Shafiq Morton

Former Malaysian PM, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamed, with Dr Yunus Yasin of Fajr Symphony and the author (right).

Saturday 27th April:

Cape Malay book found in Singapore

On Saturday morning I meet with Dr Chandra Muzaffer, director of the NGO JUST (the International Movement for a Just World). He’s a softly-spoken man in a wheel-chair. Once in the opposition political frame, he’s since beaten a retreat from the ruthless cut-and-thrust of public life.

His office is in a shady street and our short meeting soon becomes an hour. He enjoys my stories about Mandela, and we agree to network. He gives me a signed copy of his latest book, Muslims Today, Changes Within, Challenges Without. I give him Surfing behind the Wall.

Then I’m bustled out of his office to address a workshop on refugees. Around the table are young people from the Philippines, China, Indonesia and Pakistan. The dominating issue is the recognition of child refugees in Malaysia, and how one can make positive interventions.

I relate to the South African experience and the pitfalls of xenophobia. I’m asked to speak about my travels. Whether I make a positive contribution or not is difficult to ascertain, but we do talk a lot.

Then it’s a quick lunch before catching a Firefly charter to Singapore. We buzz along in a propeller aircraft for about 45 minutes. Singapore is as clean and clinical as ever, the “Switzerland” of the Far East, once known for its close ties with Israel.

My good friend Iskandar picks me up at the airport. In Singapore I’ll do a book launch at the Arab Network Society and a talk on Cape Malays at Mendaki, the Malay association HQ. Mendaki is a state NGO funded by a 2% tax on Malays and is responsible for social upliftment.

As we drive, Iskandar hands me a copy of ID du Plessis’ “classic”, The Cape Malays. I’m gobsmacked. “What’s this book doing in Singapore?” I ask stupidly.

“My late brother had it,” he replies, adding that he thought he got it while on Hajj. He then tells me I can have the book.

“Are you sure?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says, “it’s yours.”

Inside the flyleaf I come across the following:

“El Hadj Erefaan Rakiep…son of…” and a family tree leading to Imam Abdullah Qadi Abdus Salam, or Tuan Guru, who established South Africa’s first madrasah in Cape Town in 1793. A political exile of Moroccan ancestry from Tidore,Tuan Guru also wrote a Qur’an from memory while imprisoned on Robben Island by the Dutch.

“These are our ancestors,” goes another line.

Also written is “NE Rakiep bought Friday 16 Feb 1973.”

It’s a fascinating, poignant piece of local history inscribed in the flyleaf of a book long out of print – as much the tale of a person suffering under apartheid trying to discover his identity. And I’d found all of this in Singapore, and not in Cape Town.

Of course, as an Orientalist who was a friend of apartheid prime minister PW Botha, Du Plessis has been harshly criticised by academics. But his work is certainly a seminal one, despite his patronising observation that the Cape Malays once “aroused” would be liable to “run amok”.

I stay at the Ba ‘Alawi mosque. My host, Habib Hasan al-‘Attas, is as gracious as ever. His zawiyyah, built by his late father, is a vibrant centre of learning. He has a unique collection of manuscripts and Islamic artefacts, some precious enough to be housed in a special air-conditioned room.

This small, saintly man introduces me to some of his guests, who are amazed to hear about the Malay heritage of Cape Islam. In his museum he shows me an old Malayu text from Cape Town written in Arabic.

The following morning it rains. Huge drops hammer on the roof like nails, and water pours off gutters in sheets. Tropical rain is not the soft Mediterranean drizzle we experience in Cape Town. Here you get soaked to the skin in seconds.

It’s a Sunday, and as the rain slacks off, the Zawiyyah is empty except for a lone figure huddled over a Qur’an. I retreat to my room to re-read ID Du Plessis.

Perfect harmony after the Surfing behind the Wall book tour…Chinese tea in a beautiful garden.

25/4/12
Arrive in KL. It’s overcast and rainy. Ponderous clouds hang black in the sky. After a hot Cape summer the humidity is bearable. Meet up with Dr Yasin from Fajr Symphony, co-sponsor together with Dome Publications and the Kaaf Trust. It’s been a long flight, but it’s good to be with friends again.

The programme is busy – we launch Surfing behind the Wall in KL and then I go to Singapore and Penang. But first things first: the book. It’s pages are crisp, the cover is embossed. It feels good in my hands. After years of toil, it’s the moment. The big moment.

26/4/12
CATCH a few hours’ sleep. Do some laps in the hotel pool whilst a cat, probably dreaming that it’s a tiger, watches me trying to shake off jet-lag. My first appointment is the recording of two interviews with BFM 89.9, a radio station that broadcasts to KL. Three shows are scheduled, and we’ll record two before I leave for Singapore. BFM is a blend of Capetalk and VOC.

The first slot is a book review and, thankfully, the reviewer Amu says he likes the Surfing behind the Wall. In the second interview we talk about South Africa. The third slot, which I’ll do on my return to KL, will be a live evening one. I also learn that Dr Mahathir Mohamed, former Malay Prime Minister representing his Perdana Global Trust, has taken ill and can’t make the launch at the Islamic Museum. He will send a representative instead.

I also hear that the Malaysian opposition, led by Anwar Ibrahim, is preparing for a mass rally in central KL. Police might close the roads to the launch. Not good.

27/4/12
IT’S Friday. It’s a public holiday in South Africa and the day of the official launch of Surfing behind the Wall. We perform jumu’ah at the National Mosque, a massive Bauhaus-Islamic space surrounded by shaded arcades, pools and arabesque airbricks. I meet Norma, a feisty lady who is the head of the mosque’s admin. I remember her from past visits. She is a fearless da’wah worker.

I’m introduced to a small, humble man who gives me his card: Al-Haj Mufti U Myint Thein (a) Abdus Salam (the writer Nyenchin Lulin) of Myanmar.

“Whenever there’s a Muslim problem in Myanmar they lock up Mufti,” laughs Norma. I ask Abdus Salam, who is studying in KL, whether he’ll go back now that Mynamar has had an election and that Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, will take her opposition seat in parliament.

“I have hope,” he says cautiously.

The Islamic Museum, the venue for the launch, is a spacious post-modern construct – hand-carved Arabesque Moroccan filigree competes with marble, stainless steel, an Iznik blue dome, glass and mirrors. It’s one of the finest Islamic museums in the world, and was built by the Bukhari Foundation. Thank God, the police have not closed the roads.

The bunting and posters add great ambience to the auditorium. My photos, which we’re selling, are displayed and Jack (Muhsin) Kilby, a Scottish photographer now resident in KL, sets up his portable exhibition. He did nine trips to Palestine to photograph the historic places.

His collection, a collector’s item in itself, needs to be preserved. A tall, gentle man, he tells me of his travails: a smashed camera when he took pics of angry soldiers, and most of his film being destroyed on one trip by capricious security officials, who deliberately “nuked” it in the x-ray machine.

Dr Zuleika from the Perdana Global Fund opens the exhibition and is gracious in her opening address. Malaysia’s top blogger and razor-tongued commentator, Syed Akbar Ali, makes kind remarks about the book.

That evening we go out for supper. One of our guests, who is well-placed within the system, regales me with extremely funny stories of behind-the-scenes corruption. These are stories that compare in every way to South Africa. We’re strictly off the record. But one tale I can tell – as it’s widely known here – is the saga of a jealous wife orchestrating the murder of her husband’s mistress (herself embroiled in an arms scandal).

This unfortunate woman was abducted and taken into the jungle. Explosives were strapped to her privates and she was blown up.

As they say, hell hath no fury like a woman.

Next time: Singapore and Penang

ROBERT FISK of The Independent is not known for mincing his words. Having lived in Lebanon for most of his adult life, and having covered almost every Middle East conflict for the last 40 years, Syria’s complex role in the region is well-known to him.

Ruled with an iron fist by the Alawite Assad family, the Sunni business elite and the generals, Syria has played the diplomatic smoke-and-mirrors game as skilfully as the West.

By balancing the various energies at play – from Israel to Hamas to Hizballah – Syria has been able to keep her nose clean by not firing a shot in anger against Israel on the Golan Heights.

Conversely, Syria has supported Hizballah against Israel on another front, southern Lebanon. Its troops were sent packing from Lebanon after the assassination of Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri, but it did not necessarily put a stop to covert Syrian influence.

But the Syrian paradox is most clear when one realises that the same government that was willing to cold-bloodedly slaughter 20,000 Islamists in the city of Hama in the 1980’s has offered refuge to Hamas – a Palestinian Islamist political movement.

Whilst the hard rule of Assad and his cronies should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the brutal Syrian political landscape, it’s his apparent unwillingness to disengage from his neighbour, Iran, which has been more the issue for western axis powers than his vicious crackdown.

It doesn’t take much to realise that the US and Europe would be keen to neutralise any relationship that is seen to empower Hizballah and Hamas, and threaten their ally, Israel, whose bluster against Iran grows by the day.

Add into the mix old Cold War foes of the West, Russia and China (as well as their historic double vetoes at the UN) and you have a recipe for what Fisk describes as “the arena for a new Cold War”.

Professor Vijay Prashad, professor of international studies at Connecticut University, agrees with Fisk because all the old actors are there, even if for varying reasons. He points a finger at NATO’s intervention in Libya colouring the Russian and Chinese perspective.

With NATO allegedly violating Resolution 1973 of the UN charter with its intervention in Libya, there are some real issues of trust with regards to NATO’s intervention in Syria, he says.

He also points to Russia’s concerns about NATO expanding its presence into the Middle East and Eastern Europe. “The Russians, who have a naval base in Syria and who’ve had a relationship with Syria since the 1960’s, don’t want to see the end of the Assad regime.”

Syrians in the Diaspora have told me that the picture is even more convoluted than the above. Analyst Ahmad Rahbane claims that Israel, already fretful about the Arab Spring, wants Assad to stay in power as the Syrian border is now the only stable one.

Assad is a case of the devil they know. Tel Aviv’s biggest fear is Syria’s new Russian-supplied P-800 anti cruise ship missiles, with a range of 300 kilometres, falling into Hizballah’s or other hands if Assad steps down.

Washington-based cleric, Muhammad al-‘Asi whose family is Syrian, said that Saudi Arabia – keen to push back the Mid-East “Shi’ah crescent” – was creating proxies in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. Other sources told me they’d received reports of Hizballah fighters supporting the Assad regime.

Natalia Mihailova, a Chinese affairs expert writing on the website radio86.com, says that whilst China is Syria’s biggest commodity provider, China had invested in a 1 billion dollar oil refinery project in 2008, and enjoyed oil exploration rights in Syrian waters.

Syria had minimal economic interaction with the US and European bloc. In Syria, “oil was under everything”, she said, as by 2030 China would outstrip the US as the world’s biggest consumer of oil.

Quoting a maxim from Zhou Enlai, she said that “all diplomacy (in Syria) is a continuation of war by other means”. Global power plays had seen the countries taking their opposite corners.

Paul Craig Roberts, a former assistant to the US treasury during the Reagan years, was as forthright. He told Iran’s Press TV that the western focus on Syria had nothing to with democratic reforms or human rights, but a US effort to deny resources to China, the US’ biggest global competitor.

The Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a Washington think-tank dealing in energy security, commented that it was energy needs that would determine China’s global strategies. China’s reliance on Mid-East oil was 70% (with 20% coming from Iran), and it needed to protect its resources.

But where do the people of Syria, longing for more representative leadership, stand in all of this? Sources in Damascus have told me that they estimate 12,000 people (about 9,000 civilians) have already died in the 13 month uprising.

Human Rights organisations and aid agencies have reported that the Syrian government has mined its borders to prevent people from fleeing the country. And the other day, an aid worker told me she was coming across refugees who’d been gang raped by soldiers.

And as Kofi Annan, the UN and Arab League envoy shuttles between Damascus and Arab capitals with his six-point peace plan, it’s hoped that Syria does not indeed become the stage on which superpowers brawl.

Natalia Mihailova of radio86 feels that whatever happens, it will be a “blockbuster performance” with, tragically, the ordinary people in Syria political puppets in somebody else’s cruel hands.

The Prophet's (SAW) tree in the Jordan desert. Photo Muhammad Salameh.

THE 10,000 year-old centre of Amman – modernised by the Makkan Sharif, King ‘Abdullah I, after the colonial dissection of the Middle East in 1917 – is Jordan’s bustling capital. Once straddling seven hills, it now encompasses more than 20 as its grey urban sprawl envelops the countryside.

It’s only when you travel out of Amman that you begin to appreciate Jordan. Sa’ud ibn Mahfoudh, a historian, says that Jordan has over 100,000 archaeological sites dating from the Bronze Age to the Islamic era.

On my first visit in 2000 I’d focused primarily on its vast Islamic heritage to research a series of programmes for Voice of the Cape. It had proved to be a fruitful trip, and after having travelled 1,600 kms, I’d left for South Africa drunk with information.

It has always amazed me that so many travellers use Jordan as a transit point. Twenty-thousand Companions of the Prophet (SAW) migrated to the region after his death, and many important historical events occurred there.

On my journey I’d visited the tombs of Prophetic Companions such Ja’fr ibn Talib, Zaid ibn Haritha, Ubaidah ibn Jarrah and Amir ibn Waqqas, and had been overwhelmed that I’d been able stand at their feet.

I’d travelled to Udruh where Abu Musa al-‘Ashari and ‘Amr ibn al-‘As had conducted the arbitration between Sayyidina ‘Ali (ra) and Mu’awiyyah over the Caliphate in 657 CE.

I’d trodden the very soil of the battle of Mut’ah. In this battle (fought in 632 CE) the Muslim army had been defeated by the Byzantines. The Prophet (SAW) had seen the martyrdom of Ja’fr ibn Talib and Zaid ibn Haritha in a vision. He had related that as Ja’fr ibn Talib’s arms were cut off, angelic wings had replaced them.

I’d also crossed the paths of numerous prophets. On a mountaintop overlooking Petra was the tomb of Musa’s (as) companion, Haroun (as), guarded by a crusty old Bedoiun with a dagger. In the village of Baida in one of the valleys below was the spring of Musa (as), from whose sweet waters I had drunk.

In Salt I discovered the tomb of Nabi Yush’a (the biblical Joshua). I visited shrines attributed to Nabi Shu’aib (the Biblical Jethro), the Hebrew prophet ‘Uzair (as) and Ayyub (as) as well as Jadur, the brother of Nabi Yusuf (as). Then there was Lut’s (as) cave on the shores of the Dead Sea.

Closer to ‘Amman I explored the site of the Ashab ul-Kahf (the Companions of the Cave) mentioned in the Qur’anic chapter, Surat ul-Kahf.

All these memories were stirred the other day when I watched a documentary entitled The Blessed Tree. This evocative production (produced in 2010) focuses on a tree near Safawi where the young Muhammad (SAW) met with Bahira the monk while travelling with his uncle, Abu Talib, to Syria.

This was to prove a critical historical event. Bahira would be the first holy man to identify Muhammad (SAW) as a prophet.

In 2000, my guide Nader Al-Abed and I had travelled to eastern Jordan on a tour of the desert castles. We had driven to Azraq, where we would loop back to Amman.

On a lonely drive we passed the turn-off to Safawi, which is near the Wadi Sirhan, a first century trade route from the Hijaz to Syria. It was along this Roman road that the Prophet (SAW) had journeyed. Nader had told me about this tree.

Unfortunately, our hectic schedule prevented us from making what would have had to be a lengthy detour into the desert to see the tree.

But traditions relate that this tree, which had shaded the Prophet (SAW), was where Abu Talib’s caravan had rested. Given the hostile terrain, it was truly astounding that a piece of vegetation could have survived for over 1,400 years.

Later, one of Nader’s friends the photographer Muhammad Salameh, had kindly shown me his pictures of the tree. One image that was particularly striking was a wide angle shot. It showed the desert in relation to the tree, the only one for hundreds of square kilometres.

Another image that we studied showed that the tree, a western Atlantic pistachio or Buttum, had a single trunk with seven side branches. Was this divine symbolism? We didn’t know.

What we did know, however, as we poured over texts was a possibility that this tree was an authentic relic of the Prophetic era. Everything pointed to it, and if it hadn’t been Bahira who recognised Muhammad (SAW), it could have been Waraqah – another Christian monk mentioned in traditions.

I was totally taken aback when I first viewed The Blessed Tree. Nobody (understandably) had taken Nader and me that seriously all those years ago, but here was a full length documentary on it!

In The Blessed Tree Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad relates that on his return from studying at Cambridge his late uncle, King Hussein, had put him to work in the Royal Archives. It was there that researchers had discovered numerous references to the tree, and a forgotten inventory made by King Abdullah I of the holy sites in Jordan.

The Prince had inspected the tree regularly. In 2007 he had visited it together with Habib ‘Ali al-Jifri (a rector of Dar ul-Mustafa in Yemen) and Shaikh Ahmad Hassoun (the chief Mufti of Syria). These men had sat under the tree and made du’ah that they be shown the spiritual truth.

A few days after the event, Shaikh Hassoun had written to Prince Ghazi saying he’d had a dream in which he’d seen someone who appeared to be a hermit about 100 metres away from him. This person had said “peace be to you, O Muhammad ibn ‘Abdullah”.

Shaikh Hassoun had then continued: “…someone whose visage I could not make out was a halo of light under this tree.”

After saying that he had witnessed pious beings – whom he considered to be saints – visiting the figure, he had dipped his hand into a nearby spring to drink when he’d been awoken for the tahajjud prayers.

Prince Ghazi had commented that it was under this very tree that Muhammad (SAW) was recognised as a prophet and that it had borne witness to the Prophet (SAW) who himself was a witness of God.

“That tree is alive, and it’s still there (in the desert)…it’s the only Sahabi, the only remaining terrestrial witness to God’s Messenger (SAW),” he said.

Youth was always at the forefront. Extreme left is Cameron Dugmore, former MEC Education Western Cape, as a student circa 1988. Pic Shafiq Morton

THE stinging rebuke of our education system by Dr Mamphele Ramphele, former UCT vice-chancellor and struggle veteran, during her address at the sixth annual Solomon Mahlungu lecture at the University of Johannesburg is a timely reminder that all is not well in education.

Her widely reported remark that the state of our education is worse today than the gutter dispensation of 1976 is a damning indictment after 17 years of democracy. This is a system that many South Africans sacrificed their lives to overthrow.

The issue of enforced Afrikaans-medium education, and the inferior curricula dished out to non-whites via National Party policy over 30 years ago, would not only mobilise the anti-apartheid movement, but revitalise the ANC in exile, and lead to the formation of the United Democratic Front.

Education, regarded as the cornerstone of apartheid, was at the very centre of the South African uprisings of 1976 and 1985. It was the youth who took to the streets to face the Casspirs, the teargas and the live bullets.

Encompassing various race groups and administered by numerous education boards, apartheid education determined from birth your status, your level of employment and your social opportunity in an unequally weighted society.

Dr Ramphele’s assertion, that the current 30% matric subject pass mark degrades the value of secondary education and compromises further tertiary study, is given context via the dumbing-down of learning by the state for political gain.

Her statement that former education minister, Kader Asmal, had fallen victim to “micro-politics” bears truth. During his tenure the matric pass rate’s dramatic increase from 40% to 70% was loudly trumpeted as a success story for the new South Africa.

She also interrogated the 70%-plus pass rate of this year, pointing out that more than 50% of pupils starting in Grade 1 had not written exams for Grade 12. This meant that over half-a-million children had been lost to the system.

As someone who taught high school briefly under the Coloured Affairs Department during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, my encounters with our education system today (via the travails of my own children) have been illuminating, if not depressing reminders of the past.

This is because as much as things may appear to have changed, the reality is that in many ways they haven’t. More than 30 years ago, our school drop-out rate was too high. Today it is still too high. The existence of about four million unskilled and unemployed young people on the streets of South Africa, as Dr Ramphele comments, is a social disaster.

Admittedly, there have been attempts in education to redress past imbalances, but the reality is that most of the poorer schools are still as marginalised as they were before1994. How many schools, for example, can boast computer rooms, functional science laboratories, book-filled libraries and sports fields?

The hard truth is that education in South Africa is still largely determined by the old geography of apartheid.

The big observable change since 1994 might be more racially integrated classrooms, but the bigger one is that many parents in the townships have voted with their feet, sending their children to better schools in other areas. This has adversely affected township schools.

Then there is what many parents perceive as the privatisation of the education system by the state. One of the biggest grumbles from cash-strapped parents today is school fees, and as the economy bites, even privileged schools are going to suffer from shrinking fiscal bases.

During the apartheid era – and we’re not being sentimental here – schools received free stationery and text-books. The lack of free stationery today discriminates unfairly against impoverished communities where children often walk to school with empty stomachs.

An issue that has bothered me for some time has been the Outcomes Based Education (OBE) system that the Education Department rammed down the nation’s throat; this in spite of it being criticised by educators and being internationally discredited at the time of its application in South Africa.

Bureaucrats might now be in the midst of a strategic reverse strategy regarding this disastrous policy, but too few of us are aware that something suspiciously similar to OBE was already being introduced by the apartheid authorities in the early 1980’s.

I can remember having strong words with Subject Advisors on this new system they were trying to foist upon us during a time of great political upheaval. I have since discovered that our old 1980’s workbooks were almost identical to those I encountered as a parent in the 2000’s.

An educator once cynically told me that OBE called for perfect teachers in a perfect world. It demanded learning by random osmosis – impossible anywhere, let alone in post-apartheid South Africa. He added that economically, OBE “saved on the cost of text books” as the teacher was now, de-facto, the text book.

The lack of emphasis on rote learning of multiplication tables and the basic ABC in our education system (another widespread criticism) has led to a drastic drop in overall literacy. Linguistic facility is the bedrock of mathematical competence and conceptual thinking.

As an examiner and tutor at a tertiary institution offering correspondence media courses, I’ve seen first-hand the imperfect fruits of OBE – and the rapid deterioration of literary skills and our slide down the scale of being a well-educated nation.

At a tertiary level I’m now dealing with students who don’t even know where to place a capital letter, let alone construct a grammatical sentence. In comprehension exercises at least 60% of the students cannot identify a figurative expression.

The most redeeming aspect of this experience has been my personal interaction with the students. In spite of severe challenges and distractions they’re good kids, motivated and willing to learn. For most South Africans, education is the only way out of poverty. That is why there are stampedes at universities.

The point has to be made that the failure is our education system – not those subjected to it. There is nothing wrong with our youth. We can only admire their tenacity. But for them to achieve success, we have to realise that even if the legacy of OBE and apartheid is finally reversed, the state will never be able to do everything.

Dr Ramphele’s statement that the wounds of the past should not paralyse our communities bears great import. I agree with her that ignorance should never be an excuse, and that civil society – more than ever – needs to be a demanding and vociferous shareholder in the going-ons of government.

IT is a truism that earlier generations were more sensitive than us to their natural environment. A cloudburst, for example, was a much weightier event than a whorl on a satellite image, or the opening of an umbrella on a wet pavement.

It is a truism too, that 21st century city life and scientism have veiled us from our surroundings. How much can we really see of the world if our living-room focuses on a plasma screen?

We hardly know what the weather is like because we live in an air-con bubble; and pollution and street-light refraction blot out the night sky.

The disappearance of cosmology (the discipline of understanding the world in all its dimensions), says the scholar Sayyid Hossain Nasr in Man and Nature, is due to our failure to acknowledge the hierarchies of existence.

Science as technologically useful as it may be, he writes, can only remain wholesome when it is cultivated in a metaphysical matrix that is centred on the Absolute.

The reduction of the metaphysical and the revelatory to mere cultural superstition, and the elevation of cold scientific hypothesis to the pinnacle of understanding have eroded the very idea of cosmology – or holistic knowledge.

I got to thinking about this after a weekend trip to the mountains recently. Away from urban dissonance and amongst the deep valleys and soaring granite peaks of the Western Cape, I was reminded that the world was indeed a complex, wondrous place.

It made me realise exactly why prophets have always been sent to preach the cosmology of the Supra-Real. In the cacophony and miracle of existence there is much to distract us.

Call it God-consciousness, Creational Unity, recognition of Lordship; it all boils down to the same thing. We cannot shrink the universe to mere cause and effect when we don’t even know where it begins or ends, or even what’s above and below it.

This is a profound philosophical lesson that Nabi Ibrahim (as), the patriarch of contemporary monotheism, learnt in his youth.

The Qur’an (6: 75-9) states that in his search for eternal truth, Ibrahim (as) first considered that a star might be the divine. But when it set and the moon rose, he conjectured that it was the moon. But when the moon set, he declared it was the sun. But when the sun set, he realised that the Absolute could not be partnered with something that obeyed it.

“I have set my face towards Him who created,” Ibrahim (as) is finally quoted as saying.

As I sat in a camp chair under the trees next to a chattering stream, I recalled that historic Abrahamic moment. The sun was busy setting. I could so easily have thought it was literally disappearing as it dropped behind the escarpment.

As dusk descended, Venus rose. Not before long it was accompanied by other stars until the Milky Way appeared and became a smear of fantastic light. I could easily understand how the ancient Egyptians had found gods in the night sky.

Shooting stars catch one’s eye; planets seem to have different colours and constellations appear to pulsate. Suddenly, you realise that everything is alive. Nothing stays in one place for any length of time.

I’ve heard that even the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) used to look up at the night sky, his Companions reporting that he did so to reassure himself of the grand mercy of Divine Diktat, the Heavenly Balance.

As a meteorite blazed across my vision, I was reminded of the verse in the Qur’an (72: 9) that spoke of “flaming fires” being hurled at mischievous jinn trying to eavesdrop on the Angels. Were the jinn, made of smokeless fire, trying to snatch snippets of Angelic chatter that night?

And whilst the phenomenon of meteorites (and other space debris) could easily be comprehended from both scientific and revelatory perspectives, something I’d seen at the same spot two years previously could not. This was when lights, moving in the region of Orion’s Belt, started to zigzag dramatically before disappearing.

They were moving extremely fast, and completely defied what I’d previously understood as the “laws of physics”. There were several witnesses who saw the same thing, and so I definitely wasn’t dreaming.

I have no idea what I observed, and use the word “UFO” guardedly. The Qur’an has also spoken about man and jinn “penetrating the heavens” (55:33), but not without the decree of the Creator.

Soon a moon rose over the valley. It was a half moon, and I recalled it had been about a month since the 10th of Rabbi ul-Awwal, the lunar birth-date of the Prophet (SAW). On that night I’d seen the crescent rising above Signal Hill to the east. It had seemed particularly radiant, a fitting metaphor of the Prophet’s (SAW) spiritual radiance.

Dark clouds began to scud across the sky. They blocked out the stars and masked the moon, which gave the cumulus a fluorescent fringe. Later that night it rained. As raindrops pattered into the trees and splashed onto the flysheet above my head, I was again reminded of Qur’an (56:68). It seemed to ask me directly:

“See the water… (Shafiq)? Do you bring it down from the clouds, or do We?”

By the following morning the skies had cleared. The birds came to life, foraging for insects in the undergrowth. A pair of francolin came into view, and a thrush tweeted from some low branches.

But what caught my attention was a clump of fynbos being visited by bees. The Chapter of the Bee in the Qur’an is a profound one that talks much about nature. But perhaps its most profound verse is the one that proclaims that all of Allah’s creatures prostrate to Him.

I don’t know why, but in my mind’s eye I decided to listen to the bees, rather than observe them. What I heard was astounding. Their buzzing was not buzzing, but the low drone of “Allah, Allah, Allah!”

The birdsong and the stream were accompanying this dhikr, this remembrance. Gusts of wind sweeping down the valley sounded just like “Hu, hu!” (He is, He is). Even a pair of water birds flying above seemed not to be quacking, but singing “Al Haq, al Haq!” (The Truth, the Truth).

For a few seconds I was completely mesmerised. It was an insight that I would treasure for the rest of my life, the enchanting occasion when I was allowed to momentarily see things the way they really are.

I’VE never been the greatest believer in conspiracy theories. The problem I have is that they’re just too convenient to be true. Zionists, for example, cannot be behind every bush. In conspiracy theory-speak, events slot in seamlessly and everything occurs according to plan.

In this model, the conspirators are given almost divine qualities. It’s like an idolatry of fear. For example, the Bilderbergers – a sinister bankist group which meets behind closed doors every year – might plot and plan world events, but to assign dread power to them would be unwise.

I’m sure that their agenda has had to deal with more failures than successes. There are just too many people on earth right now who don’t want to be enslaved by rapacious bankers promising utopia, but actually delivering interest dependency.

The Occupy Movement is the tip of an ice-berg that is seriously threatening the corporate Titanic. Islamic finance, which offers a much fairer and equitable economic model within the system, has been a threat for years.

There is also just too much public cynicism of authority today. The poor, the majority of us, no longer trust bankers and politicians, whose public identities seem to have merged. Governments, whose primary task is to look after the people, are now solely focused on the fiscus.

As a journalist I’ve seen enough conspiracy theory imploding on itself to realise that actual events can conspire against conspiracy itself. For what the conspirators always forget is that where’s there’s push, there’s pull.

Take the Iranian situation: Iran is seen as a threat because it is pursuing the development of nuclear technology. A map of the region showing US bases in the region and the Gulf, quickly indicates that Iran is under siege – and not Israel, the US or any other Shi’ah paranoid Gulf State.

The push in Iran against the conspiracy script has been going since 1979 when the country kicked the US (bank friendly) Shah out of power. Imagine the gloomy faces at the Bilderberg table that year!

With that failed conspiracy, the conspiratorial masters had to come up with another one. That was when Martin Indyk, former US Israeli ambassador, coined the term “dual containment”. The consequence was the war between Iran and Iraq, a terrible conflict that cost millions of lives.

Of course, the Iran-Iraq scenario is much more complex, but what the bankers ultimately lost was control of Iranian oil reserves, and the sympathy of Iranians. If that wasn’t enough, Iraq’s Saddam Hussain – formerly a willing client dictator – had started to think for himself.

So when he began to talk about sweet Iraqi crude not being pinned to the US dollar and its banking system, his number came up. The proxy colonisation of Iraq now became an actual one when US forces, with its embedded media corps, rumbled into Baghdad.

And whilst the faceless bankers did make a royal mint out of Iraq’s invasion, it did have unintended consequences; collateral costs for which innocent Americans will have to pay for generations to come. Everybody knows that billions of dollars disappeared in a dark vortex of corporate looting in Iraq.

President Barak Obama’s strategic retreat from Baghdad (as with Kabul) is purely a financial one. For after years of occupation, the US hawks (and the bankist conspirators) can no longer afford to face the spiralling costs.

Combine a failed imperialist exercise with the collapse of the developed world’s financial markets, the Federal Reserve frantically printing fresh-air money to save the US economy and the Euro debt crisis, and you get failed conspiracy agenda on a grand scale.

I believe that the complexity of world events is far beyond the reach of even a scheming committee with a low moral IQ such as Bilderberg, or any 33rd Degree Mason. Man may indeed plan, but as all Muslims know, Allah plans best. If we push, Allah can pull. If we pull, Allah can push.

This touches on an absent component of the ethos of the so-called global conspirators. Their morality – if one can even call it that – is based on a vacuous expediency driven by profit, power, self-righteousness and greed. They accord themselves through their inbred arrogance, quasi-divine attributes. Their light is actually darkness.

It’s a Dajjalian metaphor, for sure. The market place becomes heaven. The realms of the human soul and spirituality are denied currency. Strangely, literalist extremists of various bents have bought into this totalitarian model, the ends justifying the means, laundered with selectively quoted scripture.

And lest anyone try to deny this, there are more than enough examples in scripture and history to prove my point that conspiracy – or totalitarian “agenda push” – denuded of spiritual imperative will always be doomed to abject failure. What about communism?

To be fair, “agenda push” can be a profitable exercise, yes, but without sincerity, prophetic value, a sense of social inclusiveness and an eye to human benefit, it loses all grace and profit.

It’s really easy to understand. Imagine if the ancient Babylonians, for instance, had built the Tower of Babel to house homeless people, instead of arrogantly trying to reach Heaven. Surely if Nimrod had not thought of himself as untouchable, a simple gnat would not have brought him down?

Indeed, history has been unkind to conspiracy. And, in the same vein, I believe the future will be equally harsh. Anti-Christs, Messiahs, bankists and secrete societies plotting in dark rooms will all be cruelly exposed on the altar of hard truth.

Socio-economic suffering is not because of Islam, but due to bad governance.

HOW “Islamic” are Islamic countries? This was a question asked by two George Washington University researchers, Scheherazade Rahman and Hossain Askari, in the Global Economy Journal of 2010.

And whilst the paper is already two-years old, its pioneering approach and its Islam-West paradigm do make it compulsory reading for anybody interested in world affairs.

This is because the Arab Spring, calling for political rights in the Muslim world, and the Occupy Movements directed against bankism in the West, have thrown into sharp focus the questions asked by the paper.

In their abstract, the authors discuss the post 9/11 era. They observe a developing global curiosity in relations between faith, finance, politics and human rights. Where exactly does faith fit in the picture?

The researchers point out the deficiencies of academics such as Bernard Lewis (who first coined the term “clash of civilisations”) in trying to understand this relationship between religion, economics and society.

The biggest problem, they say, is that Islam tends to be judged by what those labelled as Muslims do, and not by the actual message of Islam.

The central question, then, was whether self-declared Islamic countries – as determined by membership of the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) – embraced policies founded on true Islamic teachings.

To measure “Islamicity” the authors had to create their own paradigm. This was done by examining the necessary scaffolding required for an Islamic state, and by developing an index to measure the standards.

Over 208 countries were measured under four categories: economics, legal and government capacities, human and political rights and international relations.

The central assumption was that daily decisions made by individuals in society were governed to some degree by their belief systems, which fed into other values.

However, measuring Islamicity – as the authors soon discovered – was not so easy. Of the 57 member states in the OIC only seven (Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iran, Mauritania, Pakistan, Oman and Yemen) declared that they were Islamic states, with a mere 12 saying that Islam was their state religion.

In the study the 208 countries (Muslim and non-Muslim) were compared to a subset of Islamic ones. Western indices, such as the UN Human Development Index and Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, were related to Islamic principles.

The authors outlined four Islamic constructs that had to underpin the notion of a successful Islamic state: Walayyah (compassion through wisdom and justice), karamah (the acknowledgement of human dignity), meethaq (the recognition of the sovereignty of the Creator) and khilafah (responsible viceregency and trustee-ship).

Although they did not mention it, the above fundamentals would have been further bolstered by Imam al-Ghazali’s six famous social principles: the right of religion, the right to wealth and property, the right of one’s progeny, the right to personal dignity and the right to receive justice.

Implicit in this blueprint are the values of a caring society marked by legislative justice, the fair distribution of wealth and genuine leadership.

Economically, said the authors, Islam’s legal systems called for free markets, but not according to the current Western capitalist model. For example, fiqh demanded risk-sharing and disapproved of taxation of imports and exports. It also prohibited monopolies, hoarding, speculation and price manipulation.

The authors concluded that institutions proposed by Islam relating to governance, social solidarity, cooperation and justice were inherently designed to achieve economic development and growth.

The results of their research, which they do emphasise is “preliminary”, does make for interesting reading, though.

This is because the Islamic states fared badly. New Zealand, said to have more sheep than humans, came out as number one, with the US – slated as the world’s top democracy– rated only 25th.

China, usually seen as a rapacious economic powerhouse, was a surprising 27 and India, with its ramshackle democracy, came in at 89. Israel, the bête noire of the Islamic world at 61, was rated higher than the Islamic states, but the occupied West Bank and Gaza (giant blots in the Israeli copybook) were 207.

The top rated Islamic state was Bahrain at 64, though recent events there would probably have seen its rating plummet. Iran was a lowly 163 (only three slots away from Afghanistan). Of the countries declaring Islam as their state religion, Malaysia was highest at 38.

Of the Arab Spring countries, Tunisia was 83. Egypt was 153 and Libya 196. Perhaps what the ranking here predicts is that Tunisia could make the critical transition from dictatorship to democracy quicker than the others.

Of course, one has to bear in mind that these rankings are pre-Arab Spring, but Syria at 186 and Yemen at 198 are somewhat predictive of crisis as Iraq, Sudan and Somalia languish in this region of the graph.

Africa, the Cinderella of all continents, came out poorly – though there were some exceptions. The highest ranking African country was Mauritius at 42. Mauritius has a significant Muslim minority, and as a small Indian Ocean island punches far above her weight.

Namibia was next at 45, South Africa at 50 and Ghana at 53. Significantly, South Africa ranked higher than the self-declared Islamic states. What is interesting for us is that, apart from China, we are the highest rated of the BRIC countries.

The authors conclude that their “very preliminary” results show that Islamic states are not as Islamic in their practice as one would expect. However, the prominence of developed countries tending to place higher on the Islamicity Index has to be taken into proper context.

The relationship between faith, finance and polity is a complex one. The lack of development in Islamic countries cannot be attributed to religion alone.

The age-old problems of developing countries, such as unskilled government, bad economic policies, aid dependency, systemic corruption, lack of social equity and broken-down health care systems have little to do with Holy Law.

It is, in fact, as the authors say, the shortcomings of the governments and their respective policies – and not religion – that accounts for the litany of dismal failures that bedevil the Middle East and Africa, even those countries blessed with oil and natural resources.