The U.S.- and Western-trained Malian army, however, has failed miserably against the Islamists during the past year, and with the French intervention there is little time left for training.
Mokhtar Belmokhtar an Algerian in his 40s known in Pentagon circles as "MBM," just split off from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, to start his own franchise.
Interim Mali president Dioncounda Traoré
Over the past decade, AQIM has kidnapped dozens of foreigners, including diplomats, aid workers, field doctors and tourists. Belmokhtar prefers to trade his hostages for money, experts have said, and global intelligence unit Stratfor says he can get an estimated $3 million per European captive. The money allowed him to build one of the best-financed cells of al-Qaeda. It may explain how he was able to strike out on his own six weeks ago to create "The Masked Brigade," whose inaugural attack was launched inside Algeria. They have chosen to embed themselves in northern Mali, in the immense, ungoverned desert which ranges from feather-soft dunes to flat, rocky plains. And both have made tens of millions of dollars by kidnapping French, Canadian, Spanish, Swiss, German, English and Italian nationals.
Omar Ould Hamaha, served as Ansar Dine's spokesman after April 2012, became the military leader of the AQIM-affiliated Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MOJWA) in August 2012.
Omar Ould Hamaha
Ansar Dine led by Islamicst Toureg Iyad Ag Ghaly, has taken control of the major towns in North Mali and has recently taken Konna. Mali is about twice the size of France. Ansar Dine are seasoned desert fighters fighting in their own territory. Ansar Dine and Mujao have expanded the rebellion beyond the Tuaregs by incorporating a number of other ethnic groups like the Bella and Songhai (who have historically opposed the Tuareg) into a multi-ethnic force, motivated by religious fervour. Iyad Ag Ghaly. leader of Tuareg jihadist group Ansar Dine
By Heba Saleh in Cairo and Kiran Stacey in London David Cameron has raised the spectre of Britain being sucked into the fight against terrorists in north Africa for “decades” after the Algerian hostage crisis ended with more than 80 reportedly dead. The UK prime minister said on Sunday that the growing threat of Islamist militants in the Sahel region of Africa required “a response that is about years, even decades, rather than months”.
High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9ff31414-632a-11e2-8497-00144feab49a.html#ixzz2IdvqBVgG
He compared the situation with that in Afghanistan, saying: “What we face is an extremist, Islamist, violent al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group, just as we had to deal with in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9ff31414-632a-11e2-8497-00144feab49a.html#ixzz2Idvvv0AX
British officials said the government’s response to threats in countries such as Algeria and Mali, where the UK is supporting French efforts to expel Islamist rebels, would mainly focus on attempts to strengthen governments and promote dialogue. But they added that British troops could be forced to take direct action against the growing threat of Islamist militants. William Hague, British foreign secretary, said it was a “complete illusion” to think the UK was “omnipotent” and able to prevent problems in west Africa. “There is no perfect answer,” he told the BBC’s Today radio programme on Monday morning. Mr Hague compared the situation in Mali with Somalia where he said progress had been made because of a combination of strong African forces, funded by the EU and backed by UN humanitarian and diplomatic support. A total of 37 foreign hostages were killed during the siege, Algeria’s prime minister Abdelmalek Sellal said on Monday. He said the attackers came from Egypt, Canada, Mali, Niger, Mauritania and Tunisia. Three kidnappers were captured and 32 killed, said Mr Sellal. Local newspapers quoting unnamed security forces reported on Sunday that up to 30 bodies had been found at the sprawling gas complex which was being combed for explosives. Ten Japanese and five Norwegians were among those unaccounted for at the plant, which is operated by the UK’s BP, Norway’s Statoil and Algeria’s Sonatrach. On Monday the Philippine foreign affairs ministry said six of its nationals were among those killed in the siege, while four are reportedly still missing. Two Malaysians are still unaccounted for, AP said. The first British fatality has been named by the Foreign Office as Paul Thomas Morgan, aged 46. It was unclear which company Morgan had been working for. Three other British nationals are still missing. Mr Cameron said the UK must “work with others to defeat the terrorists and to close down the ungoverned space where they thrive with all the means that we have”. He said the threat would “require a response that is about years, even decades, rather than months, and . . . that is patient, that is painstaking, that is tough but also intelligent”.
High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9ff31414-632a-11e2-8497-00144feab49a.html#ixzz2Idw3WGiu
He said he would use Britain’s chairmanship of the G8 this year to ensure that the issue is “right at the top of the agenda”. In line with other western leaders, Mr Cameron refrained from criticising the Algerian authorities who mounted a final military assault on the facility on Saturday two days after their helicopters shelled vehicles in which the attackers had loaded hostages, causing many deaths. He did not repeat the “disappointment” he expressed on Friday over the decision to launch an attack on the hostage takers without his prior knowledge. Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, said: “It’s easy to say that this or that should have been done. The Algerian authorities took a decision and the toll is very high but I am a bit bothered . . . when the impression is given that the Algerians are open to question. They had to deal with terrorists.” Algerian officials said the army decided to storm the gas facility only when it became clear the militants had killed the remaining seven hostages they held and were planning to blow up the site. François Hollande, the French president, said Algeria’s tactics were “the most adapted response to the crisis” and that there could be no negotiations with terrorists. An escaped British worker, Alan Wright, told ITV News he and his colleagues hid in an office when they heard sustained gunfire. They stuck pieces of paper to the windows of the room so the militants could not see inside and after about 24 hours, his Algerian colleagues decided to attempt an escape. Disguising him as a local worker, they cut a hole in the perimeter fence and ran into the desert where they came across members of the Algerian military. The kidnappers calling themselves “Those Who Sign In Blood’’ – part of an al-Qaeda splinter group led by the veteran jihadist Mokhtar Belmokhtar – initially claimed the attack was in retaliation for France’s military campaign in Mali. They reiterated this claim on Sunday, according to the Mauritanian news website Sahara Media. It cited a video, showing Mr Belmokhtar saying: “We in al-Qaeda announce this blessed operation,” adding: “We are ready to negotiate with the west and the Algerian government provided they stop their bombing of Mali’s Muslims.” Sahara Media did not display the video itself on its site and it was not immediately possible to verify the information. Additional reporting by Hannah Kuchler Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013.
Algeria hostage crisis: Most weapons used in attack came from Libya
Most of the weapons used by al Qaeda-linked militants to storm a gas facility in southeastern Algeria came from Libya, the Daily Telegraph has learned. By Mélanie Matarese, Algiers8:50PM GMT 20 Jan 2013 Many of the Islamist terrorists shot their way into the In Amenas compound on Thursday using the AK104 model of Kalashnikov, which was typically used by Libyan rebels in the war against Muammar Gaddafi. They brought F5 rockets that also surfaced in the Libyan war, said the security source. The Islamists wore the same type of outfits that Qatar provided to Libyan National Transitional Council rebels by Qatar – yellow flak jackets with brown patches, known as "chocolate chip" camouflage. The garments are copies of ones worn by Americans in the Gulf war. The terrorists also employed 60mm gun-mortars used by France and Libyan rebels. Other non-Libyan arms used in the Algerian terror attack included German and Chinese-made Kalashnikovs, classic rocket-propelled grenades and Russian offensive and defensive
_________________________________________________
this is one of those endless circles, the Islamacists provoke, the West retaliates and invades and the Islamcists say see I told you they occupiers and get more supporters, then the whole thing goes on for years with guerilla warfare like Vietnam
Posted by lamin (Member # 5777) on :
These silly gangsters all live in the 7th century. They spend their whole lives making murderous nuisances of themselves. And in the process they lose their eyes or their lives. Well, what else to expect from morons?
If they were serious and had sense they would launch full-scale attacks on Saudi Arabia and Pakistan--2 major U.S. client states. And if they are so grieved about Palestine then they should just attack Israel with their usual savage fervour. But the noisy jackasses won't. They are dumb but not that dumb. LOL.
Posted by Clyde Winters (Member # 10129) on :
I don't think al-Qida will be a power below the Sahara. Once people in Sub-Saharan Africa don't have the West to depend on they will revert to their true warrior nature and the Wahabbis will be pushed back north.
It is only a matter of time that once the 'neo-Wahabbis ' are rejected by the locals they will return to the Maliki fiqh. The majority of Africans have never felt comfortable with Wahabbism, as illustrated by the jihad of Uthman dan Fodio. A more conservative form of Islam may result from this adventure--but Wahabbism= al-Qida--a fiqh Africans naturally reject. They will reject this fiqh because once the West falls traditionally Quranic educated Muslims will have more opportunities for succsess within their own societies and see that Wahabbism is a way of life for the hypocrite which seeks to enslave women and make one a farce before God.
.
Posted by Clyde Winters (Member # 10129) on :
quote:Originally posted by lamin: These silly gangsters all live in the 7th century. They spend their whole lives making murderous nuisances of themselves. And in the process they lose their eyes or their lives. Well, what else to expect from morons?
If they were serious and had sense they would launch full-scale attacks on Saudi Arabia and Pakistan--2 major U.S. client states. And if they are so grieved about Palestine then they should just attack Israel with their usual savage fervour. But the noisy jackasses won't. They are dumb but not that dumb. LOL.
Agreed.
.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
You need to consider Boko Haram in Nigeria founded in 2002 and Nigerian Islam in general The relevant term is Salafi which includes Wahabbism. These groups can always adapt slightly to local customs and gain acceptance of a segment of the population
Posted by -Just Call Me Jari- (Member # 14451) on :
These people are Barbarians, Stupid, Vile, and lowlife. People in Africa with the exception of Somalia don't buy the Wahabbi Islamist Sharia garbage and the Muhammadan garbage. Lets hope these Africans come to their senses before we see another Egypt on our hands.
quote:Originally posted by lamin: These silly gangsters all live in the 7th century. They spend their whole lives making murderous nuisances of themselves. And in the process they lose their eyes or their lives. Well, what else to expect from morons?
If they were serious and had sense they would launch full-scale attacks on Saudi Arabia and Pakistan--2 major U.S. client states. And if they are so grieved about Palestine then they should just attack Israel with their usual savage fervour. But the noisy jackasses won't. They are dumb but not that dumb. LOL.
Posted by mena7 (Member # 20555) on :
The West facing decades of war in North Africa is good news for the USA military industrial complex and Western politicians.The military complex will make billions selling weapons and equipment to the US army, the politician will increase their war budget and distract the people.War is a racket thats why the Pentagon thinker use the word theater of war.
Africom turned the richest and true welfare socialist state of Libya into the Afghanistan of Africa.NATO turned Libya into a rogue AL Qaeda/Assassin terrorist state.Terrorist in Libya will destabilize North Africa and the middle East, already they invaded Mali, they are fighting in Syria, they just attacked a gas plant in Algeria.In the future they will attack Niger, Chad, Algeria, Nigeria, Morocco and Lebanon.
The key to defeat the Al Qaeda/Hashishin terrorist is to copy the Israeli Mossad tactic of assassination of terrorist leaders and their financer.Country like Nigeria should invest million on their spy agency and one of their goal should be to identify the terror financier in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Abu Dabi etc.As the USA learned in Irak and Afghanistan and the French will learn in Mali it is difficult to defeat a fanatical suicidal moslem warrior army, it is much easier to take out their leader and their fat wealthy financier oversee.
Islam is a different form of Eastern Christianity like Roman Christianity is a different form of Egyptian Neterism.The reason why is you cant reinvent the wheel and religion build on top of religion.According to a book Im reading now Did Muhammad Exist by Robert Spencer and a book recommended by TypeZeist name The Lost History of Christianity by Philip Jenkins Islam is a modified form of Syriac/Aramaic Christianity.The Arab conqueror practice a mixture of Christianity, Judaisme and Paganisme.Caliph Abd Al Malik Ummayad Arab Empire was located in Damascus Syria. In order to solidified its new Empire like Emperor Constantine did earlier with Christianity in Byzantine Abd Al Malik created Islam. the Qoran(Syriac liturgy) was created out of the Syriac/Aramaic Eastern Chritian bible.The title Muhammad meaning the praise one wich was use as title for Jesus Christ was use for the name of the prophet in Caliph Abd Malik new/old religion.Syria might be the birthplace of Islam, The Alawite muslim of Pres Assad that ruled Syria worshiped both Muhammad and Jesus.There is also a large Christian community in Muslim Syria, There is also a large Christian community in Muslim Egypt.Syria connection with early Islam is Maybe the reason why the Saudi finance Al Qaeda terrorrist who is trying to destroy Syria.
Posted by -Just Call Me Jari- (Member # 14451) on :
This isnt Great News, this is a Nightmare. A quagmire of Wasteful and utterly useless Tax Dollars to Help a bunch of Ignorant, Stupid, Vile, Worthless, and Barbaric Islamofacist Nomad Arabs.
Say what you want about Khadaffi he made Lybia into a functioning state, now Lybia is nothing more than a backwater governed by a bunch of fools. This is now the future of not only Africa but the West in General. Mali once an Example of Democracy and African Heritage and Culture will become the Next Somalia and Egypt, Stooped in Ignorance, Stupidity, Moronic Sharia Law based off the most silly, absurd and sexually depraved bunch of writing ever compiled...Muhammed's Koran.
Notice that All the Leaders who had Functioning states in the Islamic world were either Dictators(Sadaam Heissain) or "Luke Warm" in their approach to Islam(Turkey, Mali, Lybia) now these Vile, Stupid and Ignorant Islamofacist Wahabbist Barbarics want to Turn Africa into Arabia before the Oil, which was one of the most Ass backward wastelands on Earth.
I mean PLEASE...SOMEONE PLEASE show me any form of Civilization of note that ever was established in the Arabian Homeland other than the Sabeans.(and even they borrowed from near by civilizations like Egypt and Greece). Yet you have Africans up here trying to imulate one of the Worlds most Illiterate and Stupid people in history and one of the most Vile, Corrupt, Plageristic, Wiley and Sexually Depraved persons to ever live, the Desert Pirate Muhammed Ibn Abdallah of Arabia.
Posted by -Just Call Me Jari- (Member # 14451) on :
Islam is not a Religion, Islam is a cult. I have heard of Did Muhammed Exist, also another theory is that the Vatican created Islam, I however don't buy it(I must study it before making a conclusion) as of yet. IMO, Muhammed def. existed and despite all this crap about him being illiterate and not knowing about Judaism and Xtianity until the Allah, aka Allah Parad the Supreme God of the Pagan Arabs, spoke to him via the Angel Gabriel Muhammed had Ample opportunity to Meet and discuss with the Jews and Xtian Arabs. His First Wife Khaddija was an Xtian for example, also his accounts on the Jews and Jesus have influence from the Sanheddrin Talmus and the gnostic "Infant Gospel" and even some of the Jewish Christian take on Jesus(That Jesus did not Die). Heck Id even argue that Dervish and Sufism is influenced by Gnostics but thats a different topic.
IMO, Muhammed existed, I mean if you read some of the Sunna and Koran about his Sexcapades, I mean who could make something like that up. There was a great Channel on Youtube about the Life of Muhammed, Minus the Liberal White Washed B.S, and even I was shocked(It was in Cartoon form, I cant find it anymore). I mean Muhammed was a Sexual Deprived Madman, the Koran and Islam was basically a Sex Cult for the Wiley Muhammed.
quote:Originally posted by mena7:
Islam is a different form of Eastern Christianity like Roman Christianity is a different form of Egyptian Neterism.The reason why is you cant reinvent the wheel and religion build on top of religion.According to a book Im reading now Did Muhammad Exist by Robert Spencer and a book recommended by TypeZeist name The Lost History of Christianity by Philip Jenkins Islam is a modified form of Syriac/Aramaic Christianity.The Arab conqueror practice a mixture of Christianity, Judaisme and Paganisme.Caliph Abd Al Malik Ummayad Arab Empire was located in Damascus Syria. In order to solidified its new Empire like Emperor Constantine did earlier with Christianity in Byzantine Abd Al Malik created Islam. the Qoran(Syriac liturgy) was created out of the Syriac/Aramaic Eastern Chritian bible.The title Muhammad meaning the praise one wich was use as title for Jesus Christ was use for the name of the prophet in Caliph Abd Malik new/old religion.Syria might be the birthplace of Islam, The Alawite muslim of Pres Assad that ruled Syria worshiped both Muhammad and Jesus.There is also a large Christian community in Muslim Syria, There is also a large Christian community in Muslim Egypt.Syria connection with early Islam is Maybe the reason why the Saudi finance Al Qaeda terrorrist who is trying to destroy Syria.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
The many holy places and old libraries of Timbuktu, once a prominent center of Islamic learning in the 15th and 16th centuries, were preserved for centuries as a result of the city’s remote location on the path of now collapsed salt- and gold-trade routes.
helps us better explain how the so-called manuscripts of Timbuktu evolved, developed and expanded throughout the whole empire. Thus, the intellectual importance of Timbuktu and the reasons it flourished are not exclusively based upon “strategic position.” It is important to convey that someone in a position of power was responsible for encouraging the attitude toward learning that prevailed in Timbuktu.As Dr. Molefi Asante has put it so conclusively in his book entitled, Classical Africa (page 134):
“The African love for knowledge, literature and learning although now filtered through the religion of Islam, never died. As it has been in the days of the early Egyptian Kingdom, so it was in the days of Askia Mohammed. In fact, Leo Africanus, a historian of the XVIth century wrote about Timbuktu:
There are many judges, doctors and clerics here, all receiving good salaries from King Askia Mohammed of the State of Songhay. He pays great respect to men of learning. There is a great demand for books, and more profit is made from the trade in books than from any other line of business. By the 12th century, Timbuktu became a celebrated center of Islamic learning and a commercial establishment. Timbuktu had three universities and 180 Quranic schools. These universities were the Sankore University, Jingaray Ber University and Sidi Yahya University. This was the golden age of Africa. Books were not only written in Timbuktu, but they were also imported and copied there. There was an advanced local book copying industry in the city. The universities and private libraries contained unparalleled scholarly works. The famous scholar of Timbuktu Ahmad Baba who was among those forcibly exiled in Morocco claimed that his library of 1600 books had been plundered, and that his library, according to him, was one of the smaller in the city. The booming economy of Timbuktu attracted the attention of the Emperor of Mali, Mansa Mussa (1307-1332) also known as “Kan Kan Mussa.” He captured the city in 1325. As a Muslim, Mansa Mussa was impressed with the Islamic legacy of Timbuktu. On his return from Mecca, Mansa Mussa brought with him an Egyptian architect by the name of Abu Es Haq Es Saheli. The architect was paid 200kg of gold to built Jingaray Ber or, the Friday Prayers Mosque. Mansa Musa also built a royal palace (or Madugu) in Timbuktu, another Mosque in Djenné and a great mosque in Gao (1324-1325). Today only the foundation of the mosque built in Gao exists. That is why there is an urgent need to restore and protect the mosques that remain in Djenné and Timbuktu..
Posted by lamin (Member # 5777) on :
"Islamic learning"? I wouldn't call it that. So-called "Islamic learning" was really a package of 3 compendia of knowledge. 1) Ancient Egyptian mathematics--especially geometry. Neo-Egyptian knowledge--metaphysics, alchemy/chemistry, and astrology/astronomy--expressed in the Hermes Trismegistus(see the Corpus Hermeticum), 2)Greek philosophy--especially the writings of Aristotle--and Greek mathematics which is mainly an upgraded version of Egyptian geometry[Thales and Pythagoras are the best-known expositors--both having spent time in Egypt], and 3) classical Roman law corrupted and primitivised into Sharia.
"Knowledge" is derived from bold and critical inquiry into human experiences in their myriad forms. Given what "Islam" means literally, "Islamic learning" is an oxymoron.
The centres of learning in Tomboctou(Timbuktu) such as the "University of Sankore" emphasised secular knowledge in mathematics, law and philosophy all derived from the 3 sources mentioned above. It was not a school for dumb madrassa chanting.
Posted by Clyde Winters (Member # 10129) on :
Here is a piece on West African Islamic Education I wrote some time ago
Islamic Education in West Africa BY CLYDE A. WINTERS
ABSTRACT
In this paper the author reviews the history of Islamic education in West Africa. It explains the origin and curriculum of traditional West African Islamic educational institutions and its manifestations in contemporary Africa.
There is a long history of Islamic education in West Africa. Islamic education in West Africa is the result of both West African and Arabic educational inspiration.
According to Ivor Wilks (1968) and Charles Hunter (1977) Islamic education wads diffused to West Africa by Ibaadi clerics from North Africa. The major founder of Islamic learning in West Africa was the 12th century Shaykh, al-Hajj Salim Suware, founder of the Jakhanka clerical tradition and scholars at the University of Sankore.
The most wide spread educational tradition in West Africa, was founded by al-Hajj Salim Suware. Al-Hajj Suware encouraged learning among the Serakhulle and other Manding speaking people, and a tradition of pacifism and withdrawal from political affairs by their educators and religious leaders.
There is a long tradition of Islamic learning in West Africa. Muslim scholars traveled throughout the Muslim world in search of knowledge.
As early as the last quarter of the 10th century there was a mosque in Cairo for the people of Takrur. In Cairo the West Africans had homes in a special section of the city. (Trimingham 1962, pp.41-42)
African Muslims have a long tradition of Arabic scholarship. Many of their documents were written in Arabic, or in their own languages in the Arabic script. Dr. J. O. Hunwick (1962) has found over 400 African Muslim authors, who wrote 2000 books. But there are few inscriptions on royal tombstones or mosque in West Africa. Nor did the African Muslims mint coins .
Al-Zuhri, writing in Andalusia (Spain), in the Mid-12th century said that leading men of ancient Ghana made the pilgrimage (hajj ) to Mekka, this suggest that West Africans were also studying the zahir al-culuum branches of learning. Moreover, the Islamist Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti (d.1505) author of the Tafsir al-Quran, in his biography Tahadduth bi ni cma Allah , mentioned many of the West African shaykh (teachers/leaders) whom he taught in Cairo, Egypt.
The African cleric/teacher restricted the use of Arabic to his teaching. Often these scholars will deliver many of their lectures on advanced Islamic studies in their own native languages. Educators in West Africa are called by many names including: Afaa, Mallam, Alufa, Shaykh, al-Wali or al-Faqih. the term fudi, is employed to designate a man of learning among the Manding, Soninke and Fulbe people. Among the Jakhanke/Jakhanka clan, a student becomes a fudi when he completes al-Suyuti's Tafsir al-Quran.
ORIGINS OF ISLAMIC EDUCATION
Muslims became interested in Arabic learning so they could understand heritage, and read the Muslim holy book called the Quran. The Muslims believe that the Quran is the word of God Allah).
The Islamic sciences include the Quran, and hadith. In the Quran , surah (chapter) Yunus 3-7, we find a summary of the Islamic sciences:
"Verily, your lord is Allah, who created the heavens and the earth in six periods then he settled Himself firmly on the Throne, He governs everything. There is no intercessor with Him save after His permission. This is Allah, your Lord, so worship Him. Will you not then mind? To Him shall you all return. The promise of Allah is true. Surely, He originates the creation, then He produces it, that He may reward those, who believe, and do good works, with equity; and as for those who disbelieve, they shall have boiling water to drink and a painful punishment, because they disbelieve. He it is who made the sun radiate a brilliant light and the moon reflect a lustre, and ordained for it proper stages, that you might know the count of years and the reckoning of time. Allah has not created this system but in accordance with the requirements of truth. He details the Signs for a people who possess knowledge.
Verily, in the alternation of night and day, and in all that Allah has created in the heavens and the earth there are Signs for a God fearing people"
These passages from the Quran, make it clear that Muslims must seek knowledge, because it helps the Muslim become closer to Allah. It was the Muslim sufi who first established the idea that a Muslim obtains a special type of grace called baraka.
The hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) demands that a Muslim seek out knowledge. Prophet Muhammad left many sayings referring to the quest of knowledge by Muslims including the following:
"The quest of knowledge is obligatory for every
Muslim. Verily the men of knowledge are the inheritors of the prophets.
Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave".(Shalaby, 1954, p.62)
THE ISLAMIC SCIENCES
It is clear from the Quran and the hadith that it is the duty of the Muslim to seek al-culuum al-qliyyah (intellectual sciences). This makes the seeking of cilm (knowledge) sacred to Muslims. Conversely this meant that the awkaaf (endowments) for educational institutions and libraries was an important aspect of Islamic culture.
Given the necessity for Muslims to seek learning/knowledge in all its diverse and intellectual stimulating forms, allowed the non-Arabic speaking followers of Islam to make their traditional sciences part of the Islamic sciences upon their adoption of Islam. Study of the natural sciences was acceptable to Islamic educational traditions if they did not conflict with the teachings of Islam. This led to the scientific knowledge of sub-Saharan Africa, India , Greece , Mesopotamia , and Egypt to became absorbed into the Islamic sciences, via the educational system.
The Islamic sciences are usually referred to as al-cilm al-husuuli (acquired knowledge). In West Africa, the Islamic sciences are divided into various branches and sub-branches of learning. Whereas the Arab Islamic sciences are primarily based on Greco-Egyptian materials the West African Islamic sciences are basically of indigenous inspiration. This does not mean that the sub-Saharan African Islamic sciences have incorporated nothing into their educational curriculum from the North African system, but it should be made clear that much of the West African Islamic curriculum was of Black African origin.
The Islamic sciences are divided into two basic educational systems the ulama (ulaama) system and the madrasah systems. Under the ulama system, a student studies under an Islamic scholar at his residence. Under the madrasah (or Koranic school) system on the other hand, a group of students study in a classroom setting.
The categories for study in the Islamic system is divided into two broad categories zahir and batin studies. The zahir studies make up the Islamic science of society as a whole. The batin studies include divination, medicine and occult knowledge. (Winters 1987)
In general, because of the existence of a pre-Islamic educational system in Africa before the adoption of Islam by many West Africans we find that zahir studies follow the Arab model of education. The practical sciences on the other hand, or batin studies combine the Arab and the African sciences, or are wholly African in origin.
In the African Islamic tradition of learning, zahir studies refer to the study of the scripture and sources of Islam. The zahir curriculum includes three areas:
Tawhid (theology)
I. Science of Society fiqh (law)
Madh (laudation)/hadith
Tafsir (Quranic commentary)
nahw (grammar)
II. Logic lugha (literature)
poetics
III. Practical Sciences
arithmetic
astronomy
music
geography
Natural Sciences
agriculture
botany-zoology
mineralogy
geology
The batin studies deal with esoteric studies or secret knowledge based on the symbolic or mystical interpretation of the Quran. This includes knowledge about divination, mathematics, khatam (charm making) and tibb (medicine). To become a Shaykh (or very learned man) one must master both the zahir and batin learning.
ZAHIR STUDIES
If we were to categorize the zahir curricula in West Africa we must conclude that they are founded on either 1) the Suwarian tradition of the Western Sudan, or 2) the Timbuktu tradition in the central Sudan. The zahir studies in West Africa is based on the Maliki fiqh or school of Islamic law. The Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence, is the earliest school of law to appear in Arabia.
The Maliki fiqh was founded by Malik ibn Anas, author of the Muwatta. The Muwatta, studies in detail the deeds and sayings of the Prophet of Islam. These deeds and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad are called the Sunnah.
The usual zahir curricula of most West African schools included the study of the Quran, one or two simple prayer books; the study of fiqh through the analysis of the Risala, by Ibn Abi Zayd; and the Tafsir al-Quran, by al Suyuti. It was Touba Jakhanke, who centralized the use of the Tafsir al-Quran, in West Africa.
Another important text used in West Africa to study fiqh was the Mukhtasar. Among the Hausa speaking people of Nigeria the Mukhtasar is often considered on the same level as the Quran.
The major text for advanced study in most West African schools in West Africa is the Mudawwana, by Sahun. It is used by most West African educators, except the Jakhanke.
BATIN STUDIES
The term batin studies refers to the study of medicines, divination and the making of charms. The batin studies usually deal with the mystical importance of Arabic letters and their corresponding numbers. This type of batin study is usually called huruuf (letters).
Batin studies began with the memorization of the numerical values of the Arabic letters. After this stage the student goes on to study khatam (seal or ring).
The khatam is a series of diagrammatic magic squares. There are three types of khatam , the muthallathu or squares three by three, the murabbacu or squares four by four, and the mukhammasu squares five by five. These khatamun (plural form of the word khatam).
In the batin institution the student learns to make different types of charms. The most important batin charm is the kaba koi naso 'bottled white liquid'. This charm is composed of a bottle which contains a white liquid and six pieces of paper. On four of these slips of paper passages from the Quran are written in Arabic script. Tables of numerical calculations are written on the final two sheets of paper. The kaba koi naso was sought by people interested in obtaining political authority.
Another common batin form, was a charm called sofo by the Manding, it was written on paper and placed inside a leather pouch, or the horn of an animal. This amulet was worn around the neck, arms, waist or ankles and was suppose to bring one good luck.
THE TEACHING LICENSE
The Muslim educator must have a license to teach. The student after studying under a recognized educator earns a license to teach called the cijaza. The cijaza is also called sanad ,it documents the chain of authorities who passed on information to the student's teacher.
METHOD OF ISLAMIC LEARNING
In the African Islamic education tradition children usually learn the Quran at home and how to write the Arabic script. Their style of writing Arabic is called ajami.
The student begins his study of the Quran by constantly memorizing the first surah of the Quran, the Fatiha, for two weeks. then the student moves on to learn additional lines of the Quran. To learn the Quran each surah is recited loudly by the student.
THE JAKHANKE TEACHING TRADITION
The Jakhanke people are the Manding speaking specialized caste of Muslim clerics and educators. (Hunter 1977) The Jakhanke people belong to the Soninke people, but they prefer to be called Serakulle. The term Soninke, in West Africa is used to refer to non-Muslim people.
The Jakhanke learning was spread throughout West Africa by the transmission of the teaching tradition from master to student. The usual Jakhanke curriculum undertaken by the Jakhanke student begins with the Quran and ends with study of the Tafsir. There are a total of 28 books that must be mastered before a student can become a teacher. The student is to hand copy these books and take them back to his village where he can begin his own Karanta (school).
SANKORE/ CENTRAL SUDANIC TRADITION
The central Sudani system of teaching , popular in Nigeria was founded by the scholars at the University of Sankore in Timbuktu. Sankore was founded during the Mali Empire by Jedala scholars.
Sankore was highly regarded as a center of learning by Muslims around the world. The curriculum of Sankore consisted of 1) Faculty of Law, 2) Faculty of Medicine, surgery, pharmacology and allied subjects, 3) Faculty of Letters, 4) Faculty of Grammar, 5) Faculty of Geography and 6) Faculty of Industrial Arts. The leading scholar of the Sankore tradition was Ahmad Baba.
Information about Ahmad Baba is found in the Tarikh al-Sudan by al-Sadi. He was born in 1556, and died in 1627. Baba strictly adhered to the Maliki fiqh. Ahmad Baba is said to have written 39 books. He taught both at Timbuktu and Marrakush, Morocco. His writings were used by many militant Islamists in the 18th and 19th century to justify jihads (holy wars) in West Africa. The curriculum founded by Ahmad Baba was made up of 44 books .
In conclusion West Africans have a long history of Islamic education. This educational system is based on both Arab and West African traditions.
The founders of the West African Islamic education system was established by scholars of Timbuktu and al-Hajj Salim Suware. These systems used in the Central Sudan and Western Sudan respectively, are still existing today (Doi 1985; Winters 1987).
This Islamic education scheme which functions outside the national education system in West African countries plays an important role in the militant Islamic movements that are causing political problems in countries like Nigeria and Senegal.
REFERENCES
Alkali,H. (1967). A Note on Arabic Teaching in Northern Nigeria, Kano Studies, no.3: 11-12.
Bello, Muhammad. (n.d.) Infaq al-Maysur. MS, Northern History Research Scheme, Department of History Ahmadu Bello University,(Zaria: Ahmadu Bello University) 2, no.4,5.
Doi, A.R. (1984). Political Role of Islam in West Africa with Special Reference to 'Uthman dan Fodio. Al-ilm Journal of the Centre for Research in Islamic Studies (University of Durban,Westville), 4:27-36.
Doi, A.R. (1985). Islamic Education in Nigeria 11th Century-20th Century. Muslim Education Quarterly 2, no.2: 68-81.
Fudi, A. (n.d.) Lubab al Madkhal. Northern History Research Scheme, Ahmadu Bello University History Department. Zaria: Ahmadu Bellow University. K.5/5.
Gbadamosi, T.G.O.(1978). The Growth of Islam among the Yoruba 1841-1908. London: Longman Group Limited.
Hunter,T.C. (1977). The Development of an Islamic Tradition of Learning among the Jakhanke of West Africa. University of Chicago . Ph.D Dissertation. Chicago.
Hunwick, J.O. (1962). Ahmad Baba and the Moroccan Invasion of the Sudan. Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 2, 3: 328-334.
Kani,A.M. (1984). Aspects of Moral Education in Sokoto Caliphate. Muslim Education Quarterly l, 3:67-76.
Lewis, I.M.(ed.) (1980). Islam in Tropical Africa. London : Indiana University Press.
Shalaby, A. (1954). History of Muslim Education. Beirut.
Trimingham, J.S. (1962). A History of Islam in West Africa. London: Oxford University Press.
Wilks,I. (1968). The transmission of Islamic Learning in Western Sudan. In Literacy in Traditional Societies, (Ed.) by Jack Goody.(Cambridge; Cambridge University Press) pp.161-187.
Winters,C.A. (1985)). The West Africa Ulama and Islamic Movements. Islam and the Modern Age, no. 1433: 286-289.
Winters, C.A. (1987). Koranic Education and Militant Islam in Nigeria. International Review of Education 33, 171-185.
Posted by Clyde Winters (Member # 10129) on :
quote:Originally posted by lamin: "Islamic learning"? I wouldn't call it that. So-called "Islamic learning" was really a package of 3 compendia of knowledge. 1) Ancient Egyptian mathematics--especially geometry. Neo-Egyptian knowledge--metaphysics, alchemy/chemistry, and astrology/astronomy--expressed in the Hermes Trismegistus(see the Corpus Hermeticum), 2)Greek philosophy--especially the writings of Aristotle--and Greek mathematics which is mainly an upgraded version of Egyptian geometry[Thales and Pythagoras are the best-known expositors--both having spent time in Egypt], and 3) classical Roman law corrupted and primitivised into Sharia.
"Knowledge" is derived from bold and critical inquiry into human experiences in their myriad forms. Given what "Islam" means literally, "Islamic learning" is an oxymoron.
The centres of learning in Tomboctou(Timbuktu) such as the "University of Sankore" emphasised secular knowledge in mathematics, law and philosophy all derived from the 3 sources mentioned above. It was not a school for dumb madrassa chanting.
Good point. To day most Muslims in West Africa only have madrassa education:
Tawhid (theology)
I. Science of Society fiqh (law)
Madh (laudation)/hadith
Tafsir (Quranic commentary)
nahw (grammar)
The failure to teach Logic lugha . has made these madrassa students ignorant to their being used by the Wahabbis. They don't understand that the customs they adopt from the Wahabbis are cultural features not religious rules asociated with traditional Maliki fiqh.
.
This Muslim educators must change the madrassa system and include the pratical sciences. The only problem is that there are few teachers who could meet the need.
Posted by Mike111 (Member # 9361) on :
quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: I don't think al-Qida will be a power below the Sahara. Once people in Sub-Saharan Africa don't have the West to depend on they will revert to their true warrior nature and the Wahabbis will be pushed back north.
Faith in Africans is a misplaced faith.
News Headline: Malian army ill-equipped to fight Islamists
Soldiers ripped off their uniforms and fled in fear during a recent confrontation with extremists.
Islam was first documented in Nigeria in the 9th century. About 85,000,000 Nigerians are Muslims, approximately 50% population of Nigeria, compared to Christianity which represents approximately the other 50% of the population. Muslims in Nigeria are predominantly Sunni in the Maliki school, which is also the governing Sharia law. Boko Haram (Hausa: lit. "Western education is sinful"),[ is a jihadist militant organisation based in the northeast of Nigeria.t is an Islamist movement which strongly opposes man-made laws and modern science. Founded by Mohammed Yusuf in 2001,the organisation seeks to establish sharia law in the country. Boko Haram was founded as an indigenous Salafist group, turning itself into a Salafist Jihadist group in 2009.[ It proposes that interaction with the Western World is forbidden, and also supports opposition to the Muslim establishment and the government of Nigeria. The group publicly extols its ideology despite the fact that its founder and former leader Muhammad Yusuf was himself a highly educated man who lived a lavish life and drove a Mercedes Benz.
The members of the group do not interact with the local Muslim population[ and have carried out assassinations in the past of any one who criticises it, including Muslim clerics.
In a 2009 BBC interview, Muhammad Yusuf, then leader of the group, stated his belief that the concept of a spherical Earth is contrary to Islamic teaching and should be rejected, along with Darwinian evolution and the concept of rain originating from water evaporated by the sun. Origin In 1995, the group was said to be operating under the name Shabaab, Muslim Youth Organisation with Mallam Lawal as the leader. When Lawal left to continue his education, Mohammed Yusuf took over leadership of the group. Yusuf’s leadership allegedly opened the group to political influence and popularity The group conducted its operations more or less peacefully during the first seven years of its existence.That changed in 2009 when the Nigerian government launched an investigation into the group's activities following reports that its members were arming themselves. Former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell suspects the number of hard-core Boko Haram operatives is small.Boko Haram is considered a major potential terrorist threat affecting Nigeria and other countries, and U.S. officials believe it is potentially allied with Al Qaeda.
BBC 22 January 2013
Boko Haram militants suspected of deadly attacks in Nigeria
Witnesses say gunmen apparently targeted hunters selling bush meat in Damboa on Monday, killing 18 people.
Another five people died on Tuesday when a group of men playing draughts was attacked in Kano.
The militant group Boko Haram, which is fighting to create an Islamic state, has staged many attacks in Nigeria.
Boko Haram has been blamed for the deaths of some 1,400 people in central and northern Nigeria since 2010. Last year alone, the group was linked to more than 600 deaths.
On Monday, gunmen opened fire at a market in Damboa in Borno state, targeting hunters selling meat from animals such as monkeys and pigs, local government official Abba Ahmed told journalists.
Strict Muslims are forbidden to eat this type of bush meat.
"Gunmen suspected to be members of Boko Haram came to the town market and shot dead 13 local hunters on the spot while five others died from their injuries at the hospital," the official said.
Damboa is located near the capital of Borno state, Maiduguri, the stronghold of Boko Haram. The militant group was founded in the city in 2002.
Meanwhile, reports have emerged of a deadly attack in Kano, the main city in northern Nigeria, 500km (310 miles) west of Damboa.
Gunmen riding on motorbikes opened fire on people playing an outdoor board game, police and witnesses say.
Gambling is also strictly forbidden under Islamic law.
Posted by Clyde Winters (Member # 10129) on :
quote:Originally posted by Mike111:
quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: I don't think al-Qida will be a power below the Sahara. Once people in Sub-Saharan Africa don't have the West to depend on they will revert to their true warrior nature and the Wahabbis will be pushed back north.
Faith in Africans is a misplaced faith.
News Headline: Malian army ill-equipped to fight Islamists
Soldiers ripped off their uniforms and fled in fear during a recent confrontation with extremists.
Not really. You only see the African today who is waiting for Euros to lead them. This will pass once the West is fully in decline and they have to count on themselves for their survival.
Posted by -Just Call Me Jari- (Member # 14451) on :
This is what people fail to comprehend, thanks to the Washed down Arab Apologist Liberal Garbage who keep spreading this "Islamic Golden Age" Myth.
Africans had Mathmatics, Astronomy and Philosophy before Islam, and the people who brought Arabic to Africa were Traders and Africans themselves.
quote:Originally posted by lamin: "Islamic learning"? I wouldn't call it that. So-called "Islamic learning" was really a package of 3 compendia of knowledge. 1) Ancient Egyptian mathematics--especially geometry. Neo-Egyptian knowledge--metaphysics, alchemy/chemistry, and astrology/astronomy--expressed in the Hermes Trismegistus(see the Corpus Hermeticum), 2)Greek philosophy--especially the writings of Aristotle--and Greek mathematics which is mainly an upgraded version of Egyptian geometry[Thales and Pythagoras are the best-known expositors--both having spent time in Egypt], and 3) classical Roman law corrupted and primitivised into Sharia.
"Knowledge" is derived from bold and critical inquiry into human experiences in their myriad forms. Given what "Islam" means literally, "Islamic learning" is an oxymoron.
The centres of learning in Tomboctou(Timbuktu) such as the "University of Sankore" emphasised secular knowledge in mathematics, law and philosophy all derived from the 3 sources mentioned above. It was not a school for dumb madrassa chanting.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
The people who invented say, the car are not merely copying people who invented the cart with wheels. Just because were predecessor innovations does not mean that other people did not make improvements or worthwhile variations. The Muslims had some great architecture for instance and while it used some principles from other architecture it cleary had it's own style. They are also great at making patterns and have some great Sufi poets. No they weren't the first to use geometric pattern but they developed their own variations and made unique complex geometric patterns.
The current Tuareg rebellion seeking a separate state was begun by the secular MNLA was formed by former insurgents and a significant number of heavily armed Tuaregs who fought in the Libyan civil war. They are Muslims but they don't believe in sharia law or that a government should be religious.
The Islamist Ansar Dine (Defenders of Faith), also fought against the government. However, unlike the MNLA it does not seek independence but rather the impositions of sharia across united Mali.
Currently Ansar Dine has achieved more power in Mali due to loose alliances with other Islamcacist groups, Al Qaeda affiliates AQIM and Ansar Dine are said to been affiliated with Algeria's DRS (Algerian State intelligence). This is like Pakistan who had friendly relations with the U.S. yet Pakistan's intelligence service is thought to have connections to Al Queda and may do some thing agisnts U.S. interest.
Islamic fundamentalism has deep roots in the N. Africa region
Muslim leaders in al-Andalus were well aware that a new, fundamentalist and aggressive dynasty, the Moorish Almoravids, had taken control of the Maghreb. And al-Mu’tamid, the ruler of Seville and the one who issued the appeal to the Almoravids, knew something about their fanatical asceticism, having helped them conquer the coastal town of Ceuta (on the African side of the Straits of Gibraltar) in 1083. The dilemma in which the rival taifa leaders found themselves in is neatly encapsulated in the celebrated remark al-Mu’tamid’s is reported to have said: “Better to be a camel driver among the Almoravids than a swineherd in Castile.
The Almoravids preached uncompromising jihad, both in the sense of self-reform and imposing religious reform through war Almoravid control of al-Andalus did not last long. There are several contributing factors that explain its rapid demise: 1) Almoravid control of al-Andalus was always precarious, and their fanaticism did little to endear them to the more pleasure-loving Andalusia society
The Tuareg rebellion in Mali has been going on and off for decades but since the fall of Gaddafi the rebel have been able to aquire a lot of weapons formerly belonging to the Libyan army. The current leader of Ansar Dine has roots going back to Iyad Ag Ghaly in the early 1990s rebellion. The MNLA has disagreements with Ansar Dine but they are not engaging in confrontations with them now because Ansar Dine, while not separatists like they are, are still weaking the Malian government so there is common cause there.
On 13 February 2012, the French radio station RFI reported statements by the Malian army that the MNLA had carried out executions of its soldiers on 24 January by slitting their throats or shooting them in the head. French Development Minister Henri de Raincourt mentioned that there had been about 60 deaths, while a Malian officer involved in burying the dead told the AFP that 97 soldiers had been killed.However, the evidence was unverified and partly denied as fabricated by the MNLA.
On 4 April 2012, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees said that in addition to the roughly 200,000 displaced persons, up to 400 people a day were crossing the borders into Burkina Faso and Mauritania.
There are two things at work, groups who have common cause, secular separatists and Islamic fundamentalists.
How Islamic inventors changed the world
From coffee to cheques and the three-course meal, the Muslim world has given us many innovations that we take for granted in daily life. As a new exhibition opens, Paul Vallely nominates 20 of the most influential- and identifies the men of genius behind them
The story goes that an Arab named Khalid was tending his goats in the Kaffa region of southern Ethiopia, when he noticed his animals became livelier after eating a certain berry. He boiled the berries to make the first coffee. Certainly the first record of the drink is of beans exported from Ethiopia to Yemen where Sufis drank it to stay awake all night to pray on special occasions. By the late 15th century it had arrived in Mecca and Turkey from where it made its way to Venice in 1645. It was brought to England in 1650 by a Turk named Pasqua Rosee who opened the first coffee house in Lombard Street in the City of London. The Arabic qahwa became the Turkish kahve then the Italian caffé and then English coffee.
2 The ancient Greeks thought our eyes emitted rays, like a laser, which enabled us to see. The first person to realise that light enters the eye, rather than leaving it, was the 10th-century Muslim mathematician, astronomer and physicist Ibn al-Haitham. He invented the first pin-hole camera after noticing the way light came through a hole in window shutters. The smaller the hole, the better the picture, he worked out, and set up the first Camera Obscura (from the Arab word qamara for a dark or private room). He is also credited with being the first man to shift physics from a philosophical activity to an experimental one.
3 A form of chess was played in ancient India but the game was developed into the form we know it today in Persia. From there it spread westward to Europe - where it was introduced by the Moors in Spain in the 10th century - and eastward as far as Japan. The word rook comes from the Persian rukh, which means chariot.
4 A thousand years before the Wright brothers a Muslim poet, astronomer, musician and engineer named Abbas ibn Firnas made several attempts to construct a flying machine. In 852 he jumped from the minaret of the Grand Mosque in Cordoba using a loose cloak stiffened with wooden struts. He hoped to glide like a bird. He didn't. But the cloak slowed his fall, creating what is thought to be the first parachute, and leaving him with only minor injuries. In 875, aged 70, having perfected a machine of silk and eagles' feathers he tried again, jumping from a mountain. He flew to a significant height and stayed aloft for ten minutes but crashed on landing - concluding, correctly, that it was because he had not given his device a tail so it would stall on landing. Baghdad international airport and a crater on the Moon are named after him.
5 Washing and bathing are religious requirements for Muslims, which is perhaps why they perfected the recipe for soap which we still use today. The ancient Egyptians had soap of a kind, as did the Romans who used it more as a pomade. But it was the Arabs who combined vegetable oils with sodium hydroxide and aromatics such as thyme oil. One of the Crusaders' most striking characteristics, to Arab nostrils, was that they did not wash. Shampoo was introduced to England by a Muslim who opened Mahomed's Indian Vapour Baths on Brighton seafront in 1759 and was appointed Shampooing Surgeon to Kings George IV and William IV.
6 Distillation, the means of separating liquids through differences in their boiling points, was invented around the year 800 by Islam's foremost scientist, Jabir ibn Hayyan, who transformed alchemy into chemistry, inventing many of the basic processes and apparatus still in use today - liquefaction, crystallisation, distillation, purification, oxidisation, evaporation and filtration. As well as discovering sulphuric and nitric acid, he invented the alembic still, giving the world intense rosewater and other perfumes and alcoholic spirits (although drinking them is haram, or forbidden, in Islam). Ibn Hayyan emphasised systematic experimentation and was the founder of modern chemistry.
7 The crank-shaft is a device which translates rotary into linear motion and is central to much of the machinery in the modern world, not least the internal combustion engine. One of the most important mechanical inventions in the history of humankind, it was created by an ingenious Muslim engineer called al-Jazari to raise water for irrigation. His 1206 Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices shows he also invented or refined the use of valves and pistons, devised some of the first mechanical clocks driven by water and weights, and was the father of robotics. Among his 50 other inventions was the combination lock.
8 Quilting is a method of sewing or tying two layers of cloth with a layer of insulating material in between. It is not clear whether it was invented in the Muslim world or whether it was imported there from India or China. But it certainly came to the West via the Crusaders. They saw it used by Saracen warriors, who wore straw-filled quilted canvas shirts instead of armour. As well as a form of protection, it proved an effective guard against the chafing of the Crusaders' metal armour and was an effective form of insulation - so much so that it became a cottage industry back home in colder climates such as Britain and Holland.
9 The pointed arch so characteristic of Europe's Gothic cathedrals was an invention borrowed from Islamic architecture. It was much stronger than the rounded arch used by the Romans and Normans, thus allowing the building of bigger, higher, more complex and grander buildings. Other borrowings from Muslim genius included ribbed vaulting, rose windows and dome-building techniques. Europe's castles were also adapted to copy the Islamic world's - with arrow slits, battlements, a barbican and parapets. Square towers and keeps gave way to more easily defended round ones. Henry V's castle architect was a Muslim.
10 Many modern surgical instruments are of exactly the same design as those devised in the 10th century by a Muslim surgeon called al-Zahrawi. His scalpels, bone saws, forceps, fine scissors for eye surgery and many of the 200 instruments he devised are recognisable to a modern surgeon. It was he who discovered that catgut used for internal stitches dissolves away naturally (a discovery he made when his monkey ate his lute strings) and that it can be also used to make medicine capsules. In the 13th century, another Muslim medic named Ibn Nafis described the circulation of the blood, 300 years before William Harvey discovered it. Muslims doctors also invented anaesthetics of opium and alcohol mixes and developed hollow needles to suck cataracts from eyes in a technique still used today.
11 The windmill was invented in 634 for a Persian caliph and was used to grind corn and draw up water for irrigation. In the vast deserts of Arabia, when the seasonal streams ran dry, the only source of power was the wind which blew steadily from one direction for months. Mills had six or 12 sails covered in fabric or palm leaves. It was 500 years before the first windmill was seen in Europe.
12 The technique of inoculation was not invented by Jenner and Pasteur but was devised in the Muslim world and brought to Europe from Turkey by the wife of the English ambassador to Istanbul in 1724. Children in Turkey were vaccinated with cowpox to fight the deadly smallpox at least 50 years before the West discovered it.
13 The fountain pen was invented for the Sultan of Egypt in 953 after he demanded a pen which would not stain his hands or clothes. It held ink in a reservoir and, as with modern pens, fed ink to the nib by a combination of gravity and capillary action.
14 The system of numbering in use all round the world is probably Indian in origin but the style of the numerals is Arabic and first appears in print in the work of the Muslim mathematicians al-Khwarizmi and al-Kindi around 825. Algebra was named after al-Khwarizmi's book, Al-Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah, much of whose contents are still in use. The work of Muslim maths scholars was imported into Europe 300 years later by the Italian mathematician Fibonacci. Algorithms and much of the theory of trigonometry came from the Muslim world. And Al-Kindi's discovery of frequency analysis rendered all the codes of the ancient world soluble and created the basis of modern cryptology.
15 Ali ibn Nafi, known by his nickname of Ziryab (Blackbird) came from Iraq to Cordoba in the 9th century and brought with him the concept of the three-course meal - soup, followed by fish or meat, then fruit and nuts. He also introduced crystal glasses (which had been invented after experiments with rock crystal by Abbas ibn Firnas - see No 4).
16 Carpets were regarded as part of Paradise by medieval Muslims, thanks to their advanced weaving techniques, new tinctures from Islamic chemistry and highly developed sense of pattern and arabesque which were the basis of Islam's non-representational art. In contrast, Europe's floors were distinctly earthly, not to say earthy, until Arabian and Persian carpets were introduced. In England, as Erasmus recorded, floors were "covered in rushes, occasionally renewed, but so imperfectly that the bottom layer is left undisturbed, sometimes for 20 years, harbouring expectoration, vomiting, the leakage of dogs and men, ale droppings, scraps of fish, and other abominations not fit to be mentioned". Carpets, unsurprisingly, caught on quickly.
17 The modern cheque comes from the Arabic saqq, a written vow to pay for goods when they were delivered, to avoid money having to be transported across dangerous terrain. In the 9th century, a Muslim businessman could cash a cheque in China drawn on his bank in Baghdad.
18 By the 9th century, many Muslim scholars took it for granted that the Earth was a sphere. The proof, said astronomer Ibn Hazm, "is that the Sun is always vertical to a particular spot on Earth". It was 500 years before that realisation dawned on Galileo. The calculations of Muslim astronomers were so accurate that in the 9th century they reckoned the Earth's circumference to be 40,253.4km - less than 200km out. The scholar al-Idrisi took a globe depicting the world to the court of King Roger of Sicily in 1139.
19 Though the Chinese invented saltpetre gunpowder, and used it in their fireworks, it was the Arabs who worked out that it could be purified using potassium nitrate for military use. Muslim incendiary devices terrified the Crusaders. By the 15th century they had invented both a rocket, which they called a "self-moving and combusting egg", and a torpedo - a self-propelled pear-shaped bomb with a spear at the front which impaled itself in enemy ships and then blew up.
20 Medieval Europe had kitchen and herb gardens, but it was the Arabs who developed the idea of the garden as a place of beauty and meditation. The first royal pleasure gardens in Europe were opened in 11th-century Muslim Spain. Flowers which originated in Muslim gardens include the carnation and the tulip.
"1001 Inventions: Discover the Muslim Heritage in Our World" is a new exhibition which began a nationwide tour this week. It is currently at the Science Museum in Manchester. For mor
Posted by -Just Call Me Jari- (Member # 14451) on :
What a bunch of Hogwash..I mean allow me to laugh for a second at the utter rubbish above. First off Notice How Muslim Apologist and Liberal Historians known to Kiss the Ass of Muhammadans to make them feel better about their absolute Barbaric, Ignorant and useless status in the Modern Sciences and the World scene and the absolute non existance contribution to Humanity. First off They use the word "Islamic" I.E "Islamic" Contributions or "Islamic" Inventions etc. Why in Hell do these same Liberals not use "Christian" civilizations "Jewish" civilization, Bhuddist Civilizations and so on, only when it comes to the most Ass Backward and depraved cult do Liberals and Muslim Apologists use the Cult, Islam, as an adjective.
Second, Most of these people were not Hardcore or Koran Abiding Muslims and Almost All of the Scholars were NON ARAB but Conquered Subject People and Converts to avoid subjugation as a 2nd class citizen under Jizya. False claim:
quote:The story goes that an Arab named Khalid was tending his goats in the Kaffa region of southern Ethiopia, when he noticed his animals became livelier after eating a certain berry. He boiled the berries to make the first coffee. Certainly the first record of the drink is of beans exported from Ethiopia to Yemen where Sufis drank it to stay awake all night to pray on special occasions. By the late 15th century it had arrived in Mecca and Turkey from where it made its way to Venice in 1645. It was brought to England in 1650 by a Turk named Pasqua Rosee who opened the first coffee house in Lombard Street in the City of London. The Arabic qahwa became the Turkish kahve then the Italian caffé and then English coffee.
The True Story of Coffee..
Also, the discovery of coffee, according to the maronite monk Antonius Faustus Naironus (1635 - 1707 AD), differs somewhat from the above tale. In "De saluberrima potione Cahue, seu Cafe nuncupata discursus" (1671) he writes, that a herdsman complained to the Prior of a nearby monastery in Abyssinia, that his animals could not sleep. Two monks, together with the herdsman, were sent by their superior to investigate what it was the animals were eating. They discovered coffee plants which they took back to the monastery, where they brewed a beverage from its fruits. They passed the whole night in pleasant conversation, without any fatigue. Undoubtedly, the evidence shows that it were Christian monks who first cultivated the coffee plant and prepared the beverage from its roasted beans. Posted by -Just Call Me Jari- (Member # 14451) on :
lie
quote: 2 The ancient Greeks thought our eyes emitted rays, like a laser, which enabled us to see. The first person to realise that light enters the eye, rather than leaving it, was the 10th-century Muslim mathematician, astronomer and physicist Ibn al-Haitham. He invented the first pin-hole camera after noticing the way light came through a hole in window shutters. The smaller the hole, the better the picture, he worked out, and set up the first Camera Obscura (from the Arab word qamara for a dark or private room). He is also credited with being the first man to shift physics from a philosophical activity to an experimental one.
The basic optical principles of the pinhole are commented on in Chinese texts from the 5th century BC. Ibn al-Haitham might have been the first to realize that light enters the eyes, but the claim that he invented the pin-hole camera is false. Giovanni Battista della Porta (1538 – 1615), a scientist from Naples, was long thought to have been the inventor, due to his description found inside Magia naturalis (1558). However, the first published picture of a pin-hole camera is a drawing in Gemma Frisius' De Radio Astronomica et Geometrica (1545).
Posted by lamin (Member # 5777) on :
quote:Second, Most of these people were not Hardcore or Koran Abiding Muslims and Almost All of the Scholars were NON ARAB but Conquered Subject People and Converts to avoid subjugation as a 2nd class citizen under Jizya.
The so-called Islamic scholars were mainly from already technologically advanced places such as Persia, Egypt[ heir to the 3,000 year Pharaonic civilisation plus inputs from Greece and Rome] and Iraq(Ancient Mesopotamia). And they dealt mainly with what was already researched by the Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans.
Unfortunately such scholars lived in places conquered by the Islamic swarm.
The Barbarians conquered Rome and they were sensible enough to learn new things from Rome, but the invaders from the Saudi sands are sufficiently stupid to believe that they offered anything original in architecture, the arts and the sciences.
Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome already developed architecture to what was transplanted to Medieval Europe. And serious mathematics and science had long been the province of the Ancient Egyptians later embellished by the Greeks. And Aristotelian inquiry by way of Augustine and later scholars lasted all the way through the European Renaissance. Andalusia's role in all this is vastly exaggerated.
Posted by -Just Call Me Jari- (Member # 14451) on :
So True, I mean its maddening how people distort this so called Islamic influence on Humanity. I mean if Islam was such a pioneer in progression why without the Oil are Islamic states stuck in a quagmire of Stupidity and backwardness.
You have to understand that of all the Cultural Centers of learning during the Middle Ages where Islam dominated, not a single City was located in the Peninsula of the Arabs. Damascus, Bhagdad, Fez, Cairo. Timbucktu etc. etc.
Second all the culture and arts of the Islamic Muslims came from the Byzantine Style of Art as seen on the Ummayad Architecture from Syria.
quote:Originally posted by lamin:
quote:Second, Most of these people were not Hardcore or Koran Abiding Muslims and Almost All of the Scholars were NON ARAB but Conquered Subject People and Converts to avoid subjugation as a 2nd class citizen under Jizya.
The so-called Islamic scholars were mainly from already technologically advanced places such as Persia, Egypt[ heir to the 3,000 year Pharaonic civilisation plus inputs from Greece and Rome] and Iraq(Ancient Mesopotamia). And they dealt mainly with what was already researched by the Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans.
Unfortunately such scholars lived in places conquered by the Islamic swarm.
The Barbarians conquered Rome and they were sensible enough to learn new things from Rome, but the invaders from the Saudi sands are sufficiently stupid to believe that they offered anything original in architecture, the arts and the sciences.
Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome already developed architecture to what was transplanted to Medieval Europe. And serious mathematics and science had long been the province of the Ancient Egyptians later embellished by the Greeks. And Aristotelian inquiry by way of Augustine and later scholars lasted all the way through the European Renaissance. Andalusia's role in all this is vastly exaggerated.
Posted by mena7 (Member # 20555) on :
Most see youtube video the idiot guide to Islam myth of Islamic civilization.There was no Islamic civilization, there was a Mawale civilization.The Arab of the Arabian peninsula(except Sabean/Yemen)were very uncivilised.They were illiterate and nomadic people,they didnt have a king or central governement, they didnt have record keeping etc.
The Arab of Islam conquered many advance civilizations like the Sassanian/Persian, Byzantine Syria, Hindu Kush Pakistan, Coptic Egypt, Maurs Morocco, Hebrew Palestine.The uncivilized Arab use those conquered peoples call Mawale meaning client to builded and governed their Islamic civilization.They also use those conquered peoples call Mawale as scholar.The majority of the so call Arab scholar were in reality Mawali Persian, Syrian Christian, Coptic Egyptian, Hebrew, Moors and Mesopotamian.The Mawali were also the manager of the Arab Islamic Empire. Great video.
Another great youtube video in the serie is the idiot guide to Islam is Islam and Africa slavery.The Arab castrated the black African male slave and rape the black African female slave into concubine.
Posted by lamin (Member # 5777) on :
Lioness,
There was no Nigeria until the British invaded in the late 19th century then the 3 territories of North, South and East were joined up under 1 flag at independence. Lugard's concubine coined the name "Nigeria" for the place.
The largest group in the North of Nigeria and other neighbouring parts are the Hausa. Islam filtered in to them around the 14th century--so it is not the 9th as you erroneously claim. The following offers useful details.
quote:Hausa have an ancient Chadic/Sahelian culture that had an extensive coverage area, and have long ties to the Tuareg, Berbers, and other peoples in West Africa, such as the Mandé, Fulani and the Wolof of Senegambia, through extended long-distance trade. Islam has been present in Hausaland since the 14th century, but it was largely restricted to the region's rulers and their courts until 18th and 19th century conquests led by Uthman Dan Fodio and others led to the forced conversion, enslavement or killing of traditional believers. [The Legacy of Arab Islam in Africa (Oneworld Publications, John A. Azumah, 2001)] Rural areas generally retained their animist beliefs and their urban leaders thus drew on both Islamic and African traditions to legitimise their rule. Muslim scholars of the early 19th century disapproved of the hybrid religion practised in royal courts, and a desire for reform was a major motive behind the formation of the Sokoto Caliphate.[3] It was after the formation of this state that Islam became firmly entrenched in rural areas. The Hausa people have been an important factor for the spread of Islam in West Africa.
Maguzawa, the animist religion, was practiced extensively before Islam. In the more remote areas of Hausaland Maguzawa has remained fully intact, but as one gets closer to more urban areas it almost totally disappears, appearing occasionally in the folk-beliefs of urban dwellers. It often includes the sacrifice of animals for personal ends, it is thought of as illegitimate to practice Maguzawa magic for harm. What remains in more populous areas is a "cult of spirit possession" known as Bori which still holds the old religion's elements of animism and magic.[4]
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by lamin: Lioness,
There was no Nigeria until the British invaded in the late 19th century then the 3 territories of North, South and East were joined up under 1 flag at independence. Lugard's concubine coined the name "Nigeria" for the place.
The largest group in the North of Nigeria and other neighbouring parts are the Hausa. Islam filtered in to them around the 14th century--so it is not the 9th as you erroneously claim. The following offers useful details.
quote:Hausa have an ancient Chadic/Sahelian culture that had an extensive coverage area, and have long ties to the Tuareg, Berbers, and other peoples in West Africa, such as the Mandé, Fulani and the Wolof of Senegambia, through extended long-distance trade. Islam has been present in Hausaland since the 14th century, but it was largely restricted to the region's rulers and their courts until 18th and 19th century conquests led by Uthman Dan Fodio and others led to the forced conversion, enslavement or killing of traditional believers. [The Legacy of Arab Islam in Africa (Oneworld Publications, John A. Azumah, 2001)] Rural areas generally retained their animist beliefs and their urban leaders thus drew on both Islamic and African traditions to legitimise their rule. Muslim scholars of the early 19th century disapproved of the hybrid religion practised in royal courts, and a desire for reform was a major motive behind the formation of the Sokoto Caliphate.[3] It was after the formation of this state that Islam became firmly entrenched in rural areas. The Hausa people have been an important factor for the spread of Islam in West Africa.
Maguzawa, the animist religion, was practiced extensively before Islam. In the more remote areas of Hausaland Maguzawa has remained fully intact, but as one gets closer to more urban areas it almost totally disappears, appearing occasionally in the folk-beliefs of urban dwellers. It often includes the sacrifice of animals for personal ends, it is thought of as illegitimate to practice Maguzawa magic for harm. What remains in more populous areas is a "cult of spirit possession" known as Bori which still holds the old religion's elements of animism and magic.[4]
Nigerian historian Chima Korieh and many historians say Islam first made contact in Kanem Borno in the 11th century but by the 14th is when the spread's presence was felt. There may also be claims of earlier contact, it's disputed nevertheless Islam has been established in Nigeria for over 600 years
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
Take your pick France or Sharia ?
Posted by lamin (Member # 5777) on :
quote:Take your pick France or Sharia ?
The pretentious jackasses started the whole thing. Specifically Sarkozy was advised by right wing, arch-Zionist and phoney "philosoper" Bernard-Henri Levy.
They should clean up their mess absent the drugged out and dozing ECOWAS governments all drugged out on corruption and incompetence.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
The current intervention of Mali was decided on by current French president François Hollande at the request of the Malian government.
Posted by lamin (Member # 5777) on :
Let's agree on one thing--you are an amusing joker. Do you understand anything at all? The Malian care-taker government had no real say-so in whether France decided to intervene or not. And you missed the point of my post: the French started the mess, so let them clean it up.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by mena7: African guerillas and rebels group are always using child soldiers to fight the central governement.It is very immoral to use children and teenager who cant understand politic, economic and society in war.Rebel chief that use child soldier should be charge of crime against humanity.
Al Qaeda is very barbaric they want to use children as suicide bomber.Al Qaeda is a religious front for a modern day assassin organisation.Al Qaeda in North Mali is applying sharia law on the Malian people cutting their hands, beating them publicly for smoking cigarette etc.
The ex President of Mali ex colonel Amani Toumani Toure was a good democratic leader who governed Mali well and respected human right but he failed to upgraded and modernised the Malian army weapons.The Malian army was outgun by the Touareg mercenary of Pres Kadafi who had better weapons.Ex colonel Pres of Mali ATT stupidly allow the Tuareg to enter Mali with all their weapons in contradiction to Niger president who order the Tuareg to disarmed before entering Niger when they were fleing from NATO invasion of Libya.
Posted by Doug M (Member # 7650) on :
Most people here are confused about history and about the present day so let me provide my humble opinion.
Islam is a religion that originated in Arabia and is practiced by hundreds of Millions of people, most of whom are non Arab. And most of these people are humble and hard working with no interest in attacking or terrorizing anyone.
However, among the elite of Islam, meaning the rulers, there has always been a streak of treachery and betrayal which includes collaborating with Christians and Westerners against their own people and fellow Muslims. This goes all the way back to Islamic Spain and in the Near East during the Crusades. It is from this backdrop that the West learned the tactics of divide and conquer and put it to good use.
Terrorism in the modern sense of the term, is truly a Western concept that has been put to good use in keeping the Islamic world in check as opposed to being something created by Muslims for the purposes of 'defending the faithful'. Since the fall of the Ottoman empire the West has openly allied with certain groups within the Arab world and supported them over others. This support, best seen in the likes of Lawrence of Arabia, are the basis of the "guerrilla tactics" that we know of as terrorism today. Every since then the world of Islam as we know it today has been defined based around the mercenaries and guerrilla tactics taught by and supported by the West to promote Western interests in the Islamic world. And the funny part is these homegrown "terrorists" and "fundamentalists" were created precisely to prevent a rise of another ottoman empire in the former Ottoman vassal states. In other words to keep the Muslim lands broken up and disunited and technically backwards. And this formula has worked wonders to the point that most people to this day associate terrorist with Islam. Keep in mind that the Ottomans in this sense represents an organized and functioning central government, which is the number one enemy of the West and the corporate industrial bankers who seek to own the entire planet and enslave everyone on it.
quote: "Suppose we were (as we might be)," wrote T E Lawrence, "an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. We might be a vapour, blowing where we listed... Ours should be a war of detachment. We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast, unknown desert ..."
Lawrence was a young officer who had spent the first two years of the First World War in the intelligence department in Cairo. On a diplomatic mission to the Hijaz region of western-central Arabia in 1916, he had formed a personal relationship with Prince Faisal, a commander now ranged in revolt against Ottoman rule. Faisal asked that Lawrence be attached to his service as a British liaison officer. Lawrence's superiors agreed. The Ottoman Empire, though much reduced, still controlled a vast territory from south-eastern Europe to the Caucasus, the Tigris, the Yemen, and the Suez Canal. Plunging into the world war, this ramshackle traditional empire, though fighting a war on four fronts, against the Russians in the Caucasus and the British in Gallipoli, Sinai, and Mesopotamia, proved a tougher opponent than its enemies predicted.
The Arab Revolt, led by the Emir of Mecca, had been encouraged by secret British diplomacy as a source of military and ideological support for the Allied cause. But after momentary success – principally the capture of Mecca itself, along with the Red Sea ports of Jidda and Rabegh – the Revolt stalled. Medina remained in Ottoman hands, and the city's 10,000-strong garrison was receiving reinforcement. When the Turks went on to the offensive, the Arabs fell back, and the tribal irregulars forming the army began to melt away. In late 1916, the Revolt hung by a thread.
Lawrence, newly arrived in the Hijaz, was witness to this looming disaster. His response appears to have been a radical re-conceptualisation of the war. He turned conventional military thinking on its head and created a new theory of modern guerrilla warfare. What if the Arabs ignored the Turks? What if they simply marched away from them into the desert? What if they constituted themselves as a "silent threat" and waged a "war of detachment"?
This they did. In fact, even before Lawrence had worked it out, they had made a start by marching 200 miles north – away from the Turks threatening them around Medina – and establishing a new base at Wejh. Supplied here from the Red Sea by the Royal Navy, they then staged a series of raids on the Hijaz Railway. Running through 1,000km of desert, a lifeline on which the Ottoman grip on Arabia depended, the Turks had to defend it. But against an enemy who could appear suddenly out of the desert haze at any point to defend the line at all was to defend all of it. So instead of a concentration of force at the decisive point – at Medina, from which a thrust towards Mecca might have snuffed out the rebellion – the Turks were forced to plant 100, 200 or 300 men every few kilometres.
quote: Boubacar Yattara, a 25-year-old Malian soldier, fed the heavy machine gun atop an armored vehicle. His unit fired on a truck full of Islamist militants, destroying it. He radioed for reinforcements, but his commanding officer had bad news. His fellow soldiers had already fallen back, beating a hasty retreat.
So Mr. Yattara did what other soldiers had done as the fighting intensified: He stripped off his uniform, waded through an irrigation canal and melted into the town’s civilian population.
'They abandoned us,' Mr. Yattara said of the other soldiers, speaking from the hospital bed where he was being treated for a concussion. 'We barely escaped with our lives.'
And now all of a sudden the Ansar Dine "rebel" group, which was fake and phony to begin with, suddenly breaks up and factions within it suddenly want to have talks with the French and Westerners and are willing to fight against their former allies. Does that sound familiar? Did anyone pay attention to the war in Somalia? Usually when this happens it is part of a something planned in advance. But now these clowns will try to join the French and all of a sudden there will be open warfare all over the Sahara and who will be suffering? Black folks. Just like they are killing civilians in Mali now they will be killing more black civilians across the Sahara and that is ultimately the goal of this whole charade just as it the goal of the charade of the "terrorism" in Somalia and the recent break up of Sudan. ALL of these are fake wars created and set up by foreigners in order to bring about the continued destabilization and destruction of African people. And the easiest way to see it is to follow the money trail and weapons trail.
But if this was a true "war on terror" the government wouldn't be giving money and weapons to the terrorists. OBVIOUSLY this is not really a war on terror. LOL. But 30 years after the US and Saudis financed Bin Laden in Afghanistan and his Islamic mercenaries, we still believe this is really about terrorism.
At this point the people are as much complicit as the leaders as the information is out there and the implications are obvious.
quote: Ansar Dine, the Tuareg-dominated Malian Islamist group under pressure from the escalating French-led military assault in the country, has split in two, according to reports.
Former fighters, once loyal to its leader Iyad Ag Ghali, have said they are prepared both to negotiate and also fight their one-time comrades.
The fracturing of Ansar Dine – if confirmed – would be a significant blow to the confederation of Islamist groups who seized Mali's north last year.
According to some reports former members of the Tuareg separatist MNLA had also joined the new group named the Islamic Movement for Azawad which is being led by Algabass Ag Intallah.
The group insisted on Wednesday that it was composed entirely of Malians and was seeking an "inclusive political" dialogue to bring its conflict with Bamako to an end. It added that it rejected terrorism and extremism.
Doug would you support a new Ottoman-like consolidation of Muslim states into a larger empire? It seems like you would like that. Egypt and Saudi Arabia could merge and unify with the African Islamic states into one big islamic empire
Posted by -Just Call Me Jari- (Member # 14451) on :
I like how Doug always finds away to blame the boogy man white man for the barbaric and backwardness of Islamic states.lol
Posted by Mike111 (Member # 9361) on :
quote:Originally posted by -Just Call Me Jari-: I like how Doug always finds away to blame the boogy man white man for the barbaric and backwardness of Islamic states.lol
Damn Jari, you're still as stupid as ever: Let's see if your shriveled melaninless mind can understand this.
Turkey - BEFORE the Albino Turks, one of the centers of Black civilization.
AFTER the Turks - A backward caldron of ignorant Albinos and mulattoes, with the remaining Blacks marginalized and purposefully uneducated.
Egypt - BEFORE the Albino Turks, one of the centers of Black civilization.
AFTER the Turks - A backward caldron of ignorant Albinos and mulattoes, with the remaining Blacks marginalized and purposefully uneducated.
Iraq/Babylon/Sumer - BEFORE the Albino Turks, one of the centers of Black civilization.
AFTER the Turks - A backward caldron of ignorant Albinos and mulattoes, with the remaining Blacks marginalized and purposefully uneducated.
Iran/Persia/Elam - BEFORE the Albino Turks, one of the centers of Black civilization.
AFTER the Turks - A backward caldron of ignorant Albinos and mulattoes, with the remaining Blacks marginalized and purposefully uneducated.
Posted by Doug M (Member # 7650) on :
quote:Originally posted by -Just Call Me Jari-: I like how Doug always finds away to blame the boogy man white man for the barbaric and backwardness of Islamic states.lol
Come again?
I am saying that point blank almost all African states are backwards because they allow themselves to continue to be used and exploited by white folks and it doesn't matter whether they are Islamic or not.
There I will make it simple.
Else, show me an African country that is not backward due to exploitation and control of its resources primarily by European foreigners.
Just one.
And last I checked Mali was an African state not an Islamic state.
Posted by mena7 (Member # 20555) on :
Great symbolism Doug. Saturnelian high priest Darth Vader dress in black wearing a nazi helmet with a triangle in his mouth(Jordan Maxwell).Darth Vader is surrounded by red guard representing the planet being illuminated by the sun.The Roman Pope dress in white symbolising the sun is surrounded by cardinal dress in red representing the planet that the sun illuminate.All those symbolism are maybe a copy of the Hausa Emir surrounded by is red guard.There are Haussa people in Sudan, they use to live in Egypt.
Religious fanatism didnt start with the moslem it started with the Roman Byzantine Christian.Emperor Constantine tyranicaly make Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire.Christian Byzantine Emperor Theodosius in the 4 cent destroyed the ancient world religion of Egypt, Greece, Phoenicia, North Africa and Europe to replaced them with Christianity.
The Roman Byzantine Christian were terrorist before Islam they terrorised the antique religion follower to converted them to Christianity.Islam is a variation of Eastern Syriac Christianity.The moslem learned their behavior from the Byzantine.The first muslim terrorist group was Assassin/Hashashin sect who assassinated muslim and Christian leaders during the crusade era.
British spy agency and spy Lawrence of Arabia help created Saudi Arabia to destroyed the Ottoman Turk empire.The Saudi royal family is descendent from a Jewish merchant from Baghdad.British spy agency and secret society are behind the creation of Islamic political organisation in the middle east like the Moslem Brotherhood of Egypt and other.The goal is to keep the moslem world backward.
Terrorist group like Al Qaeda and Ansar Dine look like mercenary groups that Saudi Arabia, Uk and USA used to destroyed their enemies and destabilised countries.The West and Saudi Arabia supported Al Qaeda in Libya and in Syria.Saudi Arabia is secretely financing Al Shabbab in Somalia and Al Qaeda in Mali. It is very strange that Al Qaeda never targeted seriously the very corrupt Al Saud dynasty in the moslem holy desert land of Saudi Arabia.
Ansar Dine and Al Qaeda in Mali are the imperialist tools in the problem reaction solution tactic of the west.France intervened in Mali to bring a neo colonial solution to the problem they created.
Posted by -Just Call Me Jari- (Member # 14451) on :
I never said Mali was an Islamic state nor was Mali backward by any stretch of imagination, impoverished but they had Culture, Democracy and tolerance.
What Im saying is this notion that Muslim countries are backward because of Europeans is laughable. Muslim Countries have always been stagnant and eventually backwards. Thats the point. Europeans had nothing to do with it, The Koran and Sharia Law has everything to do with it.
quote:Originally posted by Doug M:
quote:Originally posted by -Just Call Me Jari-: I like how Doug always finds away to blame the boogy man white man for the barbaric and backwardness of Islamic states.lol
Come again?
I am saying that point blank almost all African states are backwards because they allow themselves to continue to be used and exploited by white folks and it doesn't matter whether they are Islamic or not.
There I will make it simple.
Else, show me an African country that is not backward due to exploitation and control of its resources primarily by European foreigners.
Just one.
And last I checked Mali was an African state not an Islamic state.
Posted by Mike111 (Member # 9361) on :
quote:Originally posted by -Just Call Me Jari-: What Im saying is this notion that Muslim countries are backward because of Europeans is laughable. Muslim Countries have always been stagnant and eventually backwards. Thats the point. Europeans had nothing to do with it, The Koran and Sharia Law has everything to do with it.
Jari - Don't you ever get tired of being wrong?
While I am certainly no cheerleader for Islam, the fact is that BEFORE the Albinos took control of it, Islam DID allow for progressive thought and living style.
Al-Andalus:
Posted by Mike111 (Member # 9361) on :
^The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.
The Moorish conquest of Spain. The cities of the south, Toledo, Córdoba, and Seville, speedily became centers of the new culture and were famed for their universities and architectural treasures. Posted by HidayaAkade (Member # 20642) on :
quote:Originally posted by -Just Call Me Jari-: This isnt Great News, this is a Nightmare. A quagmire of Wasteful and utterly useless Tax Dollars to Help a bunch of Ignorant, Stupid, Vile, Worthless, and Barbaric Islamofacist Nomad Arabs.
Say what you want about Khadaffi he made Lybia into a functioning state, now Lybia is nothing more than a backwater governed by a bunch of fools. This is now the future of not only Africa but the West in General. Mali once an Example of Democracy and African Heritage and Culture will become the Next Somalia and Egypt, Stooped in Ignorance, Stupidity, Moronic Sharia Law based off the most silly, absurd and sexually depraved bunch of writing ever compiled...Muhammed's Koran.
Notice that All the Leaders who had Functioning states in the Islamic world were either Dictators(Sadaam Heissain) or "Luke Warm" in their approach to Islam(Turkey, Mali, Lybia) now these Vile, Stupid and Ignorant Islamofacist Wahabbist Barbarics want to Turn Africa into Arabia before the Oil, which was one of the most Ass backward wastelands on Earth.
I mean PLEASE...SOMEONE PLEASE show me any form of Civilization of note that ever was established in the Arabian Homeland other than the Sabeans.(and even they borrowed from near by civilizations like Egypt and Greece). Yet you have Africans up here trying to imulate one of the Worlds most Illiterate and Stupid people in history and one of the most Vile, Corrupt, Plageristic, Wiley and Sexually Depraved persons to ever live, the Desert Pirate Muhammed Ibn Abdallah of Arabia.
This is interesting. Are you saying that Arabic People never had a Grand indigenous Civilization? Explain.
Posted by mena7 (Member # 20555) on :
Doug M wise analysis, you stated Ansar Dine was fake and phony and the war in Mali was a phony war created by the West and Saudi to destabilised and destroyed Africa.Today France easily conquered Mali northern town of Gao and Timbuktu without fighting. The rebel and terrorist forces just retreated to the desert without resisting the French army.The terrorist burned the library of Timbuktu in their way out.
Posted by -Just Call Me Jari- (Member # 14451) on :
Besides Petra is Southern Arabia(Which had Influences from the Greeks, Egyptians and Ethiopians) can you name me one civilization worthy of note in the Pennisula of the Arabs prior to the 6th century A.D...
This includes monumental stone architecture, written language and books/manuscripts, development of sciences, tolerance of non natives etc.
Ill wait.
When you fail to live up to my request, Ill give you an easy request, name one city of higher learning/culture comparable to Bhagdad, Timbucktu, Cordoba, Cairo/Al-Azhar etc. in the Penninsula of the Arabs during the so called Golden Age of Arabian Muhammadan Islam..
I'll wait.
quote:Originally posted by HidayaAkade:
quote:Originally posted by -Just Call Me Jari-: This isnt Great News, this is a Nightmare. A quagmire of Wasteful and utterly useless Tax Dollars to Help a bunch of Ignorant, Stupid, Vile, Worthless, and Barbaric Islamofacist Nomad Arabs.
Say what you want about Khadaffi he made Lybia into a functioning state, now Lybia is nothing more than a backwater governed by a bunch of fools. This is now the future of not only Africa but the West in General. Mali once an Example of Democracy and African Heritage and Culture will become the Next Somalia and Egypt, Stooped in Ignorance, Stupidity, Moronic Sharia Law based off the most silly, absurd and sexually depraved bunch of writing ever compiled...Muhammed's Koran.
Notice that All the Leaders who had Functioning states in the Islamic world were either Dictators(Sadaam Heissain) or "Luke Warm" in their approach to Islam(Turkey, Mali, Lybia) now these Vile, Stupid and Ignorant Islamofacist Wahabbist Barbarics want to Turn Africa into Arabia before the Oil, which was one of the most Ass backward wastelands on Earth.
I mean PLEASE...SOMEONE PLEASE show me any form of Civilization of note that ever was established in the Arabian Homeland other than the Sabeans.(and even they borrowed from near by civilizations like Egypt and Greece). Yet you have Africans up here trying to imulate one of the Worlds most Illiterate and Stupid people in history and one of the most Vile, Corrupt, Plageristic, Wiley and Sexually Depraved persons to ever live, the Desert Pirate Muhammed Ibn Abdallah of Arabia.
This is interesting. Are you saying that Arabic People never had a Grand indigenous Civilization? Explain.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
^^^^ what about West Africa, pre Islamic vs Islamic?
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by mena7: Doug M wise analysis, you stated Ansar Dine was fake and phony and the war in Mali was a phony war created by the West and Saudi to destabilised and destroyed Africa.Today France easily conquered Mali northern town of Gao and Timbuktu without fighting. The rebel and terrorist forces just retreated to the desert without resisting the French army.The terrorist burned the library of Timbuktu in their way out.
Ansar Dine is not fake and phoney Doug is just blowing hot air. He thinks both sides are controlled by the U.S. and the whole thing is a big puppet show.
Rebel forces retreated because that is how a guerilla insurgency works. It's called being smart. They retreat into villages and mix into the regular population. Time is on their side. When the heat dies down they go somewhere else and mount a surprise attack. This goes on and off for years like in Afghanistan. Finally the wear down the foreign government's patience and the foreign government pulls out.
Posted by Troll Patrol (Member # 18264) on :
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,:
quote:Originally posted by mena7: Doug M wise analysis, you stated Ansar Dine was fake and phony and the war in Mali was a phony war created by the West and Saudi to destabilised and destroyed Africa.Today France easily conquered Mali northern town of Gao and Timbuktu without fighting. The rebel and terrorist forces just retreated to the desert without resisting the French army.The terrorist burned the library of Timbuktu in their way out.
Ansar Dine is not fake and phoney Doug is just blowing hot air. He thinks both sides are controlled by the U.S. and the whole thing is a big puppet show.
Rebel forces retreated because that is how a guerilla insurgency works. It's called being smart. They retreat into villages and mix into the regular population. Time is on their side. When the heat dies down they go somewhere else and mount a surprise attack. This goes on and off for years like in Afghanistan. Finally the wear down the foreign government's patience and the foreign government pulls out.
According to your theory and that of many eurocentrics. Tuaregs differ a lot from the "local Malian" population. So how can they mingle in, if they are that much different?
It makes no sense to me, in fact the whole theory is nonsense.
Posted by -Just Call Me Jari- (Member # 14451) on :
West Africans had Monumental Stone Architecture, Paved Roads, established Trade Routes, Gov. and Law before any Arab all going back 4000ybp to the Walata Complex, Kirikongo complex, Nok and I can name more.
You see how easy that was...now ball is in your court..
Ill wait.
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,: ^^^^ what about West Africa, pre Islamic vs Islamic?
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Troll Patrol:
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,:
quote:Originally posted by mena7: Doug M wise analysis, you stated Ansar Dine was fake and phony and the war in Mali was a phony war created by the West and Saudi to destabilised and destroyed Africa.Today France easily conquered Mali northern town of Gao and Timbuktu without fighting. The rebel and terrorist forces just retreated to the desert without resisting the French army.The terrorist burned the library of Timbuktu in their way out.
Ansar Dine is not fake and phoney Doug is just blowing hot air. He thinks both sides are controlled by the U.S. and the whole thing is a big puppet show.
Rebel forces retreated because that is how a guerilla insurgency works. It's called being smart. They retreat into villages and mix into the regular population. Time is on their side. When the heat dies down they go somewhere else and mount a surprise attack. This goes on and off for years like in Afghanistan. Finally the wear down the foreign government's patience and the foreign government pulls out.
According to your theory and that of many eurocentrics. Tuaregs differ a lot from the "local Malian" population. So how can they mingle in, if they are that much different?
It makes no sense to me, in fact the whole theory is nonsense.
I did not say the Tauregs are different from the local Malian population. The are the local population of the North!
The Tuaregs have a variety of different looking types from yellowish and Arab looking to dark skinned "black African" looking like me. The majority of Malians, 90% of the country lives in the South, however only the "black African "type. Some Tuaregs feel discriminated against by the larger mostly all black popualtion of the rest of Mali. People who look like Sanogo. I'm not syaing they are right or wrong but some of them say this. On the other hand the Tuareg also have a history of slave owning and the slave owners tend to be lighter skin (not all but most) I would call these skin color issues of secondary importance in the rebellion because many light and dark skin Tuaregs are untited by Islam and the lighter skinned Tuaregs are even reaching out to black people who are not even Tuareg black people for help in the rebellion. At the moment it's a matter of who can fire a weapon and they realize that during war they everyone they can get so they temporarily set aside their skin color issues. The situation is very complex
Posted by Doug M (Member # 7650) on :
quote:Originally posted by -Just Call Me Jari-: I never said Mali was an Islamic state nor was Mali backward by any stretch of imagination, impoverished but they had Culture, Democracy and tolerance.
What Im saying is this notion that Muslim countries are backward because of Europeans is laughable. Muslim Countries have always been stagnant and eventually backwards. Thats the point. Europeans had nothing to do with it, The Koran and Sharia Law has everything to do with it.
quote:Originally posted by Doug M:
quote:Originally posted by -Just Call Me Jari-: I like how Doug always finds away to blame the boogy man white man for the barbaric and backwardness of Islamic states.lol
Come again?
I am saying that point blank almost all African states are backwards because they allow themselves to continue to be used and exploited by white folks and it doesn't matter whether they are Islamic or not.
There I will make it simple.
Else, show me an African country that is not backward due to exploitation and control of its resources primarily by European foreigners.
Just one.
And last I checked Mali was an African state not an Islamic state.
But this thread is about Mali so how is your comment relevant unless it applies to Mali and the people therein?
Posted by -Just Call Me Jari- (Member # 14451) on :
Doug you are the one who came on blabbering about whitey manipulating the poor arab/muslims I simply pointed out your absurdity.
Dont shoot the messenger
Posted by Doug M (Member # 7650) on :
LOL! You mentioned Islamic states being backwards and we are talking about an African country and African people.
So what you said is what you meant, which is that you don't like people blaming white folks for Africans being backward.
Don't be ashamed of it. That is what you said.
Black folks are just backwards is what you meant.
LOL.
Posted by JMT2 (Member # 16951) on :
The conflict in Mali is continuing full bore, with the French military taking the lead both on the ground and in the air and seemingly pushing back Islamic rebels based in the northern part of the country. The rebels, associated primarily with Ansar Dine, had overrun a number of cities in the central part of the country, and for a time were menacing the Malian capital of Bamako.
On Jan. 22, two key cities,Diabaly and Doutenza, were taken by French and Malian troops after the rebels holding them retreated. For the time being, this has ended the threat of the fall of the Bamako government and shifted the fighting back towards the northern part of the country. The French air force has been launching numerous airstrikes in northern Mali, including in the ancient city of Timbuktu, in an attempt to weaken the strongholds of the rebel forces.
The proposed “Africanization” of the conflict has yet to happen as troops from the Economic Community of West African States and other African states have as yet only trickled into Mali. At a recent emergency summit in the Ivory Coast, ECOWAS leaders called on the “international community” to provide financial support for their African military mission in Mali, which is slated to take over most ground operations from the French. >
With many towns being taken without a fight, it is unclear if the rebel strategy is to retreat to strong points or launch a guerilla-style conflict. Ominously, human rights organizations have reported that Tuaregs and ethnic Arab civilians have been targeted by Malian security forces in a number of brutal attacks and killings. Why West African nations support French intervention
One might wonder why so many West African nations have lined up behind the French intervention in Mali.
France is a former colonizer of the region with clear economic and geopolitical motives. As mentioned in part one of this series, while the motives of various governments are not exactly the same, they can be broadly understood as a wish for stability.
The importance of territorial integrity is crucial for the ruling elites of many nations involved. Nigeria for instance, which has faced major unrest in both the North and the Niger Delta in the South, has significant reason to fear that the fall or breakup of Mali could encourage militants at home. The same could be said of Ivory Coast, where a civil war recently ended, and the most recent presidential election was decided more by French helicopters than by voters at the ballot box. Similar to Mali, Niger more directly fears Tuareg or Islamic militants becoming bolder on its territory.
In many of these countries, major unrest would threaten the kleptocratic, mineral-extraction-based economies that keep a tiny elite raking in billions while the majority of the population lives in truly abject poverty. Even for the more stable nations, significant regional unrest with its influx of refugees could destabilize the broader social and economic status quo. In sum, a significant wave of armed unrest in West Africa would threaten the regional elite’s ongoing attempts to carve out a lucrative arrangement in the world capitalist system.
Do people in Mali support the French intervention?
One crucial piece of the Mali conflict has been the proliferation of reports that most Malians support French intervention. There are a number of reasons that might account for this, but first of all it is worth noting that it is not clear to what degree this support is genuine and to what degree opponents of French intervention feel unable to speak freely or were simply not interviewed or reported on. Important social activists, like the revolutionary-minded Oumar Mariko and former minister Aminata Traoré, have spoken out against the war.
That being said, there is reason to believe many Malians may indeed support French intervention. The Islamic rebels in the North have meted out brutal treatment to those who violate their interpretations of Sharia law. This has included bans on singing and music—something for which Mali is well known—as well as a significant rolling back of women’s rights.
Such restrictions are at odds with the Sufi variant of Islam and the general religious pluralism that exists in Mali. The destruction of historical heritage sites strikes directly at some of the proudest legacies for African people.
Further, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other rebel groups operated with the tacit support of the Bamako government, which took kickbacks from these groups' lucrative hostage-taking operations. This led many Malians to associate them with the corruption and exploitation in their society. Many of the rebel groups have also agitated against independence for the Tuareg and others and stressed territorial unity of the country, which does little to endear them to those for whom national liberation is a crucial concern.
Is France intervening to protect the interests of African people?
This speaks to the limited political spectrum within which the conflict is taking place. When given only two choices, many people choose the option that seems to benefit them the most. In this case, to many it appears that France has come to defend Mali. This, however, does not address the key issue involving French intervention, which is that they are there not to protect the interests of the Malian people but first to protect a beneficial economic set-up and to counteract wider political instability in the region. Such instability could also endanger the economic-political situation for France, which is heavily embedded in West Africa and the Sahel region.
This means that French intervention, while initially appearing to some to be positive, raises other issues that reveal it to be distinctly against the interests of African people. First, for Mali directly, there is little sign that further French intervention will do anything to address Tuareg self-determination, which means further conflict in northern Mali could be inevitable. Additionally, a long-term conflict would lead to significant destruction and displacement as well as the increased militarization of ethnic conflicts in Mali. Further, it does not address any of the underlying political instability in Mali, and threatens to further entrench the corrupt elite establishment.
For the African continent the issues are equally significant. The interventions by France and others in Libya, Ivory Coast and Mali have now legitimized the role of Western troops and air power in African political conflicts. This is particularly significant in the current period when ethnic and national conflicts are erupting all over the continent, as long-simmering grievances over land, water, political corruption and mineral resources break out. In Kenya, Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, major conflicts are underway or brewing.
With the United States significantly ramping up its military activity on the continent it is clear that major conflicts anywhere could draw in Western forces. When the political forces at play are retrograde, like northern Mali’s rebels, this may seem benign. However, if popular uprisings against corrupt capitalist regimes begin to challenge African governments, a quick call to Paris, Washington, or London could send missiles raining down in the name of “regional stability.”
Many observers say that this is not a “neocolonial” invasion of Africa. This view overlooks the broader dynamic, which is the further embedding of Western militaries into African political entities, as protectors and guarantors. Arms money and training flow freely and can be used against “terrorists,” a designation that can easily include revolutionaries. And when arms and training fail, planes, troops and ships can be called in to prop up the politically feeble.
Opposing the French intervention in Mali is crucial for all those who desire the liberation of the African continent from poverty and division.
Posted by HidayaAkade (Member # 20642) on :
quote:Originally posted by -Just Call Me Jari-: Besides Petra is Southern Arabia(Which had Influences from the Greeks, Egyptians and Ethiopians) can you name me one civilization worthy of note in the Pennisula of the Arabs prior to the 6th century A.D...
This includes monumental stone architecture, written language and books/manuscripts, development of sciences, tolerance of non natives etc.
Ill wait.
When you fail to live up to my request, Ill give you an easy request, name one city of higher learning/culture comparable to Bhagdad, Timbucktu, Cordoba, Cairo/Al-Azhar etc. in the Penninsula of the Arabs during the so called Golden Age of Arabian Muhammadan Islam..
I'll wait.
quote:Originally posted by HidayaAkade:
quote:Originally posted by -Just Call Me Jari-: This isnt Great News, this is a Nightmare. A quagmire of Wasteful and utterly useless Tax Dollars to Help a bunch of Ignorant, Stupid, Vile, Worthless, and Barbaric Islamofacist Nomad Arabs.
Say what you want about Khadaffi he made Lybia into a functioning state, now Lybia is nothing more than a backwater governed by a bunch of fools. This is now the future of not only Africa but the West in General. Mali once an Example of Democracy and African Heritage and Culture will become the Next Somalia and Egypt, Stooped in Ignorance, Stupidity, Moronic Sharia Law based off the most silly, absurd and sexually depraved bunch of writing ever compiled...Muhammed's Koran.
Notice that All the Leaders who had Functioning states in the Islamic world were either Dictators(Sadaam Heissain) or "Luke Warm" in their approach to Islam(Turkey, Mali, Lybia) now these Vile, Stupid and Ignorant Islamofacist Wahabbist Barbarics want to Turn Africa into Arabia before the Oil, which was one of the most Ass backward wastelands on Earth.
I mean PLEASE...SOMEONE PLEASE show me any form of Civilization of note that ever was established in the Arabian Homeland other than the Sabeans.(and even they borrowed from near by civilizations like Egypt and Greece). Yet you have Africans up here trying to imulate one of the Worlds most Illiterate and Stupid people in history and one of the most Vile, Corrupt, Plageristic, Wiley and Sexually Depraved persons to ever live, the Desert Pirate Muhammed Ibn Abdallah of Arabia.
This is interesting. Are you saying that Arabic People never had a Grand indigenous Civilization? Explain.
You can wait because I'm asking you a question. I never said you were wrong. The reason I asked this because in a forum I visit, they were debating about the events transpiring in Mali.
One person tried to make the arguement that without Islam and Arabic Influence, Mali and other West African countries would not have reached such prominence in the olden days. I disagreed.
Posted by JMT2 (Member # 16951) on :
How Washington helped foster the Islamist uprising in Mali
On 12 October 2012, the UN Security Council voted unanimously in favour of a French-drafted resolution asking Mali’s government to draw up plans for a military mission to re-establish control over the northern part of Mali, an area of the Sahara bigger than France. Known as Azawad by local Tuareg people, northern Mali has been under the control of Islamist extremists following a Tuareg rebellion at the beginning of the year. For several months, the international media have been referring to northern Mali as ‘Africa’s Afghanistan’, with calls for international military intervention becoming inexorable.
While the media have provided abundant descriptive coverage of the course of events and atrocities committed in Azawad since the outbreak in January of what was ostensibly just another Tuareg rebellion, some pretty basic questions have not been addressed. No journalist has asked, or at least answered satisfactorily, how this latest Tuareg rebellion was hijacked, almost as soon as it started, by a few hundred Islamist extremists.
In short, the world’s media have failed to explain the situation in Azawad. That is because the real story of what has been going on there borders on the incredible, taking us deep into the murky reaches of Western intelligence and its hook-up with Algeria’s secret service.
Azawad’s current nightmare is generally explained as the unintended outcome of the overthrow of Libya’s Muammar al-Qadafi. That is true in so far as his downfall precipitated the return to the Sahel (Niger and Mali) of thousands of angry, disillusioned and well-armed Tuareg fighters who had gone to seek their metaphorical fortunes by serving the Qadafi regime. But this was merely the last straw in a decade of increasing exploitation, repression and marginalization that has underpinned an ongoing cycle of Tuareg protest, unrest and rebellion. In that respect, Libya was the catalyst for the Azawad rebellion, not its underlying cause. Rather, the catastrophe now being played out in Mali is the inevitable outcome of the way in which the Global War On Terror has been inserted into the Sahara-Sahel by the US, in concert with Algerian intelligence operatives, since 2002.
WHY ALGERIA AND THE US NEEDED TERRORISM
When Abdelaziz Bouteflika took over as Algeria’s President in 1999, the country was faced with two major problems. One was its standing in the world. The role of the army and the DRS (the Algerian intelligence service) in the ‘Dirty War’ had made Algeria a pariah state. The other was that the army, the core institution of the state, was lacking modern high-tech weaponry as a result of international sanctions and arms embargoes.
The solution to both these problems lay in Washington. During the Clinton era, relations between the US and Algeria had fallen to a particularly low level. However, with a Republican victory in the November 2000 election, Algeria’s President Bouteflika, an experienced former Foreign Minister, quickly made his sentiments known to the new US administration and was invited in July 2001 to a summit meeting in Washington with President Bush. Bush listened sympathetically to Bouteflika’s account of how his country had dealt with the fight against terrorists and to his request for specific military equipment that would enable his army to maintain peace, security and stability in Algeria.
At that moment, Algeria had a greater need for US support than vice-versa. But that was soon to change. The 9/11 terrorist attacks precipitated a whole new era in US-Algerian relations. Over the next four years, Bush and Bouteflika met six more times to develop a largely covert and highly duplicitous alliance.
ALGERIA'S 'STATE TERRORISM'
In January 1992, legislative elections in Algeria were on the point of being won by the Front Islamique du Salut, which would have resulted in the world’s first democratically elected Islamist government. With a ‘green light’ from the US and France, Algeria’s generals annulled the elections in what was effectively a military coup d’état. It led almost immediately to a ‘civil war’ (known as the ‘Dirty War’) that continued through the 1990s, allegedly between the Islamists and the army, in which an estimated 200,000 people were killed.
By 1994, the Algerian regime’s secret intelligence service, the Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité (DRS), had succeeded in infiltrating the main armed Islamist groups, the Groupes Islamiques Armées (GIA), to the extent that even the GIA leader, Djamel Zitouni, was a DRS agent. Indeed, many of the killings and civilian massacres were either undertaken by the DRS masquerading as Islamists or by GIA elements tipped off and protected by the DRS.
John Schindler, a former high-ranking US intelligence officer and member of the National Security Council and now the Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College, recently ‘blew the whistle’ on Algeria’s creation of terrorists and use of ‘state terrorism’. Writing about the 1990s, he said:
‘The GIA was the creation of the DRS. Using proven Soviet methods of penetration and provocation, the agency assembled it to discredit the extremists. Much of [the] GIA’s leadership consisted of DRS agents, who drove the group into the dead end of mass murder, a ruthless tactic that thoroughly discredited GIA Islamists among nearly all Algerians. Most of its major operations were the handiwork of the DRS, including the 1995 wave of bombings in France. Some of the most notorious massacres of civilians were perpetrated by military special units masquerading as Mujahedin, or by GIA squads under DRS control.’ [1]
By 1998, the killing had become so bad that many Islamists abandoned the GIA to form the Groupe Salafiste pour le Prédication et le combat (GSPC) but it soon became evident that it too had been infiltrated by the DRS.
Although the ‘Dirty War’ began winding down after 1998, it has never really ended. The GSPC, which changed its name to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in 2006, is still operative both in northern Algeria and the Sahara-Sahel.
In many respects, little has changed since the 1990s in that the DRS is still creating terrorists and using ‘false flag’ incidents and ‘state terrorism’ as fundamental means of control. The DRS has certainly not changed: its head, General Mohamed Mediène, who was trained by the KGB and once referred to himself as ‘The God of Algeria’, [2] was appointed in 1990 and is still in post. He is regarded as the most powerful man in Algeria.
As for Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, its leaders in the Sahara and Sahel regions, namely Abdelhamid Abou Zaid, Mokhtar ben Mokhtar and Yahia Djouadi (all have many aliases) are either agents of the DRS or closely connected to it.
My first book on the Global War On Terror in the Sahara, The Dark Sahara (Pluto 2009), described and explained the development of this extraordinary relationship. It revealed why it was that the Bush administration and the regime in Algiers both needed a ‘little more terrorism’ in the region. The Algerians wanted more terrorism to legitimize their need for more high-tech and up-to-date weaponry. The Bush administration, meanwhile, saw the development of such terrorism as providing the justification for launching a new Saharan front in the Global War On Terror. Such a ‘second front’ would legitimize America’s increased militarization of Africa so as better to secure the continent’s natural resources, notably oil. This, in turn, was soon to lead to the creation in 2008 of a new US combat command for Africa – AFRICOM.
The first US-Algerian ‘false flag’ terrorist operation in the Sahara-Sahel was undertaken in 2003 when a group led by an ‘infiltrated’ DRS agent, Amari Saifi (aka Abderrazak Lamari and ‘El Para’), took 32 European tourists hostage in the Algerian Sahara. The Bush administration immediately branded El Para as ‘Osama bin Laden’s man in the Sahara’.
RUMSFELD’S CUBAN BLUEPRINT
The US government has a long history of using false flag incidents to justify military intervention. The thinking behind the El Para operation in 2003 can actually be traced directly to a similar plan conceived by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff 40 years earlier.
In the wake of the 1961 Bay of Pigs disaster – when a CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles, supported by US armed forces, attempted unsuccessfully to invade Cuba and overthrow the government of Fidel Castro – the US Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up plans, codenamed Operation Northwoods, to justify a US military invasion of Cuba. The plan was presented to President John F Kennedy’s Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, on 13 March 1962. Entitled ‘Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba (Top Secret),’ the Northwoods Operation proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war that the Joint Chiefs of Staff intended to launch against Cuba. It called on the CIA and other operatives to undertake a range of atrocities. As US investigative journalist James Bamford described it: ‘Innocent civilians were to be shot on American streets; boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba were to be sunk on the high seas; a wave of violent terrorism was to be launched in Washington DC, Miami and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer [Chair of US Joint Chiefs of Staff] and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war against Fidel Castro’s Cuba.’
The plan was ultimately rejected by President Kennedy. Operation Northwoods remained ‘classified’ and unknown to the American public until declassified by the National Security Archive and revealed by Bamford in April 2001. In 2002, a not dissimilar plan was presented to US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld by his Defense Science Board. Excerpts from its ‘Summer Study on Special Operations and Joint Forces in Support of Countering Terrorism’ were revealed on 16 August 2002, with Pamela Hess, William Arkin and David Isenberg, amongst others, publishing further details and analysis of the plan. The plan recommended the creation of a ‘Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group’ (P20G as it became known), a covert organization that would carry out secret missions to ‘stimulate reactions’ among terrorist groups by provoking them into undertaking violent acts that would expose them to ‘counter-attack’ by US forces.
AL QAEDA IN THE ISLAMIC MAGHREB
My new book on the Global War On Terror in the Sahara (The Dying Sahara, Pluto 2013) will present strong evidence that the El Para operation was the first ‘test run’ of Rumsfeld’s decision, made in 2002, to operationalize the P20G plan. In his recent investigation of false flag operations, Nafeez Ahmed states that the US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh was told by a Pentagon advisor that the Algerian [El Para] operation was a pilot for the new Pentagon covert P20G programme.
The Sahara-Sahel front is not the only case of such fabricated incidents in the Global War On Terror. In May 2008, President George W Bush requested some $400 million in covert funding for terrorist groups across much of the Middle East-Afghanistan region in a covert offensive directed ultimately against the Iranian regime. An initial outlay of $300 million was approved by Congress.
Since the El Para operation, Algeria’s DRS, with the complicity of the US and the knowledge of other Western intelligence agencies, has used Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, through the almost complete infiltration of its leadership, to create a terrorist scenario. Much of the terrorist landscape that Algeria and its Western allies have painted in the Sahara-Sahel region is completely false.
The Dying Sahara analyzes every supposed ‘terrorism’ incident in the region over this last, terrible decade. It shows that a few are genuine, but that the vast majority were fabricated or orchestrated by the DRS. Some incidents, such as the widely reported Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb attack on Algeria’s Djanet airport in 2007, simply didn’t happen. What actually transpired was that a demonstration against the Algerian administration over unemployment by local Tuareg youths ended with the youths firing shots at the airport. It was nothing to do with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
In order to justify or increase what I have called their ‘terrorism rents’ from Washington, the governments of Mali, Niger and Algeria have been responsible on at least five occasions since 2004 for provoking Tuareg into taking up arms, as in 2004 (Niger), 2005 (Tamanrasset, Algeria), 2006 (Mali), 2007-09 (Niger and Mali). In July 2005, for example, Tuareg youths rioted in the southern Algerian city of Tamanrasset, setting ablaze some 40 government and commercial buildings. It was finally proven in court that the riots and arson attacks had been led by Algeria’s police as agents provocateurs. The matter was hushed up and some 80 youths freed and compensated. But the object of the exercise had been achieved: the DRS’s allies in Washington were able to talk of ‘putative terrorism’ among the Tuareg of Tamanrasset, thus lending more justification to George Bush’s Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative and the Pentagon’s almost concurrent ‘Operation Flintlock’ military exercise across the Sahara.
Around the time of the El Para operation, the Pentagon produced a series of maps of Africa, depicting most of the Sahara-Sahel region as a ‘Terror Zone’ or ‘Terror Corridor’. That has now become a self-fulfilled prophecy. In addition, the region has also become one of the world’s main drug conduits. In the last few years, cocaine trafficking from South America through Azawad to Europe, under the protection of the region’s political and military élites, notably Mali’s former president and security forces and Algeria’s DRS, has burgeoned. The UN Office of Drugs Control recently estimated that 60 per cent of Europe’s cocaine passed through the region. It put its value, at Paris street prices, at some $11 billion, with an estimated $2 billion remaining in the region.
The impact of Washington’s machinations on the peoples of the Sahara-Sahel has been devastating, not least for the regional economy. More than 60 kidnappings of Westerners have led to the collapse of the tourism industry through which Tuareg communities in Mali, Niger and Algeria previously acquired much of their cash income. For example, the killing of four French tourists in Mauritania, in addition to subsequent kidnappings, resulted in only 173 tourists visiting Mauritania in 2011, compared with 72,500 in 2007. The loss of tourism has deprived the region of tens of millions of dollars and forced more and more Tuareg (and others), especially young men, into the ‘criminality’ of banditry and drug trafficking.
MALI’S CURRENT MESS
While it will be clear from all this that Mali’s latest Tuareg rebellion had a complex background, the rebellion that began in January 2012 was different from all previous Tuareg rebellions in that there was a very real likelihood that it would succeed, at least in taking control of the whole of northern Mali. The creation of the rebel MNLA in October 2011 was therefore not only a potentially serious threat to Algeria, but one which appears to have taken the Algerian regime by surprise. Algeria has always been a little fearful of the Tuareg, both domestically and in the neighbouring Sahel countries. The distinct possibility of a militarily successful Tuareg nationalist movement in northern Mali, which Algeria has always regarded as its own backyard, could not be countenanced.
The Algerian intelligence agency’s strategy to remove this threat was to use its control of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb to weaken and then destroy the credibility and political effectiveness of the MNLA. This is precisely what we have seen happening in northern Mali over the last nine months.
Although the Algerian government has denied doing so, it sent some 200 Special Forces into Azawad on 20 December 2011. Their purpose appears to have been to:
• protect Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which had moved from its training base(s) in southern Algeria into northern Mali around 2008
• assess the strengths and intentions of the MNLA, and
• help establish two ‘new’ salafist-jihadist terrorist groups in the region – Ansar al-Din and MUJAO.
The leaders of these new groups – Ansar al-Din’s Iyad ag Ghaly, and MUJAO’s Sultan Ould Badi – are both closely associated with the Algerian intelligence agency, the DRS. Although Ansar al-Din and MUJAO both started out as few in number, they were immediately supported with personpower in the form of seasoned, well-trained killers from the DRS’s Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb brigades. This explains why the Islamists were able to expand so quickly and dominate the MNLA both politically and militarily.
Although Algeria’s strategy has been effective, at least so far, in achieving its object of weakening and discrediting the MNLA, it has already turned the region into a human catastrophe. Foreign military intervention now looks increasingly likely. That is something to which Algeria has always been strongly opposed in that it regards itself, not France, as the hegemonic power in the Sahel. The UN Security Council’s 12 October Resolution effectively gave Algeria a last window of opportunity to ‘rein in its dogs’ and engineer a peaceful political solution. But, as anger against the Islamists mounts and the desire for revenge from Mali’s civil society grows ever stronger, a peaceful solution is looking increasingly unlikely.
MALI'S TUAREG REBELLIONS
The Tuareg people number approximately 2-3 million and are the indigenous population of much of the Central Sahara and Sahel. Their largest number, estimated at 800,000, live in Mali, followed by Niger, with smaller populations in Algeria, Burkina Faso and Libya.
There have been five Tuareg rebellions in Mali since Independence, in addition to three in Niger and sporadic unrest in Algeria. The latest Tuareg rebellion in Mali, by the Mouvement National de Libération de l’Azawad (MNLA), began in January 2012. The MNLA comprised Tuareg who had returned from Libya around October 2011, rebels who had not laid down arms after the 2007-09 uprising and others who had defected from the Malian army. Their number was estimated at around 3,000. By mid-March, they had driven Mali’s ill-equipped and ill-led forces out of most of northern Mali (Azawad), meeting little resistance.
Following this humiliation of Mali’s army, soldiers in the Kati barracks near Bamako mutinied on 22 March, an incident that led to a junta of junior officers taking power in the country. Within a week, the three northern provincial capitals of Kidal, Gao and Timbuktu were in rebel hands, and on 5 April the MNLA declared Azawad an independent state.
The declaration of Azawad’s independence received no international support. One reason for this was because of the alliance between the MNLA and Ansar al-Din, a newly created jihadist movement led by a Tuareg notable, Iyad ag Ghaly, and another jihadist group, Jamat Tawhid Wal Jihad Fi Garbi Afriqqiya (Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa – MUJAO). Both Ansar al-Din and MUJAO were connected to and supported by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). By May, it was these Islamist groups, not the MNLA, who were calling the political and military shots in Azawad.
By the end of June, tension between the MNLA and the Islamists broke into open fighting, resulting in the MNLA being driven out of Gao and becoming increasingly marginalized politically. Since then, the Islamists have imposed strict sharia law in Azawad, especially in Gao, Timbuktu and Kidal. Summary executions, amputations, stonings and other such atrocities, as well as the destruction of holy shrines in Timbuktu – UNESCO world heritage sites – are currently being investigated by the International Criminal Court. By August, nearly half a million people had fled or been displaced.
I have warned on numerous occasions in the past decade that the way in which terrorism was being fabricated and orchestrated in the Sahara-Sahel by the Algerian DRS, with the knowledge of the US and other Western powers, would inevitably result in a catastrophic outcome, quite possibly in the form of region-wide conflagration. Unless something fairly miraculous can be achieved by around the turn of the year, northern Mali looks like becoming the site for the start of just such a conflagration.
Having said that, there is the prospect of one appalling scenario that is being raised by some of the local, mostly Tuareg, militia commanders. They are postulating as to whether Algeria’s DRS and its Western allies have been using the Azawad situation to encourage the concentration of ‘salafist-jihadists’ into the region – in the form of the long-talked about ‘Saharan emirate’ – before ‘eradicating’ them. In that instance, Algeria’s DRS would pluck out its ‘agents’ and leave the foot-soldiers – the Islamist fanatics – to face the bombardment.
But whatever dire scenario develops in Mali, when you hear the news stories related to it, do not by any means think: ‘oh, just another war in Africa’. Remember this murky, squalid background and how Washington’s Global War On Terror has come home to roost for the peoples of the Sahara.
END NOTES
1.US Joint Chiefs of Staff, ‘Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba (Top Secret)’, US Department of Defense, 13 Mar 1962. It was published online in a more complete form by the National Security Archive on 30 April 2001.
2.James Bamford, Body of Secrets, Doubleday 2001.
3.Defense Science Board, ‘DSB Summer Study on Special Operations and Joint Forces in Support of Countering Terrorism’. Available at fas.org/irp/agency/dod/dsbbrief.ppt
5.William M Arkin, ‘The Secret War,’ Los Angeles Times, 27 Oct 2002.
6.David Isenberg, ‘“P2OG” allows Pentagon to fight dirty’, Asia Times Online, 5 Nov 2002.
7.Chris Floyd, ‘Into the Dark: The Pentagon Plan to promote terrorist attacks,’ Counterpunch, 1 Nov 2002; Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, ‘Our Terrorists’, New Internationalist, Oct 2009.
8.Seymour Hersh, ‘The Coming Wars: What the Pentagon can now do in Secret.’ The New Yorker, 24 Jan 2005.
9.Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, op cit.
10. eTN Global Travel Industry News, 19 Nov 2008, eturbonews.com
there is reason to believe many Malians may indeed support French intervention. The Islamic rebels in the North have meted out brutal treatment to those who violate their interpretations of Sharia law. This has included bans on singing and music—something for which Mali is well known—as well as a significant rolling back of women’s rights.
Mali directly, there is little sign that further French intervention will do anything to address Tuareg self-determination,
if popular uprisings against corrupt capitalist regimes begin to challenge African governments, a quick call to Paris, Washington, or London could send missiles raining down in the name of “regional stability.” ____________________________
In January 1992, legislative elections in Algeria were on the point of being won by the Front Islamique du Salut, which would have resulted in the world’s first democratically elected Islamist government. With a ‘green light’ from the US and France,
the Global War On Terror has been inserted into the Sahara-Sahel by the US, in concert with Algerian intelligence operatives, since 2002.
Such a ‘second front’ would legitimize America’s increased militarization of Africa so as better to secure the continent’s natural resources, notably oil.
The US government has a long history of using false flag incidents to justify military intervention.
In May 2008, President George W Bush requested some $400 million in covert funding for terrorist groups across much of the Middle East-Afghanistan region in a covert offensive directed ultimately against the Iranian regime.
I have warned on numerous occasions in the past decade that the way in which terrorism was being fabricated and orchestrated in the Sahara-Sahel by the Algerian DRS, with the knowledge of the US and other Western powers
in January 2012 was different from all previous Tuareg rebellions in that there was a very real likelihood that it would succeed, at least in taking control of the whole of northern Mali.
quote:Originally posted by JMT2:
Opposing the French intervention in Mali is crucial for all those who desire the liberation of the African continent from poverty and division.
^^^ this is the commie position that the original Tuareg was a legitimate independance movement but was hijacked by Islamacists who were supported by the U.S. and France and that France is now going in to fight against the same people they supported becasue the whole thing is just a charde set up by capitalists to grab resources in N Africa
Posted by JMT2 (Member # 16951) on :
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,: summary of above articles:
quote:Originally posted by JMT2:
there is reason to believe many Malians may indeed support French intervention. The Islamic rebels in the North have meted out brutal treatment to those who violate their interpretations of Sharia law. This has included bans on singing and music—something for which Mali is well known—as well as a significant rolling back of women’s rights.
Mali directly, there is little sign that further French intervention will do anything to address Tuareg self-determination,
if popular uprisings against corrupt capitalist regimes begin to challenge African governments, a quick call to Paris, Washington, or London could send missiles raining down in the name of “regional stability.” ____________________________
In January 1992, legislative elections in Algeria were on the point of being won by the Front Islamique du Salut, which would have resulted in the world’s first democratically elected Islamist government. With a ‘green light’ from the US and France,
the Global War On Terror has been inserted into the Sahara-Sahel by the US, in concert with Algerian intelligence operatives, since 2002.
Such a ‘second front’ would legitimize America’s increased militarization of Africa so as better to secure the continent’s natural resources, notably oil.
The US government has a long history of using false flag incidents to justify military intervention.
In May 2008, President George W Bush requested some $400 million in covert funding for terrorist groups across much of the Middle East-Afghanistan region in a covert offensive directed ultimately against the Iranian regime.
I have warned on numerous occasions in the past decade that the way in which terrorism was being fabricated and orchestrated in the Sahara-Sahel by the Algerian DRS, with the knowledge of the US and other Western powers
in January 2012 was different from all previous Tuareg rebellions in that there was a very real likelihood that it would succeed, at least in taking control of the whole of northern Mali.
quote:Originally posted by JMT2:
Opposing the French intervention in Mali is crucial for all those who desire the liberation of the African continent from poverty and division.
^^^ this is the commie position that the original Tuareg was a legitimate independance movement but was hijacked by Islamacists who were supported by the U.S. and France and that France is now going in to fight against the same people they supported becasue the whole thing is just a charde set up by capitalists to grab resources in N Africa
Biitch, i don't give a fuk what you think. You're so lucky this is cyberspace.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
pipe down before I put my foot up your ass
thanks, lioness
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,:
Jan 21, 2013
The UK prime minister said on Sunday that the growing threat of Islamist militants in the Sahel region of Africa required “a response that is about years, even decades, rather than months”.
He compared the situation with that in Afghanistan, saying: “What we face is an extremist, Islamist, violent al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group, just as we had to deal with in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
Jan 30 2013
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said the French operation was planned to be a lightning mission that would last just a few weeks to avoid getting bogged down.
"Liberating Gao and Timbuktu very quickly was part of the plan. Now it's up to the African countries to take over," he told the Le Parisien daily. "We decided to put in the means and the necessary number of soldiers to strike hard. But the French contingent will not stay like this. We will leave very quickly."
_______________________________
guardian Jan 30 2013
UK troops to be sent to Mali, Downing Street confirms Defence secretary outlines British assistance in urgent statement to Commons after Tory MP raises concerns
A major increase in the UK commitment to help French and African forces in Mali and the region has been confirmed by Downing Street and the defence secretary, Philip Hammond, in an urgent statement to the House of Commons.
Amid concerns on the Tory benches that Britain is being drawn into a conflict without an exit strategy, the government said that 200 UK troops would train an African regional force outside Mali, with up to 40 more on an EU training mission inside the country. A further 70 RAF personnel will oversee the use of Sentinel surveillance, to be based in Senegal with 70 supporting crew and technical staff, and 20 will staff a C-17 transport plane for a further three months.
Britain has offered a roll-on, roll-off ferry to help transport French armour to Mali by sea, landing on the African coast. Britain is also offering air-to-air refuelling capacity to operate outside the UK, but based in Britain. It is possible the US will provide air-to-air refuelling.
Hammond outlined the British assistance after an urgent question to the Commons was granted by the speaker, John Bercow, in response to a request by the Tory MP John Baron.
The defence secretary said: "I can assure the house that we will not allow UK personnel to deploy on any mission until we are satisfied that adequate force protection arrangements are in place."
Britain is to offer £3m to help the African-led International Support Mission to Mali (AFISMA) to uphold a UN security council resolution on Mali. A further £2m will be donated to a second UN fund to build political stability inside Mali.
Hammond said: "The UK is also prepared to offer up to 200 personnel to provide training to troops from anglophone west African countries contributing to AFISMA, though the numbers required will be dependent on the requirements of the AFISMA contributing nations."
Baron raised concerns about the growing mission. "It is quite clear that British involvement is deepening in Mali and the wider region. I don't think there is any dispute that it is in everyone's interests that we do not allow legitimate government to fail, particularly when faced with extremists."
Baron, who said he opposed the military action in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, added: "I do fear one can be drawn into ever-deepening conflicts. Afghanistan illustrated in particular the danger of being sucked into larger deployments. The mission changed from defeating al-Qaida to nation building and the mission morphed into something much larger."
British sources stressed again that the UK would have no combat role in Mali, but disclosed for the first time that Britain had offered to run with the French a combined joint logistics headquarters inside Mali. The UK made the offer at a meeting in Paris on Monday attended by the prime minister's national security adviser, Sir Kim Darroch. The offer was rejected by the French at this stage as unnecessary, but shows the scale of the UK's preparedness to help its closest military ally in Europe.
The offer of 200 troops to train members of the AFISMA regional force is being made by the UK deputy national security adviser at a meeting in Addis Ababa on Tuesday.
The prime minister's spokesman stressed the UK military assistance was to "work out the appropriate support to regional forces". No timetable was given for the length of the UK commitment. "We will do what we can to help the French mission and to contribute to a regionalised approach," he added.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
It is somewhat troublesome, the formal colonial white man coming to the rescue although they are not quite the same as they used to be. Shout outs to JMT2. but Nigeria has a large population, SA is relatively developed , Kenya has some troops , given the whole continent of Africa they should be able to handle this, yet apparently they can't or are trying to save money. I wonder what Libya would be doing now if it was still under Gaddafi. Maybe nothing it's hard to say. Gaddafi did create the Islamic Legion dedicated to creating the "Great Islamic State of the Sahel".The Legion was disbanded by Gaddafi following its defeats in Chad in 1987 and the Libyan retreat from that country. But its consequences in this region can still be felt. Some of the Janjaweed leaders were among those said to have been trained in Libya,as many Darfuri followers of the Umma Party were forced in exile in the 1970s and 1980s. The Legion was also to leave a strong impact on the Tuareg living in Mali and Niger. In the 80s Gaddafi had wanted a "Great Islamic State of the Sahel" but he wanted it his way not the Al Qaeda way.
Posted by -Just Call Me Jari- (Member # 14451) on :
Im answering your question because the fact is that Arabia was devoid of indigenous high civilization EVEN after the expansion of Islam.
LMAO @ the Arab/Euroclown asserion that Mali would have not reached its height if not for Islam. First off Ghana and Mail were not Islamic states they were Pagan, Songhai was the only state that adopted Islam as a national religion, so lets be honest.
Also had Arabs or Arabic not came the Malians would have adopted Greek or Latin or maybe Geez via trade with the Christians in the Med. and East Africa. Literacy would have penetrated further South, This can be seen in the fact that the Berbers and Taureg(Saharans) had a script called Tifinagh, Islam and Def. Arabs contributed nothing important outside adopted Arabic which could have came from Countless other literate peoples including Africans.
Also the fact that Arabic itself was developed by Syrians and Persians is another matter.
If Arabs were such Intellectuals and such bestowers of civilization, then where are the Cites of Higher Learning in Arabia?? How come all the Cities of Higher learning existed in regions which already had high culture before Islam.
quote:Originally posted by HidayaAkade: You can wait because I'm asking you a question. I never said you were wrong. The reason I asked this because in a forum I visit, they were debating about the events transpiring in Mali.
One person tried to make the arguement that without Islam and Arabic Influence, Mali and other West African countries would not have reached such prominence in the olden days. I disagreed.
Posted by -Just Call Me Jari- (Member # 14451) on :
Doug you are a retard, Im not blaming anyone but the Islamist morons who destroyed the Sufi Shrines and NATO who armed these morons. You're the one up here blabbering about whitey pulling the strings on the poor simple minded Arabs and Muslims, and poor them they are all product of whitey..lol
You're a fool if you think these Arabs/Arabized Muslims are some innocent party, Just like the Buddhist Statues in Iraq and the Flooding of the High Dam in Nubia these people have no culture and dont care about any culture besides strict adherance to Islam, the Koran and Sunna.
Let me guess the White Man is soley responsible for the Destruction of the Bhuddists, the sufi Shrines in Mali, and the flooding of Nubia.
Hell the Sudanese were/are planning on building a Dam with THE CHINESE which will flood more of Nubia, but let me guess the white man is behind that.
And where did I say black folks were backward you illiterate cretin. I said Arabs and Fundie Sharia/Wahabbist Muslims are backward be they black or white. This is evident in the destruction they leave in their wake.
you're a fool.
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: LOL! You mentioned Islamic states being backwards and we are talking about an African country and African people.
So what you said is what you meant, which is that you don't like people blaming white folks for Africans being backward.
Don't be ashamed of it. That is what you said.
Black folks are just backwards is what you meant.
LOL.
Posted by JMT2 (Member # 16951) on :
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,: pipe down before I put my foot up your ass
thanks, lioness
You're welcome to try ... live and in living color!
Posted by lamin (Member # 5777) on :
Lioness,
Be careful what you read. When resources are competed for propaganda often replaces truth.
Gaddafi was always opposed to French imperialism in the Sahel--hence the long war with Chad against the French puppet governments always defending French interests.
Gaddafi-- a descendant of Arabised Berbers tried unify the 5 states of coastal North Africa but they refused.
To establish some "islamic state of the Sahel" would be an impossibility because it would entail wars with the 5 coastal North African states plus the 4 directly below them--Mali, Chad, Niger, and Sudan. Impossible. This idea could be just French propaganda.
Furthermore, Gaddafi was not seen as real Muslim by militants. One of his sons is named Hannibal--a "pagan" name. He sent them to haram universities like the London School of Economics. Women rode bikes and flew planes, and they wore pants as they saw fit. Hardly Islamic. Females were freely supported to attend school and train to be pilots, doctors, engineers, etc. In fact Gaddafi's daughter was a lawyer. Very, very haram for real Muslims. There were churches in Libya another haram no, no for a real Muslim leader.
On account of being just Muslim nominally Gaddafi was opposed by genuine Muslims for whom the ideal state is Saudi Arabia. Libya was mainly secular founded on the principles of Jamahariya.
Posted by -Just Call Me Jari- (Member # 14451) on :
The Lioness is drinking the propagandist Coolaid of the West Imperialist machine, the fact is Gadaffi was a Marked man going back to the Shrill Ronald Reagan and Thatcher of the U.K. There were several attempts to assasinate him by the British etc.
The Fact is Gadaffi was turning Lybia into a Secular State and was abandoning Arabism and thus Islam as a way to Unify North Africa. He promoted Secular Education as well, while Americans pack on 20,000-60,000 in debt simply for a 4yr education Lybians enjoyed free Higher Education.
Obama the Warmongering Reaganite and his NATO allies saw fit to end that, Long Live Lybia the most Successful African State.
Now South Africa and the South African Elite Whites can no longer fret about an African Unity with Lybia as the Leader. The same old **** can continue, Corrupt African Leaders living in Splendor and 5 story mansions driving Italian Luxury cars, while 95% of their people live impoverished, illiterate and starving dying of AIDS and Malaria(Gadaffi vastly improved the Health Care Standards of his people) Now the Islamist and the Arabs that NATO armed are getting too close for comfort.
What imbeciles these imperalist monkeys are..lol, they wanted Gadaffi gone so bad that they fucked themselves over in the process..lol
Posted by mena7 (Member # 20555) on :
Western imperialist countries are the first responsible for the invasion of Mali by Al Qaeda terrorist.Western governement destroyed Libya and armed Al Qaeda terrorists in Libya.The Malian governement of Amani Toumani Toure is secondly responsible for the invasion of Mali by its incompetence.Governing is predicting, President Toure of Mali failed to predict the coming of armed Tuareg refugee back to Mali after the destruction of Libya by NATO.He failed to send half of the Malian army to the Libyan border to disarmed the Tuareg and to protect northern cities.He didnt ask neighborhood country for military help.Pres Toure didnt upgrade the weapons of his army,the Tuareg rebelled from Libya had better weapon.He allowed the USA imperialist army AFRICOM to trained with the Malian army.
In the contrary the Pres Mamadou Issoufou of Niger was more competent he disarmed the Tuareg before entering Niger.They arrested the son of Kaddafi at their border to control the border activity.President Mwai Kibaki of Kenya is a very competent president in the matter of security.Al Shabbab a Somalian terrorist group associated with AlQaeda was attacking Kenya northern border and kidnapping tourist in the Kenyan coast.Pres Kibaki send the Kenyan army to South Somalia were they killed 700 Al Shabbab terrorists.The Nigerian army is so well armed and trained I dont see any Alqaeda terrorist group invading North Nigeria in the future.
President ex colonel Amany Toumani Toure of Mali was a great democratic leader who respected the human right of its people and take care of its people welfare but he was a bad military leader who failed to strengthen his army and controled Mali frontier.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by -Just Call Me Jari-: The Lioness is drinking the propagandist Coolaid of the West Imperialist machine, the fact is Gadaffi was a Marked man going back to the Shrill Ronald Reagan and Thatcher of the U.K. There were several attempts to assasinate him by the British etc.
The Fact is Gadaffi was turning Lybia into a Secular State and was abandoning Arabism and thus Islam as a way to Unify North Africa. He promoted Secular Education as well, while Americans pack on 20,000-60,000 in debt simply for a 4yr education Lybians enjoyed free Higher Education.
Obama the Warmongering Reaganite and his NATO allies saw fit to end that, Long Live Lybia the most Successful African State.
Now South Africa and the South African Elite Whites can no longer fret about an African Unity with Lybia as the Leader. The same old **** can continue, Corrupt African Leaders living in Splendor and 5 story mansions driving Italian Luxury cars, while 95% of their people live impoverished, illiterate and starving dying of AIDS and Malaria(Gadaffi vastly improved the Health Care Standards of his people) Now the Islamist and the Arabs that NATO armed are getting too close for comfort.
What imbeciles these imperalist monkeys are..lol, they wanted Gadaffi gone so bad that they fucked themselves over in the process..lol
ironically prior to the recent Libyan civil war Gaddafi had improved relations with U.S. and Britain and condemned Al Qaeda for 911. (although he also echoed made anti-Western remarks made by Chavez at the same time)
What happened was was the so called "Arab Spring" starting with Tunisia. That seemed like a legitimate uprising against government oppression Then it spread to Egypt and elsewhere, there was talk of democracy and text messaging But nobody can really predict how mass uprisings will turn out even the CIA. Even though Mubarak was friendly to the U.S. the U.S. decided not to protest the popular uprising in Egypt.
At the time of the "Arab Spring" there was a lot of talk of "democracy" The Western countries didn't support all the uprisings but they didn't talk much against them and sort of had a wait and see attitude. limp thumbs up about it.
Later there was a popular uprising inFebruary 2011 in Libya and by March it was supported by NATO. airpower. It was a chance get rid of Gaddafi for good. This uprising may or may not have been poweful enough to be successful without NATO or at least be more drawn out like Syria.
But did the Western powers predict that Egypt would be come to be ruled my the Muslim Brotherhood? Did they know a U.S. ambassador would be killed in Libya? Did George Bush think that 12 years later the Taliban would still have a foothold in Afghanistan?
Like you said "they fucked themselves over in the process"
However you cannot equate the U.S. presence in Iraq, Afghanistan and the French in Mali to old school colonialism. You can't get away with that these days. Afghanistan was very costly for the U.S. for example. The rhetoric is that the Afghans and Iraq's must take over their own governance. You can't call Afghanistan and Iarq U.S. colonies although there is a strong influence.France is not going to be able to come in and run the place like French Algeria back in the day.
Should NATO have intervened in Libya? Maybe not, I'm not sure about that. If you look at Libya today you cannot just fall back to old rehtoric and say they are now just a U.S. puppet "imperialist" project. Where they're headed is uncertain
_______________________________________________
wikipedia, Gaddafi:
Pan-Africanism, reconciliation and privatization: 1999–2011
As the 20th century came to a close, Gaddafi increasingly rejected Arab nationalism, frustrated by the failure of his Pan-Arab ideals; instead he turned to Pan-Africanism, emphasising Libya's African identity. From 1997 to 2000, Libya initiated cooperative agreements or bilateral aid arrangements with ten African states.In June 1999, Gaddafi visited South Africa, visiting his friend, Mandela; the following month he attended the OAU summit in Algiers, calling for greater political and economic integration across the continent and advocating the foundation of a United States of Africa.He became one of the founding figureheads of the African Union (AU), initiated in July 2002 to replace the OAU; at the opening ceremonies, he proclaimed that African states should reject conditional aid from the developed world, a direct contrast to the message of South African President Thabo Mbeki. At the third AU summit, held in Libya in July 2005, he called for a greater level of integration, advocating a single AU passport, a common defense system and a single currency, utilising the slogan: "The United States of Africa is the hope." In June 2005, Libya joined the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), and in August 2008 Gaddafi was proclaimed "King of Kings" by an assembled committee of traditional African leaders. On 1 February 2009, a 'coronation ceremony' in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, was held to coincide with the 53rd African Union Summit, at which Gaddafi was elected chairman of the African Union for the year.
he era saw Libya's return to the international arena. In 1999, Libya began secret talks with the British government to normalise relations.In 2001, Gaddafi condemned the September 11 attacks on the U.S. by al-Qaeda, expressing sympathy with the victims and calling for Libyan involvement in the War on Terror against militant Islamism.His government continued suppressing domestic Islamism, at the same time as Gaddafi called for the wider application of sharia law. Libya also cemented connections with China and North Korea, being visited by Chinese Premier Jiang Zemin in April 2002. Influenced by the events of the Iraq War, in December 2003, Libya renounced its possession of weapons of mass destruction, decommissioning its chemical and nuclear weapons programs. Relations with the U.S. improved as a result,[ while U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair met with Gaddafi in the Libyan desert in March 2004. The following month, Gaddafi travelled to the headquarters of the European Union (EU) in Brussels, signifying improved relations between Libya and the EU, the latter ending its remaining sanctions in October.[ In October 2010, the EU paid Libya €50 million to stop African migrants passing into Europe; Gaddafi encouraged the move, saying that it was necessary to prevent the creation of a "Black Europe".[238]
Removed from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism in 2006, Gaddafi nevertheless continued his anti-western rhetoric, and at the Second Africa-South America Summit on Isla Margarita, Venezuela in September 2009, joined Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in calling for an "anti-imperialist" front across Africa and Latin America. Gaddafi proposed the establishment of a South Atlantic Treaty Organization to rival NATO. On 23 September 2009, Gaddafi addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York for the first time, using it to condemn western aggression. In Spring 2010, Gaddafi proclaimed jihad against Switzerland after Swiss police accused two of his family members of criminal activity in the country, resulting in the breakdown of bilateral relations.
The Libyan economy witnessed increasing privatization; although rejecting the socialist policies of nationalized industry advocated in The Green Book, government figures asserted that they were forging "people's socialism" rather than capitalism.Gaddafi welcomed these reforms, calling for widescale privatization in a March 2003 speech. In 2003, the oil industry was largely turned over to private corporations, and by 2004, there was $40 billion of direct foreign investment in Libya, a sixfold rise on 2003.Sectors of the Libyan population reacted against these reforms with public demonstrations, and in March 2006, revolutionary hardliners took control of the GPC cabinet; although scaling back the pace of change, they did not halt them. In 2010, plans were announced that would have seen half the Libyan economy privatized over the following decade. While there was no accompanying political liberalization, with Gaddafi retaining predominant control, in March 2000, the government devolved further powers to the municipal councils.Rising numbers of reformist technocrats attained positions in the country's governance; best known was Gaddafi's son and heir apparent Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, who was openly critical of Libya's human rights record. He led a group who proposed the drafting of the new constitution, although it was never adopted, and in October 2009 was appointed to head the PSLC. Involved in encouraging tourism, Saif founded several privately run media channels in 2008, but after criticising the government they were nationalised in 2009
Libyan Civil War n 2011, Gaddafi spoke out in favour of Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, announcing that to satisfy his people, he should introduce the jammahariyah system to Tunisia.Fearing domestic protest, the Libyan government implemented preventative measures, reducing food prices, purging the army leadership of potential defectors and releasing a number of Islamist prisoners.They proved inneffective, and on 17 February 2011, major political protests began in Libya against Gaddafi's government. Many of the reasons for the uprising differed from those of Tunisia and Egypt; unlike those nations, Libya did not have a large Islamist support base or civic movement and was largely religiously homogenous; however, there was much dissatisfaction with the corruption and entrenched systems of patronage that were associated with Gaddafi's regime, and unemployment had reached around 30%. Gaddafi accused the rebels of being "drugged" and linked to al-Qaeda, proclaiming that he would die a martyr rather than leave Libya. Proclaiming that the rebels would be "hunted down street by street, house by house and wardrobe by wardrobe",the armed forces opened fire on protests in Benghazi, killing hundreds. Shocked at the heavy handed response, a number of senior politicians resigned or defected to the protester's side.
On 26 February the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1970, suspending Libya from the UN Human Rights Council, implementing sanctions and calling for an investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC) into the killing of unarmed civilians.] In March, the Security Council declared a no fly zone to protect the civilian population from aerial bombardment, calling on foreign nations to enforce it; it also specifically prohibited foreign occupation. Ignoring this, Qatar sent hundreds of troops to support the dissidents, and along with France and the United Arab Emirates began providing the NTC with weaponry and training Amnesty International published their findings, in which they asserted that many of the accusations of mass human rights abuses made against Gaddafist forces lacked credible evidence, and were instead fabrications of the rebel forces which had been readily adopted by the western media. w with NATO support in the form of air cover, the rebel militia pushed westward, defeating loyalist armies and securing control of the centre of the country. Gaining the support of Amazigh (Berber) communities of the Nafusa Mountains, who had long been persecuted as non-Arab speakers under Gaddafi, the NTC armies were able to encircle Gaddafi loyalists in several key areas of western Libya. In August, the rebels seized both Zlitan and Tripoli, effectively ending the last vestiges of Gaddafist power. On 25 August, the Arab League recognised the NTC to be "the legitimate representative of the Libyan state", on which basis Libya would resume its membership of the League.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
what if Mali had called the Chinese for help?
Mali Economy
Mali is one of the poorest countries in the world.The average worker's annual salary is approximately US$1,500. Mali is a major recipient of foreign aid from many sources, including multilateral organizations (most significantly the World Bank, African Development Bank, and Arab Funds), and bilateral programs funded by the European Union, France, United States, Canada, Netherlands, and Germany. Before 1991, the former Soviet Union, China and the Warsaw Pact countries had been a major source of economic and military aid.
Mali's economic structure centers on agriculture and fishing. Some of Mali's prominent natural resources include gold, being the third largest producer of gold in the African continent,and salt. About half the population lives below the international poverty line of US$1.25 a day.
Mali's key industry is agriculture. Cotton is the country's largest crop export and is exported west throughout Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire. The most productive agricultural area lies along the banks of the Niger River, the Inner Niger Delta and the southwestern region around Sikasso. In addition to cotton, Mali produces rice, millet, corn, vegetables, tobacco, and tree crops. Gold, livestock and agriculture amount to eighty percent of Mali's exports. Agricultural activities occupy 70% of Mali's labor force and provide 42% of the GDP. Cotton and livestock make up 75%-80% of Mali's annual exports. Small-scale traditional farming dominates the agricultural sector, with subsistence farming (of cereals, primarily sorghum, pearl millet, and maize) on about 90% of the 14,000 km² (3.4 million acres) under cultivation.
In 1991, with the assistance of the International Development Association, Mali relaxed the enforcement of mining codes which led to renewed foreign interest and investment in the mining industry.Gold is mined in the southern region and Mali has the third highest gold production in Africa (after South Africa and Ghana).The emergence of gold as Mali's leading export product since 1999 has helped mitigate some of the negative impact of the cotton and Côte d'Ivoire crises. Other natural resources include kaolin, salt, phosphate, and limestone. From the 1960s to the 1990s state owned mining—especially for gold—expanded, followed by a period of expansion by international contract mining. Large private investments in gold mining include Anglogold-Ashanti ($250 million) in Sadiola and Yatela, and Randgold Resources ($140 million) in Morila - both multinational South African companies located respectively in the north-western and southern parts of the country. While great income is produced, most staff employed in the mining industries are from outside Mali, and residents in the areas of intensive mining complain of little benefit from the industry. Populations complain of displacement for the construction of mines: at Sadiola Gold Mine, 43 villages have lost some land to the mine there, while in Fourou, near the large Syama goldmines, 121 villages saw some displacement.
In addition, the continued exploitation of unregulated small scale mining, often by child labourers, supplies a large international gold market in Bamako which feeds into international production.[8] Recent criticism has surfaced around the working conditions, pay, and the widespread use of child labour in these small gold mines, and the method which middlemen, in regional centers like Sikasso and Kayes, purchase and transport gold. Gold collected in the towns is sold on—with almost no regulation or oversight—to larger merchant houses in Bamako or Conakry, and eventually to smelters in Europe.Ecological factors, especially pollution of water by mine tailings, is a major source of concern. The Sadiola Gold Mine is an open-pit gold mine situated near Sadiola, in the Kayes Region of Mali. The operation is jointly owned by AngloGold Ashanti and Iamgold, who each have an effective holding of 41%, while the Government of Mali owns the remaining 18%.
AngloGold Ashanti
AngloGold Ashanti was formed on 26 April 2004, after the High Court of Ghana approved the merger of AngloGold and the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation three days earlier. In late 2007, Mark Cutifani replaced Bobby Godsell as CEO of AngloGold Ashanti
It has recently drawn unfavorable comment from Human Rights Watch for its handling of its exploration operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The company has admitted paying extortion money to Nationalist and Integrationist Front in exchange for access to gold mines in the Ituri province of the DRC (AngloGold 2005). AngloGold Ashanti responded to the allegations in Human Rights Watch's report with a statement released in 2005.[citation needed]
In August 2007 British charity War on Want published a report accusing AngloGold Ashanti's parent company Anglo American of profiting from the abuse of people in the developing countries in which the company operates.[9] The report alleges abuses committed by AngloGold Ashanti subsidiaries in Colombia, Ghana and Mali.[citation needed]
According to Forbes AngloGold Ashanti was accused in 2007 in Colombia for "murders of trade union and community leaders who opposed the company's activities in the region". The company disclosed itself in 2006 or in 2007 unacceptable safety performance in its platinum mines. Safety measures were taken.
In January 2011, AngloGold Ashanti was named the world's "Most Irresponsible Company" at the Public Eye Awards, hosted by the Berne Declaration and Greenpeace in Davos, Switzerland. The nominating organisation, WACAM (Wassa Association of Communities Affected by Mining), catalogued the company's history of "gross human rights violations and environmental problems."
Mark Cutifani Bobby Godsell
Estimates of literacy rates in Mali range from 27–30% to 46.4%, with literacy rates significantly lower among women than men.Mali's higher education system includes four universities. The University of Timbuktu and The University of Bamako each enroll roughly 20,000–25,000 students per year.
Life expectancy at birth is estimated to be 53.06 years in 2012
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
