FA

Turtles all the way down

[FA @FAnewsfeed]

@MazMHussain The spectator has done the same thing in the uk

[FA @FAnewsfeed]

@koreanscot I think you and your fellow gooks might be shooting blanks

[Bactrian 🌴 @ElegantiaeArbit]

Incredibly important intervention on behalf of one of the most misunderstood books of our time.

[FA @FAnewsfeed]

This is essential reading.

As Muslims and western critics alike continue to adopt the narrowest possible framing of what constitutes Islam, @Imran_posts
provides some much needed context

[Kasurian @KasurianMag]

What is Islam?

In When is Drinking Wine Islamic?, Imran Mulla (@Imran_posts) revisits Shahab Ahmed’s magisterial work that sought to answer this very question.

Some critics took Ahmed to mean that anything Muslims had ever done could be called Islamic. Others took him to mean that the word itself had no coherent meaning. Ahmed died in 2015, aged 48, and What Is Islam? was published posthumously. He was never able to answer his critics.

For centuries, Muslims from the Balkans to Bengal read the Persian poet Hafiz. In one of his verses, the ascetic longs to drink from the Fountain of Paradise, while the poet reaches for the wine-cup. Both hope for God’s mercy. A jade wine-jug belonging to the Mughal emperor Jahangir bore an inscription beginning, “God is Most Great!” At the Ottoman court, the traveller Evliya Çelebi recalled meeting Sultan Murad IV at a party where wine was served. Evliya abstained. The gathering ended with the afternoon prayer and a recitation from the Quran.

How do we make sense of this?

For Ahmed, the question turns on what Muslims understood themselves to know of God, and how they came to know it. The Quran directs its readers to look for God’s signs on earth and within themselves. Philosophers saw reason as one way to discover such truths. Sufis spoke of knowing them through experience. A reader of Hafiz could recognise in the wine of a ghazal both the cup passed between friends and the experience of intoxication with the Divine. The difficulty for a modern reader is that the poet could mean both at once.

Ahmed thought we did an injustice to Muslims of the past when we could recognise the Islam in a jurist’s ruling but scarcely recognise it in a poem that generations of Muslims had known by heart. We also, he wrote, did an injustice to ourselves.

For 14 centuries, in Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s words, the Islamic had been “one of the salient ways of being human”. Ahmed’s book closes with an invitation. “Let us understand, apprehend and benefit from the importance of being Islamic.”

Read more on Kasurian. Link in reply below:

[papa buri @papaburi]

phenomenal by imran, some of the most thought provoking and thoroughly against the grain writing you will read

[Hon. PolProf of Agile Ceremonies @CeilNoyle]

Ironically he’s had to resort to the very identity politics that his characters were supposed to be “skewering.” What a tragic, unfunny boomer

[Matthew Petti @matthew_petti]

“We understand that we must live by the sword. And all of this is infinitely preferable to exile.”

[FA @FAnewsfeed]

@FranklinVH2 He really thought this was his 'antifragile'

[FA @FAnewsfeed]

@MhaskarChief He would still demolish a Pepe's chicken rice box at 11pm though

[FA @FAnewsfeed]

The electrodynamics notes in my files at home are photocopied from a girl who sat in the front row and wrote more legibly than all of us and used pretty colours.

I nailed that exam

[FA @FAnewsfeed]

Comments on what constitutes a real degree tend to come from humanities grads who have anxieties about their own academic calibre.

Highlighters are just a chick thing. When I was studying theoretical physics, the few girls all did this and their notes were way more readable

[Adam James Pollock @AdamPollock]

If you’re at university and using multicoloured highlighters you do not do a real degree and you should immediately drop out and learn plumbing

[FA @FAnewsfeed]

@Con_Tomlinson Stephen Miller is a lunatic who would happily sell his country to Israel. Zia is a patriot

[Amjad Masad @amasad]

@TuckerCarlson @GovMikeHuckabee @SecRubio @davidamilstein Ambassador Cuckabee doesn’t seem to work for America. Time to open an investigation.

[Adnan Hussain MP @AdnanHussainMP]

Why the Sri Lankan team?

What happened to everyone being ethnically English?

[FA @FAnewsfeed]

More Hasbara slop from the Spectator

The name is appropriate; you, the goyim are mere Spectators

[The Spectator @spectator]

The Tel Aviv neighbourhood of Hatikva is everything Israel's critics across Europe fail to understand. This run-down suburb is home to many working-class Mizrahim: Jews who, save for their skullcaps, would not look out of place in a London mosque.

They, or their parents, came to Israel from across the Islamic world: Iraq, Iran, Tunisia, Algeria and Yemen.

Finally safe in the Jewish homeland, many have become some of Benjamin Netanyahu's most ardent supporters. These deeply religious taxi drivers, cleaners, administrators and shopkeepers still feel the trauma of life under the iron fist of Islamism.

Boycotts and finger-wagging from London or Paris will not sway them. They will vote for the strongman they believe most likely to launch the fastest and farthest-reaching rockets, quashing any possibility of a return to the Islamic world they left behind.

✍️ Noa Hoffman

Article | https://t.co/JK5a8acAFe | @hoffman_noa

[FA @FAnewsfeed]

Spoken like a true geopolitical expert

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

@golden_bear777 No, I’m eating burgers while empty tunnels are getting destroyed.

You fucking weirdos and your dead kids wank fantasies. Your poor wank sock.

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

A reminder that at the New York mayoral debate, a city election in America, all of the candidates were asked where they'd go abroad to first and they said Israel and only Zohran Mamdani said he'd stay at home in NYC.

So, remind me again: who are the ones 'obsessed with Israel?

[FA @FAnewsfeed]

We need to convert the yellows to green.

Everyone will be happier

[5Pillars @5Pillarsuk]

✈️ Nearly two-thirds of 5Pillars readers/viewers are either planning or considering making Hijrah from the UK.

In a 24 hour social media poll of 655 people, 62.9% said they either had a firm intention to leave Britain for a Muslim country or were seriously considering it.

📊 The results:

🟢 21.4% – Have a firm intention to make Hijrah.

🟡 41.5% – Are considering making Hijrah.

🔴 37.1% – Have no intention of leaving.

The findings highlight the appeal of living in a Muslim environment, as well as growing questions about the future of Muslims in Britain.

💬 Would you consider leaving Britain to live in a Muslim country? And if so, where would you go?

[FA @FAnewsfeed]

@TypeForVictory You're reposting Eyal Yakoby?

[FA @FAnewsfeed]

Israelis really think taunting a bunch of women is an "epic display of power"

[Eylon Levy @EylonALevy]

One of the most epic displays of power in the history of modern conflict.