AhlulBayt Islamic Society

Quran My Beloved 2009

An evening of heavenly tajweed recitation of the Holy Quran by prominent recitors. Allow the words to sink in your heart in the annual gathering.

6pm
Friday, 20^th March 2009

Seminar Rooms
Sir Alexander Fleming Building
Imperial College London
Exhibition Road
London
SW7 2AZ

Refreshments will be served!

Prophet Mohammed (S) in the Quran: The Reality

Report and photos of the event will be uploaded soon Inshallah

Karbala and The Mahdi

Karbala and The Mahdi - Imperial College AhlulBayt Society - Report of the event will be uploaded soon Inshallah

Documentary Screening: “Occupation 101”

The Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Date: Thursday 22^nd January

Time: 6:00pm – 7:00pm

Venue: Huxley Building, Room 308, South Kensington Campus

Free Entry & Refreshments

Following on with AAW, we will be screening the Documentary “Occupation 101”.

Trailer: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=pV_T551jw88 

Ashura Awareness Campaign: GAZA - Desperate for Justice

Food Crisis and Peak Oil - Feedback

Do you get your 2000 kilo-calories a day? This is the minimum energy intake of an adult from food according to the UN body the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Since you’re in Britain, you probably do, but the answer to that question is no for 1 billion of the 6 billion people who inhabit this Earth.

As part of the Ahlulbayt Islamic Society’s campaign about the current Economic Crisis, Mr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development (IPRD) gave a talk regarding the current crisis in food supplies. Mr Ahmed began by making the point that increases in food prices are actually causing riots around the world. Although not reported widely in the news, 37 countries have seen food riots, including Indonesia, Morocco and Mexico. Here in Britain the consequences have been less severe with households seeing their weekly grocery bills increase food prices due to fluctuating prices over the past few weeks, which have hit low-income families the hardest.

Since most Imperial students are not farmers, it’s difficult for us to remember that the food we eat – that Ploughman’s Cheese sandwich sitting in its plastic container or the mandatory cup of coffee between lectures – actually grew out of the ground at some point. Agriculture is that age-old human activity, but according to Mr Ahmed, it is the unsustainable industrial agriculture practiced across the world that is creating a food crisis. Some of the mechanisms for this, such as soil erosion, were explained. The intensive growing of crops today isn’t compatible with the fact that it takes 500 years to replenish 1 inch of top soil, the result is lower productivity year on year. Water scarcity is an under-acknowledged issue, the NewScientist magazine reported that an average hamburger takes 11,000 litres of water to produce, and like top soil, fresh water is currently being used faster than water tables are replenished. Pesticide Pollution and the effects of Global Warming were also discussed.

Lastly Mr Ahmed argued that monoculture – the growing of only one crop over a large area - is completely unsustainable. Third world farmers face pressure to grow only one “cash” crop to sell to huge corporate agricultural companies like Dupont and Cargill, who in turn sell it to supermarket chains in developed countries. Instead of rotating crops or growing a variety of them which would supply local markets, huge fields of cocoa or cotton are sown and their produce exported. Colombia is not short of arable land and its biggest agricultural exports are coffee, tobacco and cut flowers, but the Latin American country must import other food to feed its population, of which 13% are undernourished according to the FAO. India is another paradoxical case where, despite earning $1.2bn from exporting milled rice in 2004, a fifth of India’s population is undernourished.

Overall Mr Ahmed made a compelling argument, but he failed to address several common criticisms. For example many advantages have been gained from the industrialisation of agriculture, like economies of scale and improved yields, and what role would Genetically Modified food would play in a more sustainable agricultural system. Additionally the Peak Oil half of his talk was not as well developed, with a plethora of technical terms clouding his argument. Terms like a Hubbert curve, Olduvai theory and the opinions of petroleum geologist Colin Campbell, are ones best left for the hours spent browsing Wikipedia.

Worrying about feeding ourselves is something we don’t do anymore in a developed country like Britain. Our supermarkets are open 24/7 with a huge choice of food, and the law requires motorway service stations to be open 24/7 to let us refill our fuel tanks and stomachs. And if you’re annoyed that the JCR closes at 6pm when you still want a bite to eat, the Imperial College Library Café is open throughout the night! We live our lives assuming food will always be available for us to eat, but for masses of people in the world most of their time is spent ensuring they get their 2000 kilo-calories a day just to survive.

Hassan Joudi

Food Crisis and Peak Oil

Monday

24th November 2008

6pm

 

Sir Alexander Fleming Building

Lecture Theatre 2

Imperial College London

Exhibition Road

London

SW7 2AZ

Islamic Economics: the solution? - Feedback

Being faced with the worst global economic crisis in the last century, religion is the last thing on the mind of some individuals. However, on a cold gusty night in central London, dozens of students, professors and businessmen warmed the ambience with a glimmer of hope, asking the single question: Can Islamic Economics be the solution?

The heart of academic excellence in London was united with that of economics, as experts on the field graced Imperial College with their presence. The main speaker was Professor Rodney Shakespeare, a Cambridge graduate, barrister and economist. He was joined in the audience by Canon Peter Challen, the Chairman of the Christian Council for Monetary Justice and co-author of the widely read book “Seven Steps to Justice” with Shakespeare. Renowned economist Tarek el-Diwany, who Shakespeare described as the “number one Islamic author on interest”, was also present to contribute his expertise on the matter.

The main speaker’s high profile brought with it an aura of expectation, and he didn’t fail to impress. Shakespeare is a teacher of Binary Economics in Triskati University, Jakarta, the largest private higher education institution in Indonesia, and it showed. His arguments for an Islamic system based on binary economics were well structured and his radiant and jovial approach defied the bitterly cold night in a country on the verge of recession.

The Imperial AhlulBayt Islamic Society organised this event as part of a campaign to raise awareness of the “credit crunch”. Shakespeare called not just for the spreading of awareness, but the spreading of ownership. This is the pillar on which the notion of binary economics rests, and the reason why an Islamic system without interest can hoist us from the current financial pitfall. It may seem idyllic, but as Shakespeare said, the current system is on the precipice of collapse with interest continuing to shift wealth from the poor to the rich. A new arrangement is needed quickly; ironically, perhaps this “new” system was proposed some 1400 years ago in the deserts of Arabia.

Mohsin Asharia

Islamic Economics - is it the Solution?

Monday
10th November 2008
6pm

Blackett Lecture Th1
Physics Building
Imperial College London
Exhibition Road
London
SW7 2AZ

Rodney’s first book on binary economics (The Two-factor Nation) was published in 1976. Rodney is co-author of the standard textbook on binary economics ─ Binary Economics – the new paradigm (University Press of America, 1999). He is also co-author of the subsequent text ─ Seven Steps to Justice (New European Publications, 2003) ─ which furthers develops binary economics; and author of The Modern Universal Paradigm, containing later developments, being published in 2007 by Trisakti University, Jakarta.

Trisakti University (where Rodney is Visiting Professor of Binary Economics teaching on the international postgraduate Islamic Economics and Finance program) is the largest private university in Indonesia, the second overall in prestige, and the birthplace of the Indonesian reformasi revolution. Rodney has also been offered, and has accepted, a Professorship at a large private university in another country. He is a Cambridge MA, a qualified UK Barrister and a well-known paper presenter and lecturer particularly at Islamic conferences dealing with money, the real economy, binary economics, and social and economic justice. In these fields, the leading Islamic academic is Professor Masudul Alam Choudhury with whom Rodney is at present co-operating on a major work ─ The Universal Paradigm and the Islamic World-system (to be published in 2007) ─ which is permeated throughout by binary economics particularly as it has developed over the last four years.

Economic Genocide: A debtly deception - Feedback

Credit crunch. Global Financial Crisis. Britain on the brink of recession. We are told we are simply facing the consequences of over-borrowing. But is there a much deeper flaw? Is the monetary system inherently causing an Economic Genocide?

As part of the AhlulBayt Islamic Society’s current campaign to raise awareness about the Economic Crisis, students of all faiths and backgrounds convened in the Clore Lecture Theatre last Thursday to discuss the topic in more depth. We were extremely privileged with the presence of Toufik Machnouk, Executive Director of the Insitute for Policy Research and Development, to clarify the nature of the crisis we are currently in. However, this was not simply a chiding to consumers about overspending, or a scolding of banks for overlending, rather a structured analysis of three important factors often misunderstood by average Joe: the ownership of wealth, the monetary structure, and the Islamic perspective on these two systems.

The talk sent a chilling message, implying that the problem is in the “credit” rather than the “crunch”. Whilst some governments seem to think we can fight fire with fire and “borrow our way out of this”, Mr Machnouk suggested otherwise. The problem, he explained, lies in the ownership of wealth. You know something is wrong when the lower half of the world’s population own just 1% of the world’s wealth, and that the richest three men on the planet are worth the equivalent of the total GDP of the 48 poorest nations.

Combining the wealth ownership inequalities with a flawed monetary structure creates a lethal concoction. So lethal, in fact, that it has led to the deaths of more children than the number of deaths caused by World War I. Interestingly, 97% of “money” is today created by private banks in interest. However, when one pauses to ask where all this money came from, there is an eery silence. In fact, the majority of this money is not in circulation but in the form of digits in computers. No wonder we can’t pay it back. So why has this never been a problem up till now. Economists liken it to a game of musical chairs: so long as the music is playing, everyone is fine. When it stops, somebody has to lose.

The problem is overshadowed globally, with poor countries strangled by unpaid debts in a system set up post-WWII by the States. Unfortunately this perpetual debt can only be sustained by perpetual growth. As the speaker put it, it is like charging you for the air you breathe, whilst simultaneously asking you for a part of your lung for each breath you take. The poor countries are forced into IMF loans, which seem like an idyllic escape at the time. However, the structural adjustment programmes attached to the loans ensure the loan money disappears to private and foreign investors, leaving the impoverished nations to clear up the mess. And pay back the loans, of course. It comes as no surprise that all nations given IMF loans showed a decline in 17 key indicators in the years after they received the loans. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that half of the world’s population now lives in absolute poverty, earning under $2 a day.

Mr Machnouk concluded with the Islamic perspective on the issue. The Arabic word for “Economics” stems from the word “Equality”. In Islam, wealth is nothing but a trust from God, and policies in place attempt to ensure fairness and justice in transactions and the financial system. Be it through the prohibition of hoarding wealth to the public ownership of community resources, the right of financial assistance to the elimination of interest, Islam aims to reach a state where wealth is not the goal, rather a means to satisfaction.

In conclusion, the talk was a huge success in fulfilling the AhlulBayt Society’s aim to raise awareness about the crisis, and its more general aims to encourage dialogue and free thought. The looming discussion on Islamic Finance by guest speaker Prof Rodney Shakespeare looks to be the icing on the cake for the Economic Crisis campaign.

Mohsin Asharia