http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/jul/17/malaysia-gold-dinar-thwart-capitalism
The Dinar & Dirham Effort in Malaysia : A Defense
By Muhd Noor Bin Muhd Deros
In The Name of Allah The Most Gracious The Most Merciful.
May the praise and blessings of Almighty Allah be upon our beloved hero Prophet Muhammad s.a.w.
I will try my best to be as objective as possible in my response to the article. And by starting with myself, I would like to call upon all journalists and writers to stay strong and do not crumble in the face of the backfiring assaults of prejudice and biasness.
But after all I understand, human beings are called Insan (the forgetful) for a reason.
Let's go straight to the article:
1) The writer wrote: "(the dinar & dirham was) Inspired by selective religious sources"
We need the writer to explain this further. How does he draw the line between different interpretations and being selective? After all being selective can be a positive attitude.
2) Let us set the record straight. The idea was first introduced by Umar Ibrahim Vadillo of The Murabitun World Movement in 1992, in Granada, Spain, where the first Dinar was minted after the fall of the Caliphate.
To start with Dr Mahathir is a clear flaw in the writer's research. Dr Mahathir is significant in declaring it to the world. It is important to note that he himself blundered in the effort. He gave the project to The Central Bank of Malaysia, which is like giving your sheep to be taken care by the wolves.
Umar Ibrahim vadillo stresses on the bottom up process, it has to start with the people. Governments and banks do not, cannot & will not want to take it up due to them being conscious or unconscious puppets of the UN, IMF and The World Bank.
3) He continues : "It lacks the egalitarian spirit embodied in socialism's virtue of the common good."
Another flaw in the writer's research. It is clear by now, that this is not a seriously and objectively written article. It confirms my earlier sensing of a straw man fallacy.
The Dinar & Dirham Project is not a simplistic stand alone project. It is just one of the steps in the fight against the backward, primitive, sinister and crumbling idea of capitalism.
Below is an excerpt from Umar Vadillo’s Esoteric Deviations in Islam :
"The Dinar & Dirham comes with:
1) THE RESTORATION OF ZAKAT, not as charity, but with the prior appointment of an Amir(leader) in the community and the appointment of zakat collectors who demand the payment of zakat. The zakat is paid in Dinars and Dirhams, made available to the Muslims and made acceptable by our traders.
2) THE RESTORATION OF THE CALIPHATE, as the ultimate goal that unifies all the Muslims, not under the romance of the past, but with a clear-cut program for unity based on a common currency: the Islamic Dinar (4.250 grams of gold). Not by mass election, but by emergence or by a college of leaders.
3) THE RESTORATION OF ISLAMIC TRADING, as the way to create wealth and prosperity for our people and the alternative to the present usurious system. It consists of:
- COINS: Dinar, Dirham and Daniq.
- SOUQS/OPEN MARKET: Markets open to all with no rental of selling space, no taxes and no shops, to replace the supermarket monopolies.
- CARAVANS: Open distribution networks between the Islamic markets.
- CONTRACTS: the real Sharikah & Qirad (Commenda), not the pseudo contracts invented by the Islamic banks.
- GUILDS: open production organisation for competing successfully in the time to come. Associated to the guilds is the re-establishment of Awqaf (Islamic endowments)"
(End of excerpt)
So, it is far from lacking an egalitarian spirit. These empowering programs from Allah; Zakat, Souq (open markets) and Awqaf should be understood properly and viewed as an interconnected system, if not; the writer's misrepresentation of the project is understandable.
The writer continues:
"On a wider scale, who is to prevent gold-rich nations from banding together as a cartel to fix prices at exorbitant amounts in the same way that the oil-producing nations of OPEC did?"
Yes, this is a possibility. But I am sorry Mr Nazry, are you asking passively for a program devoid of any challenges? Are we living in Utopia?
Every single thing in this world can be manipulated and exploited, except the heart of a Mu'min who is madly in love with his Lord.
Seriously, are you saying that the gold and silver alternative is open to human manipulation EXACTLY as today's means of exchange?
Between a modest Muslimah who refuses to consider herself as a commodity and a drunken woman with scanty clothes in a club, do you seriously believed that both of them are exposed to the same level of harm and exploitation?
Another important point; in Islam, money is about tangibility and intrinsic value. If you do not have gold, please know that Allah has provided abundant tangible resources with intrinsic value for us to use. We just need creativity.
And we also need to read history.
We do have good and creative minds.
Just Google www.e-dinar.com, an electronic virtual dinar system that is 100 percent backed up by gold, 1 virtual Dinar: 1 real Dinar ratio. The proof? You can demand your physical gold whenever you want, don't worry there will be no vault (not bank) closure.
Hence the idea of bringing a bag of gold around for shopping is the imagination of an uncreative mind.
Lastly, I understand the writer's fear and scepticism. If you are living or have lived in a place governed by untrustworthy human beings, you will surely have to be vigilant and sceptical.
But this project and movement places great emphasis on something that is still very alien to the west ; Tasawwuf (Which is deeply rooted in the Islamic traditions, not the New Age Sufism ) which stands on the idea of Taqwa.
The heads of this movement, all of them have went through a harsh course of the annihilation of the ego. Under the hand of Shaykh Abdal Qadir As-Sufi.
Their passion and love for God is not identical at all to the evangelists Christians.
Hence, you will not understand this effort and movement if you do not understand the concept of active Tasawwuf.
Allah knows best.
Walhamdulillahi Rabbil Alamin.
To understand more about this movement and the Dinar & Dirham project please visit :
A response from a Murabitun member,Hajj Abdussamad Clarke to Nazry's article :
ReplyDelete"We do not need the dinar as an anti-capitalist tool, since capitalism is clearly its own worst enemy.
The article is a conflation of piffle in my view. But that is also a good definition of the Guardian, a once honoured outlet but now squarely in the capitalists' pocket.
To deal with it, you have to start with the first sentence: "Imagine a ... See Moreworld trading solely in gold and silver coins. Imagine the size of your wallet." Anyone who has carried dinars knows that they occupy vastly less space and weigh much less than the corresponding amount of paper money. After all, a dinar is now over £130 compressed into a neat few grammes. But such people never even bother to check inconvenient things such as details in their blithely dismissive prose. If such glaring inconsistencies are to be found in the very first words, do we need to then proceed with a rigorous analysis of the whole sorry piece?
But Mr Bahrawi is probably not too worried by criticism. I am sure that the Guardian paid him rather well for his attack on his brothers.
As he makes quite clear, he doesn't speak from the perspective of Islam but of "…the egalitarian spirit embodied in socialism's virtue of the common good". But the depth of ignorance that could suggest that socialism has a monopoly of the philosophy of "the common good" is simply too deep to be plumbed.
As to the old "who is to prevent gold-rich nations from banding together as a cartel to fix prices at exorbitant amounts in the same way that the oil-producing nations of OPEC did?" there is a very simple answer, which also explains why gold and silver are so historically cheap: once gold reaches anything like a realistic price vis-a-vis paper money, investors will flock to it and the whole system of paper money and treasury bonds will collapse. That is why J.P. Morgan et al have a permanent operation of shorting the prices of gold and silver and artificially depressing them.
And why should a coin worth at present over a £100 be considered the preserve of the super wealthy? Most people in the West at least deal with figures in excess of this all the time, for their rents, bills and expenses. Have you ever seen how much people pay at the supermarket for a weekly shop?
I personally saw the first dinars and dirhams of this epoch that were minted in 1992 and there were hardly more than a handful. Now there are more than 25,000 of them in Indonesia in daily use in markets and in the lives of the poorest and most ordinary of people, and the entire federal state of Kelantan is minting them in quantities. Anyone who has ever plotted graphs know that this is an ascending one.
But personally speaking, I am more than content if the author of the article and however many millions of Guardian readers continue to bank on paper notes, and good luck to them. I know where my vote will go."