Bodies of gunmen in Mumbai attacks remain unburied, Islamic World News, NewAgeIslam.com

Islamic World News

Bodies of gunmen in Mumbai attacks remain unburied

The bodies of nine gunmen killed during attacks on the Indian city of Mumbai a year ago are still awaiting burial.

The unclaimed bodies are lying in a local government hospital and Mumbai police say they have still to take a decision about their future.

Muslim clerics had denied permission to bury the bodies in Mumbai graveyards, saying the actions of the gunmen had "defamed" their religion.

Ten men attacked Mumbai on 26 November 2008, killing more than 170 people.

Only one gunman, Mohammed Ajmal Amir Qasab, survived and he is currently facing trial.

'Un-Islamic'

The bodies are being kept in the morgue of Sir JJ Hospital. Officials say the area is secluded and guarded around the clock. The seal is checked every day.

The question of what should be done with the dead militants arose soon after the attacks.

Pakistan flatly refused to take them despite India's argument that they should go back to the country from which they originated.

http://newageislam.com/bodies-of-gunmen-in-mumbai-attacks-remain-unburied/islamic-world-news/d/2118

Lords of the Flies and Breeding Bin Ladens, War on Terror, NewAgeIslam.com

War on Terror

Lords of the Flies and Breeding Bin Ladens

By Jonathan Power

14 November 2009

A reader of a column of mine on the social consequences of abandoned street children wrote to point out that my prognosis that these little Lords of the Flies would grow up as the new Bin Ladens, primed to wreck vengeance on established societies, was mistaken.

“Osama bin Laden’s anger did not develop out of poverty,” she argued, “but out of a middle class malaise”. Of course. And so did Che Guevara’s and Stokely Carmichael’s and that of Marx and Lenin.

But this does not exclude the undisputable, well-researched, fact that poverty, particularly when it exists in a society of gross inequalities, breeds violence, crime and the urge to deal out deadly punishment on conventional society. The leaders may be educated; the shock troops often come from the underclass.

Besides, humanity has never confronted before 100 million youngsters growing up on the street, without parents. Their anger, one day, will surely find a political channel as well as the inevitable criminal one.

I think, indeed, the argument can be taken even further: there are 800 million people living in hunger without sufficient nourishment. Many exist in a state of political torpor, barely able to summon the energy to plant next year’s crop. But somewhere in the vast mass there are those who seethe with anger at their predicament. These days the mass media is ubiquitous, reaching even into the poorest villages, telling all. I’ll never forget sitting on an African country bus, filled with peasants holding their live chickens, watching French-made videos portraying the most ghastly violence. Ideas travel. The only surprise is that it is has taken so long for a bin Laden type to hit us where it hurts.

http://newageislam.com/lords-of-the-flies-and-breeding-bin-ladens/war-on-terror/d/2140

A cast-iron case for a secular society, Islam and Pluralism, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam and Pluralism

A cast-iron case for a secular society

Nick Cohen The Observer,

Sunday August 3 2008

When the Commission for Racial Equality investigated racism in the building industry, it said that a man's skin colour was irrelevant to whether he would make a good worker. A black bricklayer should have the same opportunities as a white bricklayer. Today's supporters of homosexual adoption say that the sexuality of a couple is irrelevant. If they can show they would make good parents, they should have the same rights to adopt as everyone else. The argument among economists about the gender pay gap is, at root, an argument about relevance as well. Are women paid less because they take time off to have children or because of misogynist employers' irrelevant prejudices?

Now politicians, judges and the godly are trying to turn religion into an equal opportunities cause. The language sounds the same as in the 20th century, but the consequences could not be more different. Instead of fighting for equality, they are demanding special treatment and the social fragmentation that goes with it.

http://newageislam.com/a-cast-iron-case-for-a-secular-society/islam-and-pluralism/d/423

Lecture 2: The Philosophical Test of the Revelations of Religious Experience, Books and Documents, NewAgeIslam.com

Books and Documents

Lecture 2: The Philosophical Test of the Revelations of Religious Experience

Scholastic philosophy has put forward three arguments for the existence of God. These arguments, known as the Cosmological, the Teleological, and the Ontological, embody a real movement of thought in its quest after the Absolute. But regarded as logical proofs, I am afraid, they are open to serious criticism and further betray a rather superficial interpretation of experience.

The cosmological argument views the world as a finite effect, and passing through a series of dependent sequences, related as causes and effects, stops at an uncaused first cause, because of the unthinkability of an infinite regress. It is, however, obvious that a finite effect can give only a finite cause, or at most an infinite series of such causes. To finish the series at a certain point, and to elevate one member of the series to the dignity of an uncaused first cause, is to set at naught the very law of causation on which the whole argument proceeds. Further, the first cause reached by the argument necessarily excludes its effect. And this means that the effect, constituting a limit to its own cause, reduces it to something finite.

http://newageislam.com/lecture-2--the-philosophical-test-of-the-revelations-of-religious-experience/books-and-documents/d/219