According to Beliefnet, on January 29 it was Chinese New Year, January 30 to February 1 is a Buddhist New Year celebration, and of course beginning the evening of January 30 is the start of Muharram, the Islamic New Year. So…

Muharram is a special month in the Islamic calendar. It is fourteen hundred and twenty-seven years since the Prophet, Allah ’s peace and blessings be upon him, and his family and companions, may Allah reward them, made the emigration to what is now known as Madinah. It was this year that was later chosen as the beginning of the Islamic calendar, as it marked an important turning point in the establishment of Islam.

Some Muslims observe extra fasting and prayers in this month. It is also a month in which we sadly remember that members of the Prophet’s holy family, may Allah bless and preserve them, were killed in a shameful civil war.

I recently read on a collection of ‘top ten blogging mistakes,’ never to blog about your personal things you don’t want a future prospective employer to know. Because once it has been put out into the cyber-universe you can never get it back. I have a conversion story out there which I hate (it just does not represent me or my way of thinking now) and it’s replicated on a variety of sites that gives me little hope of trying to set fire to the darn thing. C’est la vie.

So it’s with some trepidation that I write about my personal battle with depression: there are a great many taboos about the illness, with vestiges of nineteenth century attitudes towards nutters from the nuthouse. I’m leaving a lot of the personal stuff out, and writing about how it felt to me to be depressed, so that I can maintain a little bit of privacy over what has been a pretty rough trot. But having the right doctor, the right medication and a loving family has been my salvation, alhamdulillah. (BTW usual disclaimer, none of this is to be considered individual medical advice, go see your doctor etc. etc.)

We have a common instance of this referring to second causes what ought to be referred to the First Cause [God] in the case of so-called illness. For instance, if a man ceases to take any interest in worldly matters, conceives a distaste for common pleasures, and appears sunk in depression, the doctor will say, ‘This is a case of melancholy, and requires such and such a prescription.’ The physicist will say, ‘This is a dryness of the brain caused by hot weather and cannot be relieved till the air becomes moist.’ The astrologer will attribute it to some particular conjunction or opposition of planets. ‘Thus far their wisdom reaches,’ says the Qur’an. It does not occur to them that what has really happened is this: that the Almighty has a concern for the welfare of that man, and has therefore commanded His servants, the planets or the elements, to produce such a condition in him that he may turn away from the world to his Maker. The knowledge of this fact is a lustrous pearl from the ocean of inspirational knowledge, to which all other forms of knowledge are as islands in the sea.

The doctor, physicist, and astrologer are doubtless right each in his particular branch of knowledge, but they do not see that illness is, so to speak, a cord of love by which God draws to Himself the saints concerning whom He has said, ‘I was sick and ye visited Me not.’ Illness itself is one of those forms of experience by which man arrives at the knowledge of God, as He says by the mouth of His Prophet, ‘Sicknesses themselves are My servants, and are attached to My chosen.’ (Al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness)

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Read Part 1 first.

It’s been nearly a week since I posted the first part of my review of this thought-provoking book, so I’m about due for the next installment. Briefly to recap, Legenhausen’s work on religious pluralism has converted me away from broad, reductive, Hick-type pluralism as a philosophical concept.

After defining various types of pluralism, Legenhausen then describes the philosophy of John Hick (probably pluralism’s most famous advocate) and gives a run-down of a series of responses to Hick’s thesis, in defense of non-pluralist positions. I have to say this bit was over my head. To give you an example:

Wild speculation that q on the basis of e is not a case of prima facie justification because e would not provide x with sufficient grounds for believing q even if there were no overriders in the possession of x.

Way too mathematical for me, so I kinda skipped over chunks of “The Epistemological Challenge of Religious Pluralism,” although I did manage to pick up the following.

Hick claims that if it is religious experience that makes religious belief rational, and all the various religions have experiences that can be said to justify their claims (eg. the Christian being baptised with the Holy Spirit, the Buddhist’s experience of Nirvana, the Muslim’s annihilation and subsistance in Allah , glorified be He etc.) then religious experience either justifies all religions or none.

One response to the varying experiences that are had in the world’s religions, is to assert that there is no real underlying difference. That underneth all the religions is a mystical unity: Sufis, Kabbalists, Mystics Unite! However, experts on religious mysticism are increasingly rejecting this view, says Legenhausen, because it fails to understand that mystical experiences are strongly conditional upon the religious paradigm that produces them. To put it another way, there is a reason why St. John of the Cross experienced a relationship with Jesus and not the Buddha!
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I’m not sure if I’m the Maryam that’s been tagged (there are a few of us out there), but if so here goes:

Four Jobs I’ve Had in My Life

1) Secretarial work for a Bankruptcy and Liquidation firm (baaaaaaad karma place, so I won’t put the URL up.)
2) Tech Support for an Internet Service Provider
3) Voice-over for educational computer programmes.
4) Research Assistant in an Islamic studies department

Four Movies I Could Watch Over and Over, and Have

1) When Harry Met Sally
2) Truly Madly Deeply
3) Star Wars (the original episodes 4,5 & 6)
4) Educating Rita

Four Places I Have Lived

1) Romsey (tiny, country town in Victoria where I lived on a farm until I was nearly nine.)
2) Far North Queensland (Tolga was my base, but I travelled around teaching and doing volunteer work)
3) Swindon, U.K. (round-about capital of England)
4) Sana’a, Yemen, where I left my heart. It’s the friendliest place in the world, and home to a masjid (mosque) that was built while the Prophet Muhammad , peace and blessings be upon him, was alive!!

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Last night Abu Yasmin subjected me to torture of the worst kind. I had to endure watching an interview with the Australian Prime Minister on the 7.30 Report. The topic that got my blood pressure rising was his ill-informed generalisation that the yoooth in Australia aren’t being taught our history properly. Go read the interview if you can stomach it (I can’t without a stiff glass of Enoz), but Pavlov’s Cat said it best:

What the PM wants, as one exasperated-looking history teacher pointed out when asked to comment, is to wind the clock back several decades: to reinvent, as with the wheel, the time when Australian history was taught as a triumphalist grand narrative of grand middle-class white male triumphs.

Barista gives a good analysis. I tell you this, if Howard’s vision ever gets implemented, you can be bloody sure we’ll be homeschooling Yasmin!