Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteA peer at modelmayhem wrote, "we owe our national debt to our war endevears, those american companies that profitered off of our soldiers backs have NO pride."
My response:
I'm sure a look over the contractor books will lift some eyebrows, but the phrase "our war endevears" [STET] masks the stimulus. However we may gird up, as it were, those who would do us harm are real, not confined to Islam although that portion gets its share of attention, and they're working with intimidation and violence, the usual tools, largely off the field.
Now we've wrestled with this for a while, and states recognized "thugocracy", organized crime, privately waged wars, and the general domain that comprises the organization of violence beneath the conventional warfare radar.
I'm off into another aspect, which is the motivating literary and scholarly culture that filters, informs, instructs, and shapes militant enterprise.
That's a little terror incognita all it's own, and I'm just barely a toddler in it.
So for Americans, Canadians, Europeans, and Chinamen--really most men in most countries across the planet--let's please dismiss that ownership-implying phrase, "our war endeavors."
Who here has also read The Sealed Nectar: Biography of the Noble Prophet by Safi-ur-Rahman al-Mubarakpuri?
Why not?
Never heard of it?
Not available to you?
From the title page: "This Book was awarded First Prize by the Muslim World League at world-wide competition on the biography of the Prophet held at Makkah Al-Mukarramah in 1399 H / 1979."
One might think a book possessing a greatness relevant to more than one billion people would have a little cachet in the world at large.
It's published by Maktaba Dar-us-Salam -- http://www.dar-us-salam.com/ -- and it is available through them as well as Amazon and its resellers.
Have you -- anyone here - read it?
Curious about it?
"Our war endeavors . . . ." Funny how that works.
Here's a paragraph from the biography, and it comes up late, page 320 for the First Edition which runs to 503 pages:
"The battle of the Trench took place in the fifth year Hijri. The siege of Madinah started in Shawwal and ended in Dhul Qa'dah, i.e., it lasted for over a month. It was in fact a battle of nerves rather than of losses. No bitter fighting was recorded; nevertheless, it was one of the most decisive battles in the early history of Islam and proved beyond a shadow of doubt that no forces, however huge, could ever exterminate the nascent Islamic power growing steadily in Madinah. When Allah obliged the Confederates to evacuate, His Messenger was in a position to confidently declare that thenceforth he would take the initiative in war and would not wait for the land of Islam to be invaded."
I'd like to tell you that's highly selective cherry-picking for a quotation on my part, but it's not. From the past come echoes of the present in every chapter.
I'll leave the thread to return to its discussion of war in general, but the way some twist the language to fault the victims of aggression strikes me as shameful.
America and much of the rest of the world has been forced to spend in this area of defense, but probably, we're not doing so wisely, and that partly out of habit, out of ignorance, and then in response to an altered and much enlarged and potent threat preserved in a portion of the globalized literary experience and adopted as a literal script in some quarters.
Cited Reference
Al-Mubarakpuri, Safi-ur-Rahman. Ar-Raheeq Al-Makhtum (The Sealed Nectar): Biography of the Noble Prophet. P. 196. Saudi Arabia, UK, USA, Pakistan: Maktaba Dar-us-Salam, 1995.
Other Reference
Wikipedia. "Ar-Raheeq Al-Makhtum": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Raheeq_Al-Makhtum
Wikipedia. "Safi-ur-Rahman Al-Mubarakpuri": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safi-ur-Rahman_Al-Mubarakpuri
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