(snipped)
From 9/11 until recently, many of our community spokespersons would insist that these crimes were the work of a tiny minority that had no significant support or sympathy among Muslims, and that this terrorism had nothing to do with Islam. But one could argue that, to the contrary, the willingness to takfir Muslims and then murder them and then justify the murder of whoever (be they Muslim or non-Muslim) does not agree with whatever utopian vision one is ready to kill for, has afflicted Islam since its earliest years. I refer, of course, to the Kharijites, who murdered the caliph Imam Ali and put women and children, as well as non-combatant men, to the sword because of a utopian doctrine. This, the first and most grievous heresy in Islam, was suppressed and universally repudiated by the ulema in the earliest centuries, but was revived as an operational arm for radical Islamist revolutionary ideology in the mid-1960s and at a time when it had little or no reference to Palestine, Iraq, or Chechnya.

That is why we must reject the insistence, that echoes within all of us, on finding only those “roots and causes” of terrorism that are exclusively outside of a particular way in which some, perhaps even many, Muslims understand Islam. Is the “cause” colonialism? Amir Abd al-Qader al-Jaziri warred for years in the mid-nineteenth century against one of the cruelest strains of European colonialism – the French conquest of Algeria – without committing one atrocious act. On the contrary, he punished his own troops if they committed atrocities in retaliation for those committed by French troops, atrocities that are now par for the course among Muslim terrorists. And this same Amir Abd al-Qader, exiled by the French to Damascus, intervened with his own corps of armed bodyguards to save the lives of Syrian Christians threatened by a murderous Muslim and Druze mob in 1860, a mob responding – no doubt, to legitimate economic grievances – as some sort of moral open season for mass murder.

Perhaps the answer, I would suggest, and particularly to Muslim young people, is that Amir Abd al-Qader, who was unquestionably a great warrior, was above all a noble warrior who considered Islam above all as a personal path to a spiritual reality and not as a religion emptied of spiritual content and then turned into a modern revolutionary ideology in which utopian ends justify any means. Indeed, the duties – sources or imperatives of social justice – toward one’s family, neighbors, and, by analogy, one’s nation all stem from that personal struggle on that personal path to God that characterizes the greater jihad.

Traditional Islam, be it in the Indian subcontinent or the Arab world, was once perfumed by an inner spirituality. In the United Kingdom, far more than is the case in the United States, Muslim young people have two options: to either hold onto a traditional Islam that was entirely enveloped in an immigrant ethnic idiom, particularly language, dress, and ethnic insularity, that was inconceivable for most of them for they are precisely that – British young people of Muslim faith, and the language, dress, and cultural insularity are foreign and, when imposed, embarrassing. The alternative was to assimilate into the prevailing mass youth culture that, in the United Kingdom, tends to be particularly mindless, promiscuous, drug and alcohol afflicted, and often criminal. Now this narrow prism has been increasingly radicalized by grievance-obsession . We must recognize that a grievance, however real, in fact particularly if it is real , can become self-defeatingly obsessive. Every successful immigrant group or successful sector of an immigrant group that has come to America and Europe, both Muslim or non-Muslim, seems to understand this intuitively.

So, radical versions of Islam offered an alternative, one that combined the fashionable left-wing identity politics of the past few decades with a Muslim identity that claimed a false universality … a false universality in its denial that all living and worthwhile human culture, Muslim or not, beyond the most basic religious rites and law, is invariably local. The alternative that was not particularly available was traditional Islam, with its core of spiritual priorities, enshrined and expressed in our Anglo-American English language and in those strands of Anglo-American culture – one thinks of Shakespeare, the Lake poets, and the school of politeness and good manners that is massively endangered, but still alive and easily assimilated into an Anglo-American Islam – a process that has occurred on a limited individual middle-class basis in Britain and even more so in the more educated, more middle-class second-generation as well as the convert Muslim communities in the United States.

And in a world of overreaching materialism and militant secularism that could be described as fundamentalist, this evolving British traditional Islam and its American equivalent must find true allies. I suggest that those true allies are to be found among those faith communities – Christian and Jewish – ready to acknowledge our common Abrahamic origins.

Excerpt from speech by S. Abdallah Schleifer, professor emeritus of journalism and mass communication at the American University in Cairo, Egypt at Temple University, Philadelphia, PA on Oct. 2nd of last year...

The nexus of problems we face as re-designers of human institutional systems that have atrophied naturally over time due to lack of justice-based maintenance, fundamentally have to do with how a lot of people –– perhaps most –– think and interact with the world.

This has been documented and commented upon by a host of people, extending from the ancient prophets of all the great religions, to recent writers such as Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, J. Krishnamurti, Richard Bach and Shunryu Suzuki.

I've felt for a long time that us warriors in The Just Third Way must not become trapped in these ages-old dungeons of ego-mind-think –– because it will doom this movement like many attempts in the past at "changing the world" –– which, of course, is impossible. Life is perfect. One of the many challenges of living is: Can we SEE, FEEL and BE this FACT?

It can be observed that what most people consider evil in conventional terms can be traced to the divided mind. To a mind that stands apart. To a mind that screens. To a mind that connives. To a mind that cleaves the skull, stands on the table, blinking and staring back. Like some ugly alien life force truly bewitching humankind.

The reality of freedom can never be grasped by the divided mind.

Most people associate freedom not in what can be observed in nature, but in humans' supposedly independent free will and the power of free choice.

But if I separate my mind from myself and my experiences, freedom seems to be how much I can barge around the world; yet the world somehow always seems to resist and throws a lot of rocks back.

But to the undivided mind there is no distinction between "I" and the world. There is just one giant endless Streaming that engulfs everything. This Power provides the foamy crest in an ocean wave, the pulse felt through a human wrist or the thrust of magna out a volcano's throat. Life is not a matter of "me" pushing the world around or it sometimes pushing back.

Having a choice is not freedom. Choices are decisions usually motivated by pleasure or pain, and the divided mind constantly schemes about getting "I' into pleasure and as far away from pain as possible.

But the sweetest pleasures are spontaneous, and pain at its worst is an anticipation before it's even slated to arrive.

The often false sense of being "free" wanes when trying to do impossible or meaningless things. We are not free to jump across a canyon, march safely across a busy freeway of speeding traffic, or prevent blood from being pumped back from our toes.

Freedom, like everything else in Life, is conditional. There is no such thing as freedom when it contradicts how Life works. If I split my mind apart from the Streaming, and allow it to command this or command that based on what pleases me, the more I will be incapable of enjoying anything at all.

Because all pleasure exist in the present. Unless I am aware and acknowledge that fact, future happiness can never be guaranteed. That sense of "losing ones self" in the moment and resisting any urge for the mind to play games with time reveals the only true freedom.

This may explain why there are precious few people who support the wisdom of what we're trying to do. We must spend ample time teaching people how to think, and the traps that lie in wait all around us. I believe this is contained in Justice Based Management, but perhaps needs to be elevated in this important education.

If we can't interact normally with the Everyday World, which some name God or Tao, we're not going to counterbalance good and evil.

What we name the Streaming is not important; perhaps it may even trigger this disease of human minds splitting apart from what they constantly experience. Just trying to write about this delicate matter may trigger a backlash, but as humans, we have precious few tools to effectively communicate.

We must daily try to immerse ourselves in this solar-like wind, which exists in our own atmosphere. It's not easy, because our civilization constantly builds a culture that glorifies Man over Tao.

This wrestling match exists in a circular orbit of time. It just keeps coming back again and again and again. Can we break this dog-chasing-tail syndrome so that we can truly strike out in new directions like Capital Homesteading that holds so much promise?

Saint money. How can humans have the energy or time to connect with the Streaming Metaphysic when we're all slaves to countless hours spent balancing on an economic teeter totter that has grown dangerously unstable for people sitting on either end?

These are challenging flaws that require judicious redesign. Nothing but the future of mankind depends upon it.

Just some thoughts from a struggler of One Mind~~Nemo