death was left totally questionable with one person, who has thirty years’ experience on the legal bench, commenting on the in-complete investigation: “As it has been left, the whole scandalous affair is a complete travesty”.

Unfortunately, once again, the political and inter-connected legal meandering is continuing to upstage common sense with the parliamentarians again undoing their own commitment to fair democratic processes as in the Babar Ahmed debacle. Held for more than seven years without trial, the man is not being given a hearing in the UK despite over 140,000 signatories on the government e-petition, which is a record for the little amount of time - a matter of a few weeks - which it was given to amass the required total of 100,000 signatures for his matter to be debated in the main chamber in the House of Commons, just as it is required. One of the worst and most dangerous precedence we’ll set for our legal system, and the future of our democracy, is to allow the extradition of this man to the US to take place based purely on allegations related to thought-crime without evidence provided for the British Publics’ scrutiny.

The People’s Demands
As a British-born, Western-developed individual, I am accustomed to many of our inherently good traditional values we espouse: suspend judgment whilst establishing the truth, seek compromise, punish the unlawful, amend mistakes, make apologies, forgive and forget the past, be honest and upright, honour the guests, compete fairly, be confident, and so on. Indeed, one of the adages we often hear quoted is “What goes round comes round”.

So what is clear to me is that people, around the world in both the East and West, are venting their anxieties through a number of means - protests, petitions, vigils, occupy camps, strikes and various types of campaigns - about the deliberate cover-up’s, falsification of reports, victim harassment, fear-mongering, shoddy journalism (and at times immoral and unwarranted sensationalism), the uncanny manipulations, the corruption, greed, the squandering of Public wealth, the vast number of deaths and unnecessary destruction, all which must be limited as much as possible through appropriate ministerial, legal, commercial, industrial and public checks and balances.

Intelligence, both raw and refined, must be valid. It must be coherent, accurate and thorough. Where inconsistencies and gaps in information may exist, there is a requirement for a rational, balanced and longer-term, nuanced view on matters so that situations arising are read in the best and fairest light possible. Whatever the colour of any presiding government - be it Blue, Red, Yellow, Green or any combination of them, it is important to weigh information objectively, and to present it in terms of the values listed above.

Policies must be dependable, fair and equitable. Actions, military or other, must be justified, consistent and legitimate.

Journalists must have freedom of press. But the symbolism, language and tonality must not attempt to smear any group, particularly without a shred of real evidence available. Inflammatory remarks aimed at jabbing, mocking or teasing whole groups must be curtailed. Further, they must be held accountable to industrial regulations.

People must be listened to. A truly open arena must welcome public debate; this is enlightened democracy. Those working in the interests of national security at every level should come out from behind the silos and join the Public debate, airing views in an amicable manner, thereby adding real value back to the genuine discussion.

The brief accounts given earlier of Mr Cook, Mr Benn, Mr Tenet and Ms Short, amongst others, though written a few years before, just go to accentuate the very difficult tasks on the agenda of our Western governments, and their related agencies, in dealing with the ‘war on terror’. I know that we are living in troubled and ‘interesting’ times. But the situation is not helped by moral corruption in our own institutes. It is not helped by the 99% of the population having their concerns ignored.

Such corruption is precisely what has caused a stir in the Middle East region for the unprecedented Arab uprising, which clearly demonstrates to us here, that there is a new way of dealing with people’s expectations whilst maintaining obligations towards the Crown or country, as well as coordinating strategies for peace and security, both nationally and internationally.

As most people are, I too am personally dedicated to realising the real potential of world peace by mitigating the risk of terror-type threats through the best and most productive means available. In my view, this must be based on solid values such as trust, veracity, accountability, credibility and legitimacy. Political expediency alone must not sacrifice these values, or the hard work done to establish good relations and trust will be wounded, or worse, undone, as witnessed by the now widely-regarded infamous neo-con policies post 9-11 (2001).

Work must be conducted with a real yearning to serve the Public’s interest and must be credited as much as possible when done so. Yet we have seen above how many an expert - Mr Blix, Mr El-Baradei, Mr Tenet, Mr Cook and Dr Kelly, and others of similar kind, have been overseen despite their years of insightful experience, honesty, objectivity and patriotic loyalty. The business of ’sexying-up’ dossiers, or falsifying the truth to fit with particular bias should be the stuff of crime and espionage novels. We know that people at the very top of our governments have got it plainly wrong on many occasions, most notably in Iraq.

Of course there are a multitude of people serving the greater good, God and country and are either risking or dedicating their lives for such purposes. It, however, does no favours if the actions of our governments are far removed from solid intelligence and sincere motives. This leaves a foul atmosphere, a bitter taste in the mouth and an awkward feeling in the pit of the stomach.

The general Public - including sincere cabinet ministers - sense clearly if they are being misled. The awful and outrageous action to invade Iraq / Afghanistan in absence of UN Security Resolutions is a recipe for disaster, as we have clearly witnessed through the immense death tolls through-out that region. This can have further grave repercussions on our shores which we want to minimise anyway!

So whether it is Remembrance Sunday (Armistice) or not, we must always remember that unless there are justifiable and legitimate grounds for military action, troops should not be risking their lives, families should not be losing their loved ones, and innocent civilians need not die. One always questions why those who send the youngsters and their captains off to the battle fields - the politicians - are not there themselves? And if money is short in the treasury, with the economy having such a bad time at present, with more Public cuts imminent, why not pull the troops out and save the money - and precious lives??

The deaths of Robin Cook, Dr David Kelly, John F Kennedy et al. ought not to be in vain. Moral leadership must be aware of public perception and sensitive to their concerns. We must thereby do our utmost to live by Golden Principles: Truth, Validity, Legitimacy, Consistency and Justice.

Both policy and public policing need to be real, justified and fair. Legitimate security concerns should be approached with consistency in mind, principles in the heart and equality in action. Media and Police - key institutes of our society - ought to be working to impede real criminal targets and threats, not engendering baseless fear. Bankers and other’s in the top so-called ‘1%’ need to get closer to the ground and really feel the needs of others.

In such way, I feel, we can have responsible leadership who don’t “steal the truth“ but rather offer it freely for they are principled and prepared to stand by it. In this manner, the ‘children’ need not feel any guilt towards what the ‘parents’ are doing for rather than having ‘a gaping hole in our combined heart’, it is filled with trust, love and honesty, as beautifully and practically shown by a genuine father-figure such as Nelson Mandela. A befitting tribute to his legacy is the life-like statue placed in the capital with the words of then Mayor of London Ken Livingstone summing up Mr Mandela’s exemplary life in these words:

“Long after we are forgotten, you will be remembered for having taught the world one amazing truth, that you can achieve justice without vengeance. I honour you and London honours you.”

For Truth, Justice, Success and Contentment,

Asad R Khan

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Dear Reader,

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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