Alan K. Henderson's Weblog

Dutch legislator Geert Wilders will not be prosecuted for inciting hatred of Muslims with his film denouncing the Quran, prosecutor said Monday.

Prosecutor said his film "Fitna," or "Ordeal" in Arabic, and statements Wilders wrote in Dutch newspapers were hurtful and insulting but not criminal.

Wilders said he hopes prosecutors will send a copy of their decision to prosecutors in Jordan, where he faces a lawsuit. Wilders has said he is worried he could be arrested if he leaves the Netherlands because Jordan has informed Interpol he is wanted to face charges there.

We see something new in the statement that everything Allah created is good (v. 7). This appears to contradict the idea that Allah created many jinns and men for hell (7:179 and v. 13 of this sura). However, the Imam Malik says that this only means that “he created everything well and in a goodly fashion,” not that everything he created is itself good.

YUSUFALI: He Who has made everything which He has created most good: He began the creation of man with (nothing more than) clay,
PICKTHAL: Who made all things good which He created, and He began the creation of man from clay;
SHAKIR: Who made good everything that He has created, and He began the creation of man from dust.

In v. 13 is also repeated the assertion that Allah would have guided all human beings to the truth if he had so desired – indicating here again that Allah does not, unlike the God of the Bible, will “that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth” (I Timothy 2:3)

The Romans were, in fact, defeated in 610 AD in the battles of Antioch and Aleppo.

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The question is : how do we define "a small number of years"? The traditions, as well as Muslim commentators, tell us that Abu-Bakr made a bet with Ubai-ibn- Khalaf that this prediction would be fulfilled within three years. Muhammad, who rarely had an unspoken thought, told them that the "small number" is between three and nine years (Source: al-Baizawi).

The Romans (Byzantines) defeated the Persians 12 years later in 628 AD at the battle of Ctesiphon - so Muhammad's prophecy was wrong. Muslims have worked very hard to side-step this issue. In fact, Pickthall translates Sura 30:4 as "Within ten years", whereas Ali and Shakir correctly translate it as "Within a few years". In either case, Muhammad was wrong.

"So, I have a deep faith," Obama continues. "I'm rooted in the Christian tradition. I believe that there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people."

"The difficult thing about any religion, including Christianity, is that at some level there is a call to evangelize and proselytize. There's the belief, certainly in some quarters, that if people haven't embraced Jesus Christ as their personal savior, they're going to hell."

Obama doesn't believe he, or anyone else, will go to hell.

But he's not sure if he'll be going to heaven, either.

"I don't presume to have knowledge of what happens after I die," he says.

[Animism] commonly refers to belief systems that attribute souls to animals, plants and other entities, in addition to humans. Animism may also attribute souls to natural phenomena, geographic features, everyday objects and manufactured articles.

It has often been noted that while the Bible is (among many other things) a series of historical narratives, the Qur’an is a series of sermons.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

Not since 1972 have we been presented with two such painfully inadequate candidates. When Election Day came that year, I could not bring myself to vote for either George McGovern or Richard Nixon. I stayed home.

In the past eight years, New York City has experienced an unprecedented construction boom, with $29 billion of building forecast for 2009, an 83 percent increase from $16.4 billion in 2000, according to the New York Building Congress, an association of developers, architects and vendors.

Hey, I want to talk about our governor out here, Governor Kathleen Sebelius, who James Carville last year said should be at the top of the list for running mate for Barack Obama; which also would be a white women. So probably -- instead of Hillary, he can always grab Kathleen. Well, in the last two months Kathleen has blocked a coal-fired plant that was going to be a three-and-a-half-billion-dollar investment in western Kansas, which is suffering, and the health department approved the plan. She vetoed the plan on her own, and on top of that, there was an oil company out of Texas -- Hyperion, you can do a word search -- that was going to put a $10 billion oil refinery in my county, and they said because Kathleen Sebelius just flippantly used carbon emissions and global warming as her reason for rejecting the coal-powered plant -- even though it met federal regulations -- they said they were not going to come to Kansas and put in $10 billion, so we lost $14 billion.

Religious architecture and art were to medieval feudalism what advertising and commercialism are to modern capitalism: A rather effective way to build support for the status quo using aesthetics instead of argument. My claim, in short, is that Notre Dame played the same role during the Middle Ages that fashion magazines play today. Notre Dame was not an argument for feudalism, and Elle is not an argument for capitalism. But both are powerful ways to make regular people buy into the system.

Less than a decade ago, I drove from former West Germany to former East Germany, and was struck by how much more beautiful the West was. Houses in the West had flower boxes. Houses in the East did not. I reflected that the aesthetic gap between West and East used to be vastly greater. And I recalled how people I knew who toured the Soviet bloc were more likely to sadly describe the "greyness" of communist life than the machine guns at the border.

The upshot is that the private pursuit of beauty in the West had a striking externality. Every time a West German put a flower box in his window, he was making capitalism look prettier than socialism. And while intellectuals may say they couldn't care less about such things, I suspect that sheer aesthetics changed a lot of minds about East versus West.

How does one go from a 53% electoral victory to a 20% approval rating in one year?

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What his first year in office teaches us – America's presidential candidates take note – is that the way to become the most unpopular of presidents is to take all sides on every issue. By talking like a reformer, Mr. Sarkozy has displeased the partisans of the status quo, and by failing to undertake the reforms he proclaims, he's also disappointed the partisans of change.