As Westerners,most of us were raised with the Christian slogan “Judge not,that ye be not judged” Matthew7:1 as a basic teaching of Jesus.This concept has echoed throughout history so that even nowadays we hear people saying “Don’t be so judgmental” as if this was an obvious truth.

In Islam, as well we are taught by the scholars to have a good opinion of people( Husn Al Thann) although most of the textual evidence actually refers to having a good opinion of our Lord rather than of humanity.Also we are told to make 70 excuses for our brother or sister if we see them doing wrong although this is not really an authentic hadith.On the other hand, at the same time, we are encouraged in the Quran to practice “amr bil maroof and nehi al munkar”(enjoin the good and prevent evil).How can we possibly do that if we don’t acknowledge and state to others the good and evil of their actions.So,this is a much more problematic question than meets the eye at first glance!

If we go back to the Biblical references to start with we have in Genesis of the Old Testament Adam and Eve being forbidden to eat the fruit of a particular tree.This fruit is from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.The punishment for this act was being exiled from the heavens and sent down to earth!

If we reflect on this story ,which is very deep indeed ,what can we understand?This is what I would propose as an explanation.1) That having ideas about good and evil is inconsistent with being in the heavens.Makes sense ,no?There is only positivity,light and love in the heavens.No need for judgment,no need for discernment.

Now,what about the Earth-plane? It appears that discerning good and evil is fundamental to existence on this plane! Is that not your experience?!Common sense,no? How can we possibly manage our lives in this world without being able to discriminate between the two? Ever known people who are too unaware or too naive to make those judgments lol?Ever noticed all the trouble they get into ?!

So how do we resolve this apparent contradiction- between being forbidden to judge and needing to judge in order to survive?!Let me propose a potential solution.It has to do with the difference between discernment (‘furqan’ in Arabic- also one of the names of the Quran ‘Al Furqan” so it can’t be bad) .Discernment is necessary.Judgment may be optional .

And what is the difference between the two.”Aye,there’s the rub” (That’s Shakespeare.Let’s bring in some secular wisdom as well lol).This is how I see it.With discernment,you can see clearly the difference between good and evil.But at the same time you don’t denounce the evil.You take note of it and you manage it,you try to inoculate yourself against it,you detoxify it, you mitigate it-call  it what you will..But you don’t denounce it because it,too,is from God.One of the recitations we did with the BaAlawi people of Yemen  said “Al Khair wa shaar fi mashiat Illah” Both good and evil are from the will of Allah.Sorry for the moralists amongst you but that is the reality.Evil has it’s purposes!We need to confront it without denying it.

So every time you come in touch with evil,remind yourself that it too is purposeful.It might be designed as a test,it might be there to teach you something,it might purify you and raise your rank.But it needs to be there for this life’s  purpose to be realized.And when you get to the other side you will know why!

Now ,one of the main practical aspects here is how to manage this evil- or this ignorance or this untruth(‘batil’ in Arabic). The first step is not to deny it!That just makes matters worse.The second step is to develop discernment and use use your wisdom .This is no easy matter.It requires a life-time and more.Our parents should be our first teachers but,in all honesty,most of them,caught up in their social conditioning ,daily worries and unresolved conflicts and desires,are woefully inadequate on this score!

So we have to seek out teachers of various sorts.Sometimes ,if we are lucky,we may meet them in our daily lives and during our professional training but most of the time,we need to seek them out.And that is a whole other subject and many go awry on that path.It’s somewhat like a Catch-22! You need discernment  to find a wise teacher so if you don’t have it to start with,how can you possibly get there?! The answer is the Mercy of Allah who will grant you this great ‘niamat'(gift) of a wise mentor if you are sincere and worthy.May you all be granted this Mercy. Without it, life can easily become a shipwreck! Salaams,Ibrahim

Call to Action: Part Two

The Beginnings of a Solution

Pre-education: As I began to reflect on the problems of contemporary education, I realized that there is an important prior step. Since all of our children are exposed to an incredible number and amount of toxins(It is actually a miracle that there are any normal children out there!) the first step in our process should probably be an education of parents about how to minimize exposures to them and to their children. This is no easy matter with no perfect solutions of a completely toxic-free environment. The scientists find these toxins in the Arctic far away from civilization and glyphosate (Round-up) in the rainwater as well so we are in a perilous situation-no doubt.

There, however, things we can do- like filtering our water, hard-wiring our computers with cable rather than wi-fi, keeping our cellular phones away from our brains and eating organic foods whenever possible. Many progressive,”enlightened” people I know  do not do even these simple maneuvers. They prefer to listen to the block-head scientific types who tell them our water is safe(true if you are living in Pasteurian times where the only danger was bacteria!) or that cell[phones and their EMFs are not really dangerous. Many educated people I know still believe tap-water is fine and organic doesn’t make a difference as the pesticides in the other foods are only ‘residues” and thus cannot harm us. So, we first need some education for ourselves. And we will attempt to do that-for those who are prepared to join us and commit to this adventure! There is a lot of material out there so we will have to work at sorting out what is useful and do-able.

Education: So much attention has been given to this matter and so much confusion has been generated that I don’t know where to start lol. Let us begin with one of my favourite terms these days –Epistemology (the science of knowledge) i.e. how do we get to the Truth and how do we recognize it once we get there. The current consensus zeitgeist(from Latin to German you can see that our approach represents a vast umbrella lol!) is that you get to knowledge and Truth by gathering data and logically analyzing that data. That is called Empiricism. Is that true however?! No-one bothers to question it -or at least very few do. It is an article of faith-“scientific theology” or “scientism” you could call it. Is that working? Is it creating healthy, satisfied, self-realized people -or the contrary?! They have been using this model since the 18^th Century(The Age Of Enlightenment or Age of Rationality they call it), so they have had plenty of time to draw their conclusions!!I will let you answer that one lol. Just like the term “evidence-based medicine” there is no evidence for it! Yet, they continue to apply it as if it were a Law of the Universe. As the Quran, the holy book of the Muslims, states about certain people ‘They are deaf, dumb and blind” lol but they maintain their convictions nevertheless.

If you need a concrete situation to understand this hypothesis, just look at the management of the current pandemic. The people who like Antony Fauci are wedded to this Empirical scientific model have been consistently wrong! They say the virus occurred naturally while the evidence by this stage is overwhelming that this is a genetically-modified virus! They said that masks are not useful and then changed their minds(two million Asians can’t be wrong lol) and they said hydroxychloroquine is useless and dangerous and then the article in Lancet that proved their contention proved to be bogus and had to be retracted. Just saying … There is much, much more of this.

So the epistemology of the Empiricists and their double-blind, placebo-controlled multi-centered, multi-million dollar studies published in peer-reviewed journals turns out to be dysfunctional and largely useless if not outrightly dangerous. Listening to one of our “genius doctors” like Didier Raoult and Chris Martensen turns out to be far more useful in ascertaining the truth of the situation. In fact “anecdotal evidence” that the scientific community is so contemptuous of, turns out often to be more useful than those systematic, rigorous scientific studies!

But let’s get back to our children! Do we really want to produce another generation of Professor Nimbus types with huge brains and no hearts?! Because that is what our schools are doing. They train the “mind” the logic, the mathematical and verbal skills whilst ignoring the hearts and souls of our children. That is NOT what I want for my grandchildren nor is it what you want, I presume.

The kind of schooling I am proposing would train the hearts and the souls of our children. It would teach empathy and compassion and the subtle realities of our spirit. We would use techniques from all the spiritual traditions to help our children subtilize their perceptions and care about the other children and their environment including the natural environment.

At this point, I see four essential components of this education:

• the practical domain: I believe an educational process should teach students basic life skills-like how to shop for and prepare food, how to build things, how to fix basic things around the house and basic car mechanics, how to organize their paperwork and thus make our accounting and income tax reports easier for us. All of this is ignored in our current educational system which always gives the priority to theoretical abstractions like intermediate algebra over practical matters like what to do when your car won’t start lol!
• The moral, ethical component. One of my perceptive daughters who attended the Rudolf Steiner school once said: ”Daddy, there’s only one subject at Steiner schools- “art” lol I later added: ”There’s only one subject at Islamic schools-“morality /good behaviour”( more about these different school systems at a later date )Needless to say “morality/good behaviour” is a necessary component of education. But it is not sufficient. We want open-minded, open-hearted, alive children not robotic “goodie-two-shoes” types!
• The heart/psychology: This component needs to educate children in empathy, compassion and even understanding psychopathology(we all have some of that lol).Spiritual and religious people are often anti-psychology and that is unfortunately narrow-minded and limiting. Just because Freud was an atheist doesn’t mean he didn’t contribute enormously to our understanding of the human psyche( I personally use his insights profitably on a regular basis).The 20^th century took some enormous strides in understanding empathy( something seriously lacking in many of the Muslim communities I have participated in) and we should learn to benefit from it. Despite all the limitations of their tradition(see the chapter ”Unpacking Buddhism” in my last book: “Understanding Life” the Buddhists have ridden the slogan of compassion to become one of the most acceptable traditions in Western society. So empathy, compassion and understanding, with their natural consequences of patience and acceptance and tolerance, are fundamental to this approach.
• The Spiritual Component: This is likely to be the most difficult to define but also absolutely vital to the development of our children. Meditation, prayer, contemplation, solitude (ever hear about that in a school lol?!)- all of these are part of it. The ultimate goal is to put ourselves in contact with what the Sufis call the “sir”-the inner secret of our Being. More on that later.

1. C) The Venue: This is a biggie! I think a mortar and brick school is the wrong venue! ( even if it is adobe rather than brick lol). Now, I am not of the opinion, like some other thinkers, that our current schooling system was intentionally designed, by some clever, manipulative businessmen and government officials, just to serve the needs of industry. I would consider that to be a conspiracy theory. There are multiple layers of ignorance involved in the establishment of current schooling institutions. nancial manipulation is just one of them lol.

Nevertheless, the resemblance .in actuality, between what we now see as schools and what are now factories cannot be ignored! Not because the schools were designed by the builders of factories but because both of these institutions are dehumanizing ,overly-controlling and life-inhibiting. This has to change if we are to preserve our humanity!

So what am I proposing?!  We need something more natural, more organic-something more akin to human nature. So what I would see being developed is a form of “collective home-schooling”. Remember Hilary Clinton and “it takes a village”. Regardless of what you think of her, and my opinion is no more glorious than yours lol, she was right!

And what does this look like? Let’s say there are four families working together(yes, this will require some proximity, some sense of community) ,the children will know the other children and will know their parents .So if some mothers (and fathers) need to go to work, their children will be taken care of by other parents, not by day-care professionals! . This arrangement would be on a rotating basis so that let’s say every four days one or two or three  of the parents would be responsible for watching over and possibly  teaching the children. Obviously, there would be lots of details and logistics to work out, but that is the basic model. It avoids the delegation of child-care and children’s education to professionals and institutions and thereby protects our children’s hearts and avoids the trauma of separations every Monday morning- to the prisons of schools and organized daycares.

Have I gotten your attention? Are you interested in this kind of project? At this point, we need to work with people who would be committed to such a project and willing to restructure their lives accordingly. If you are “in” just let me know.

”And zo ve may to begin”  Salaams, Sufi Ibrahim

A Call to Action: Alternative Education

Part One: The Problem

I feel sad and worried for the current generation of children and you should too. Especially if you are a parent of a young child or are hoping to have children! Not only are we seeing an epidemic of Autism, hyperactivity and childhood behavioural disorders but the scientific research is more and more indicating what is actually responsible for this epidemic!

Tracey Woodruff, Phd. In the Department of Reproductive Sciences at UCSF makes the following statement “Our findings have found that many chemicals do indeed accumulate in the fetal environment and are absorbed at greater levels by fetuses than by the pregnant women themselves! This may have significant consequences for the fetus(notice the careful language. It’s more like “undoubtedly have significant consequences” as we can see it all around us!)Many of these chemicals are known to affect development(and to be cancerogenic and neurotoxic at the same time.)”A few worrisome candidates for the role of “childhood destroyers”-polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs),organochlorine pesticides(OCPs),polybrominated diphenyl ethers(PBDEs) , perfluorinated compounds(PFCs) mercury and lead. Many of these  have been detected in the U.S. in 99% of U.S. pregnant women-according to the NHANES(National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey of the CDC) data!

”Contrary to previous research” Woodruff writes: ”we found evidence that several PCBs and OCPs were often higher in umbilical cord samples than in maternal blood samples! And you thought McDonald’s was bad for your children lol. This is the legacy we are leaving for our children! They emerge toxic from the womb! And our governments are asleep at the wheel. If you think they are underperforming with the pandemic, their approach to these problems, which are somewhat more subtle, is way worse! Please notice here that these studies are not even attempting to factor in the toxic effects of EMFs(cellphones and Wifi and G4 and G5) nor the problematic issue of vaccine injuries and the immunological problems due to multiple assaults on the immune system caused by over- vaccination. Not only are we not out of the woods but the woods are getting denser by the moment!

Now on top of all this, we add in a schooling system that is completely out of sync with real children’s needs and hearts and you have a recipe for disaster-a disaster we can see all around us. Especially in the public schools-although private schools are barely any better! If someone had designed a system of education in order to make children stressed, miserable and out of touch with their true nature(‘fitra’ we call that in Sufism) they could not have done a better job! Keeping young children-especially boys- penned into their seats in a classroom, formulating academic goals and standardized testing are all formulas for generating misery! Then we hire teachers who are often more interested in having a dependable career than in taking care of children, professionalizing what should be one of the ultimate human activities-sharing the knowledge we have gained in our lifetimes.  Add to that having academic researchers designing curriculums in the boardrooms of the Ministries of our governments. All of this should be anathema to real educators and human beings. But we have come to accept this as normal!

In addition to this toxic brew, there is an orientation, still after all these years of contrary research like that of Howard Gardiner and Daniel Goleman, to training the mind alone. Mathematical and verbal skills, period. There is no training of the heart, of the soul, of empathy and compassion. And there are almost NO practical skills transmitted. That is the state of the education nation.

It is not only Western thinkers like Rudolf Steiner and John Taylor Gatto and Howard Gardiner (father of multiple intelligences) that realize how wrong this is. One of the great Islamic scholars of our times Habib Ahmad Mahshur al-Haddad r.a. made the following statement with regards to education in the Islamic world. ”The beginning of the decline of the Islamic world started with the elimination of the teacher-student relationship in the Islamic world and its replacement by institutions and the professionalizing of the teaching profession. This is now a Universal problem!

As our politicians, including the “good ones” like Bernie Sanders harp on about the need for everyone to get higher education in order to be fulfilled in life, we have to seriously wonder “what they are smoking” lol  The entire Epistemological (excuse the Greek lol) enterprise is flawed at its core. The idea behind it all is that Truth can only be known from the outside-via facts(“data-driven” they call it)  and the logical, systematic analysis of these facts(“data- crunching”).That is what they believe to be the royal road to Truth and that is what governments try to use to come to the right decisions. In the philosophical world this is known as Empiricism or Scientific Materialism or “The Age of Enlightenment”. And it is fundamentally wrong-corrupt to the core.

So if you find that our governments are confused and the Truth of what is going on escapes them on a regular basis,it is not simply about greed as most intellectuals believe. It is also about ignorance-the ignorance of Philosophical Materialism. And that is precisely what our schools are trying to transmit to our children. No wonder they are unhappy. Because it’s the inner that is primordial! That is what determines our well-being, not the outer. And that is why the Prophet of Islam saws prayed for ‘afiya’(well-being) not for more wealth and more data lol.I will leave it here for now. The second part will address the beginnings of solutions-what we can do about  this sad state of affairs inshallah.

A little lightness for the dark period of the Corona Virus lol.I have concluded from a long process of analysis and observation that I can summarize the DSM-5 Diagnostic Manual into two simple categories- Crazy People and Rational People!

Now, the crazy people are usually quite obvious,although at times their craziness can be somewhat hidden-but not to the astute observer.They are somewhat different from the “normals”. But they are also open-minded,sensitive and insightful in the way that the Rationalists are not! For example,when I worked at the local Psychiatric Hospital,the psychotic patients invariably “got” that I was Muslim! The social workers and other professionals would often ask if I was a Rabbi or an Orthodox priest but the patients almost invariably got it right.Remember the famous Stanford study about the fake patients?! The other patients were the most observant of their “fakeness” ,the nurses next and the doctors last!

The second category is the “Rational People” Ya right.They are inevitably hiding serious amounts of craziness of all sorts when you get to know them! They have emotional outbursts,fixed ideas and inappropriate behavioural reflexes.Both Freud ,especially, and Jung as well,underlined this phenomenon but people don’t seem to have paid much attention.They still believe in the Rationality of these people.The “rational people” besides hiding a considerable amount of craziness are also closed-minded,ideological and rigid.”No inbox” as I like to say.Or a very limited one at best.And they can stick to their wrong-minded positions for decades as I have discovered in the last few years as  I reconnect with some of them I knew well in the past  after a 40 year hiatus!

You can probably guess by now that I prefer the Crazy Ones lol.They are definitely more open and hear the Truth better than most. When I would visit Sheikh Nazim in London to do practices with our Sufi group  he would often greet me by saying”Dr. Ibrahim.Welcome to our asylum.We are so happy to have a psychiatrist with us”.I thought he was kidding.But after many years I realized he was serious.It takes a certain amount of “craziness” to embark on the spiritual path seriously.And that’s the type of craziness I have come to love.Have a serene Corona Virus outbreak! Salaams,Ibrahim