Fruits, Vegetables And Untruths

TMy rebuttal is about an article titled 'Islamic cleric bans women from touching cucumbers, bananas for sexual resemblance’, and whose excerpts are as follows:

“An Islamic cleric residing in Europe said that women should not be close to bananas or cucumbers, in order to avoid any ‘sexual thoughts’. The unnamed sheikh, said that ‘if women wish to eat these food items, a third party, preferably a male related to them such as their a father or husband, should cut the items into small pieces and serve.’

He said that ‘these fruits and vegetables resemble the male penis and hence could arouse women or make them think of sex’ and added carrots and zucchini to the list of ‘forbidden foods for women’. When asked how to control women when they are out shopping for groceries and if holding these items at the market would be bad for them, the cleric answered saying ‘this matter is between them and God.’

Answering another question about what to do if women in the family like these foods, the sheikh advised the interviewer to ‘take the food and cut it for them in a hidden place so they cannot see it.’"

Who is behind it?

People these days will believe anything and everything that the mass media prints or beams at them. Most people did not find the time to research or ponder over a matter that came to light recently on the internet and which concerned Muslim identity. Thus ran an article’s headline: Islamic cleric bans women from touching bananas, cucumbers for sexual resemblance.

First, the cleric in question is neither a cleric nor a Muslim. Second, some female relative within his own unbelieving family might have ‘touched’ the said items in ways that one need not mention in this article. Third, believing Muslim women need not be compared with unbelieving women who, without the fear of God in their hearts, will readily revel in such perversions if the right price is paid.

Red faced Muslim women, who use circular bits of cucumbers only over their eyes to rid themselves of dark circles, were quick to condemn this bogus insinuation but the ones always lying in wait to malign Muslims found another reason to laugh out aloud.

Since God and the Prophets never forbade believers from touching fruits such as cucumbers and bananas or odd looking vegetables, who is this unheard of ‘Islamic cleric’ to prevent one from doing so? Is this the same kind of mind at work that launched the cartoons of Prophet Muhammad or wrote books such as ‘The Satanic Verses’? If one reads the headline under scrutiny (‘Islamic cleric bans women from touching bananas, cucumbers for sexual resemblance’) it is plain to see the kind of mind that was able to spin such news.

Programmers of mass ‘controlled’ media

The global media is controlled by a half a dozen conglomerates whose sole job is to mow down true public opinion and replace it with perversion and untruths. Journalists, the channels, websites, the talk-show hosts, all need that elusive ‘something’ to rocket their ratings skywards, and they will devour any lie, spin any fabric and do whatever it takes to serve the media moguls. Every little useless bit is featured as ‘headline’ or ‘breaking news’, trivia triggers worthless debates, and panels of covert spin-doctors work overtime to do the bidding of their invisible pay-masters who know how to ‘programme’ our thought patterns. One only has to stop and think: who is against Muslims in this global war of error (G-WOE)?

The answer is painfully obvious but even more painful is the fact that, leave alone Christians, even decent Muslims fall into deceptive Zionist traps. The root cause of instability in the world is the political climate of the middle east, in the middle east exists Israel which is a nuclear power fully financed by America, America is controlled by Zionists, and many from this ‘chosen race’ are bent upon forcing down our throats nothing but ‘peace’ (war) and ‘democracy’ (anarchy through instability). It is this group that supports pro-Zionists and Communists, and punishes anti-Zionists through the arm twisting tactics of public opinion. Through deception, they keep the public’s mind focussed on non-events and non-issues, and which helps keep all dissent and rebellion against the prevalent exploitive global financial system quite ineffective.

Freaks of Nature?

If one were to type the words ‘Muslim women, cucumbers’ into any decent search engine, what would one get? Loads of links referring to the same article, what else? Who, if not the destroyers of entire countries, the plunderers of Muslim wealth, the conspirators against Islam, are behind all of this?

But what, one may ask, is the reason for creating such sensationalism? The reason is the same that Satan uses against a God-ordained system: corruption of all that is good and wholesome. Because this media onslaught is directed against core human values of modesty, shame and other desireable virtues, it will remain largely unchecked if one only consoled oneself by asking ‘but what can I do?’
 
Apology

Many Muslim women today want more hijab (modest head-scarf), not more skin exposure. They want the exploitation of women to come to an end which the opposing camp helps perpetuate through child pornography rackets in central Europe and sex slave trade linking east European countries with Israel.

While investigating the recent accusation against Muslim women, I came across an apologetic editorial, whose excerpts are as follows:

“As a young news organization (www.bikyamasr.com) we are concerned over the manner of both our reporting on this issue and the way our article was used by a number of global organizations to promote their own partisan agendas.

It was my own editorial oversight that failed in allowing this story to be published. It was my duty to not publish this story before we could gather independent verification about the details behind the original Arabic article from www.assawsana.com.

The “Islamic cleric bans women from touching cucumbers, bananas for sexual resemblance,” article should not have run when it did; it should not have been run at all. We should not have published about an ‘unnamed sheikh’ in an unnamed European country unless we were able to garner more information on the issue, both on the sheikh himself and the news website the information was gathered from, independently.

We have an increased responsibility to not only verify our own material at the highest levels, but further investigate the quotes and articles of other news organizations before referencing their work. This is our error. We apologize for the poor judgment on the matter.

We recognize our pitfalls and their repercussions . . . error in judgment can have serious, detrimental effects. We apologize to our readers for the inadequate editorial judgment. We should not have sourced a piece published by a small website based on such limited, unverifiable information. We accept responsibility for doing so and are working to correct the aspects of our organizational culture which allowed this mistake to occur.

Reporting in a fair and accurate manner on Islam is a difficult process, and one that www.bikyamasr.com takes very seriously. We will continue to push for more information on this story in order to interrogate the accuracy of their original article. If we cannot uncover more information, then we take it as our duty to make this clear and do everything in our power to spread that revelation to those who have sourced and quoted it.

We apologize to our readers for letting them down, and will strive to assure them with our future work that we are making fundamental, institutional changes to assure that mistakes like this do not happen again.”

©Tahir Gul Hasan, 2011

References
English article: www.bikyamasr.com
Original Arabic article at http://www.assawsana.com/portal/newsshow.aspx?id=58893
http://bikyamasr.com/50403/islamic-cleric-bans-women-from-touching-bananas-cucumbers-for-sexual-resemblance/

Kiss Of The Unveiled Spider-Woman

Who, if not the inventive miniaturization-loving Japanese, could have thought of sending kisses across cyberspace using one’s tongue? Welcome to the digital age in which everything must be digitized, stored, altered, sent, received, recycled in a bin and finally emptied to make more room for more trash.

But first, some kiss history. The word came from Old English cyssan ‘to kiss’, which in turn came from coss ‘a kiss’. Kissing is recent development in western culture and is rarely mentioned in Greek literature. It only recently became a social gesture, a sign of refinement of the higher classes. In the east, the same refinement was once seen writ large on the faces of the men who frequented the rooftop dens of ultra-refined dancing girls of affluent Lucknow.

It is believed kissing was quite rare among the lower and semi-civilized races but was firmly established as instinctive in the advanced societies—whatever the word ‘advanced’ means. The kiss seems to have been unknown to the ancient Egyptians, which makes one wonder about the hold of Cleopatra on Marcus Antonius. However, the kiss was well-established in early Greece, Assyria, and India.

Today, science has convinced us by showing us brain scans of people involved in lovely relationships and found that after that first magical meeting, a complex system in the brain is activated which mimics what a person experiences when under the influence of cocaine. In studies of affection between paramours, when the human guinea pigs viewed images of their partners, the reward and motivation systems (in the ventral tegmental area) was found flooded with dopamine, an internal chemical that is released when one undertakes something exciting.

Kissing requires tremendous muscular coordination of 34 facial and 112 postural muscles, the most important one being the kissing muscle (orbicularis oris) which is used to wrinkle the lips. Lips have numerous nerve endings which make them sensitive to touch and bite. And in the case of the French kiss, the tongue plays an important role.

Affection does reduce stress. When kissing was studied in experiments, it was found that an increase in the frequency of kissing in marital and cohabiting relationships resulted in a reduction of perceived stress, an increase in relationship satisfaction, and a lowering of cholesterol levels. One can now better understand why they convinced the masses to consume fewer eggs instead of promoting marathon kissing sessions.

Kissing causes the adrenal glands to release adrenaline and norepinephrine into the blood, which brings on an adrenaline rush that benefits the cardiovascular system. When the heart pumps faster during a passionate kiss, one may burn up to three calories per minute—not that lovers carry with them calorie counters.

Of course, most Christians overemphasize the ‘Jesus is love’ bit and neglect his struggle against sodomy in the God’s temples and usurious practices of the rabbis and derive greater inspiration from the second verse of the song of Solomon 1:2 from the Old Testament:

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth

For thy love is better than wine

Medicinal properties and religious inclinations aside, kisses could become the next big business with servers across the world dedicated to nothing but storing the lip-prints and audio signatures of millions of cyber-kissers. When thieves begin to steal famous kisses and the Wall Street bankers sell them to vulnerable investors, the police will appear with not fingerprint experts but rather with kiss-and-tell specialists. And whether its Osama or Obama, everyone kisses, therefore, terrorists at-large and those on Washington’s Capitol Hill will all be caught using only their kiss signatures.

This conspiracy of inventing a contraption capable of ‘getting two people so close together that they can't see anything wrong with each other’ in cyberspace was hatched in Tokyo's Kajimoto Laboratory. The device allows French kissing over the Internet by flapping the tongue on a plastic straw to make another plastic straw flap remotely on someone else's tongue.

The French, before they started imposing fines on veiled Muslim women, were a polite and tolerant people. The reason they clung for so long to ‘preserving the French habit of kissing ladies' hands was that they believed that a man needed to ‘start somewhere.’ Later they invented French kissing (sucking lips, moving tongues) but today the bitter truth is that a French man can ‘drive safely while kissing a pretty girl because he is unable to give the kiss the attention it deserves.’

The Japanese remote kissing device, a motorized box, resembles a police Breathalyzer used for finding out if a driver is or is not drunk. It converts circular movements of one’s tongue through motors into a kiss that can be felt across the seven seas. I would much rather prefer a kiss that can be felt across one’s entire body.

Now let us look at the Kiss Machine. When one manipulates a plastic tube on one device using the tongue, a computer program stores the movements on a computer and transmits them to another device, causing its tube to move in the mouth of a distant loved one. The inventor actually wishes to rescue long distance relationships with this ‘kiss transmission devices’ (KTD) by transmitting the tactile sensation of kissing from one person to another. The information can be saved and replayed repeatedly.

The researchers seem to realize that most people might not exactly find licking a plastic tube a sensational replacement for the real thing because even the worst kiss comes with a sense of taste, breath noises and plenty of moistness produced by interactive tongues. The inventors aim to re-create all of those wonderful feelings. Will be soon have wet mouse-pads, speakers that make wonderful ‘mmm’ sounds or inflatable dummies to do our bidding? Are we being changed to hide behind our computer screens?

Just as there are full-contact Karate competitions, in the near future we might have full-on person-to-person experience over the Internet. The inventor of the Kiss Machine dreams of having popular entertainers use his device to record kisses that could generate global interest and profit. I do not think all our social ills and financial woes will evaporate once we begin to swipe our tongues over plastic straws.

There are more serious issues such as how might one decide if the person on the other side is experiencing kissing for the first time? In 1948, the Ladies Home Journal insisted that ‘it takes a lot of experience for a girl to kiss like a beginner.’

Kisses too, like most other things in life, have been categorized into types such as adolescent, sexual/romantic, non-sexual, affection, religious, peace, respect, friendship, and those shown by the entertainment industry.

Once the Japanese start rolling out from their factories the new clever invention, we will have a new breed of kiss criminals (kissminals), or simple people who get caught in the act by their loved ones. The need of the hour is to start cooking the right excuses immediately, such as: honey I was just improving my tongue’s motor skills; sweetheart I was NOT really kissing another woman but rather just a straw; darling I was going to try this on you once I was finished here; or as Chico Marxsaid, “I wasn't kissing her, I was whispering in her mouth.”

Ladies and gentlemen, in the near future, if you find your spouse innocently tonguing a straw late into the night imagining you might be asleep, consider my simple recipe: don’t argue, don’t destroy the crockery, but firmly plant a kiss on his lips that does not taste like plastic because ‘a kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.’

©Tahir Gul Hasan, 2011

Allama Iqbal: A letter to The Times

Reproduced for your viewing pleasure is Allama Iqbal's letter that he wrote to The Times of London, and which was published on 12 October 1931 on page 8.

Iqbal's poetry may have been full dreams of Islamic revival and all out activism but it does not appear that he ever advocated, let alone dream, of what we are facing today as a result of injecting alien medicines that the body of Pakistan does not require for its cure.

The text

Sir,— Writing in your issue of October 3 last, Dr. E. Thompson has torn the following passage from its context in my presidential address to the All-India Moslem League of last December, in order to serve as evidence of “Pan-Islamic plotting”:

I would like to see the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind, and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single State. Self-government within the British Empire or without the British Empire, the formation of a consolidated North-West Indian Moslem State appears to me to be the final destiny of the Moslems, at least of North-West India.

May I tell Dr. Thompson that in this passage I do not put forward a “demand” for a Moslem state outside the British Empire, but only a guess at the possible outcome in the dim future of the mighty forces now shaping the destiny of the Indian sub-continent. No Indian Moslem with any pretence to sanity contemplates a Moslem state or series of States in North-West India outside the British commonwealth of Nations as a plan of practical politics.

Although I would oppose the creation of another cockpit of communal strife in the Central Punjab, as suggested by some enthusiasts, I am all for a redistribution of India into provinces with effective majorities of one community or another on lines advocated both by the Nehru and the Simon Reports. Indeed, my suggestion regarding Moslem provinces merely carries forward this idea. A series of contented and well-organized Moslem provinces on the North-West Frontier of India would be the bulwark of India and of the British Empire against the hungry generations of the Asiatic highlands.

Yours faithfully,

Muhammed Iqbal
St. James’s court, S.W.1, Oct. 10.

Scanned image of the letter

 

London visits

The following year, 1932, Iqbal again visited London in connection with the Third Round Table Conference held between Indian leaders and the British government. At a reception in his honour on 24 November, attended by members of the British Parliament and diplomats from many countries, Iqbal made a short statement which ended with the words:

“Muslims have courage and have always shown loyalty and affection for Great Britain. I hope the Muslims’ legitimate claims and aspirations would be fully safeguarded in the final settlement.” (Letters and Writings of Iqbal, page 70)

A similar function was held on 15 December in a room in the Houses of Parliament where foreign diplomats and members of the House of Lords and Commons were invited to meet Iqbal and other members of the Muslim delegation. Iqbal summarised the case for the Muslims of India, and ended his speech as follows:

“I, therefore, respectfully submit that the demands the Muslims of India have placed before you are worth your consideration, because a powerful India will solve for ever the question that is most prominent in politics at the present time, the question of the cooperation of the East and West. India lies between the East and West, and if the Muslims are allowed an opportunity, with the co-operation of England, they can serve the people of Asia and of England.”

©Tahir Gul Hasan, 2011