WTC & The Twelver's Progression; Ali, Hosein and the Twelth Emam

A word about the myopia of U.S. foreign policy is in order. For some of us have not invested sufficient time in learning about waves of current affairs overtaking our time like waves of nomads from the high Eurasian steppe of yore annihilating resistance.

Our President’s middle name, Hussein, is that of the grandson of Muhammad of Mecca. Hosein was a grandson of the false prophet Muhammad. He was killed by thousands of warriors outside Baghdad along with his son and retinue at the order of the Caliph. Caliph means successor in Arabic. Sunni means the orthodox way. The successor to Muhammad was Sunni and the killing of Hosein began the alternative Mohammedan sect of Shi’ism.

The problem of the construction of a twelve-story mega mosque near ground zero—an egregious appearance of conflict of political ethical interest that creates substantial strain amongst New Yorkers and concerns across the United States, brings us to wonder about any symbolism in this profit upon the World Trade Center destruction by Mohammedan fundamentalists nine years ago.

Some have said that the mega-mosque is a project of a Shi’a sect rather than the Sunni sect of the Al Qa’eda suicide hijackers. Some have said that they reflect a more quietist brand of Mohammadanism.

What is the Shi’a? Shi means party. The ‘a’ is an abbreviation for Ali-a cousin of Muhammad and the fourth Caliph who was murdered. The Shi’a is the party of Ali.

One historically significant Shi’a sect was known as The Twelver’s after the legendary Twelfth Imam. One group of Sufi Twelver’s roasted captured rivals as shish kabobs in the 1500s. Some Sunni are also Sufi.

The Shi’a believe that the rightful rule of Muhamadanism is through the false prophet and Ali his cousin who married a daughter of Mohammad who bore a son named Hosein-also murdered. The Ummayad were the non-relatives of Muhammad who ruled Mohammadanism instead of the blood line that the Party of Ali-the Shi’a, followed as a separate branch of Mohammadanism. It was a large Shi'a mosque of the eleventh Imam that was bombed in Samara Iraq in 2006 by Al Qa'eda bombers. Politics for Mohammadans may be religion through other means. Establishing internicine targets and boones of contention in N.Y.C. near ground zero may increase the challenges for security if not political self-determination

The Shi’a began their own tradition of heads of Mohammadanism called Emams. The eleventh Imam was the last-he had no son, except perhaps for a hidden son that was set to return one day. The mysterious 12th Imam of the Shi’a gives us pause to wonder about the 12 story mega-mosque planned for construction near ground zero. Is this an end of time symbolism?

The Shi’a developed a policy of lying to deceive enemies and avoid persecution during the time of the sixth Emam. Ja’far al Sadiq called this political and social innovation of dissimulation taqiyeh. With President Obama bearing a name of that of the grandson of the false prophet, we are given more reason to wonder if the quietist policy of political lying has served to conceal the actual motives for building a twelve story mega-mosque near ground zero? In reading a History of Iran (Empire of the Mind) by the British writer Michael Axworthy I encountered several ideas (ref. page 127-128) to add to the mix of confusion regarding foreign policy of the United States in the globalist era. There is a reverse indoctrination and control phenomena in which the interests of actual U.S. citizens at home are significantly degraded and those of foreign interests preferred.

Shi’ists believe that Mohammedans ought to be led by a blood descendent of Muhammad. I protest the use of the phrase ‘submission to God’ or Islam to describe followers of Muhammad. I believe they submit in error to Satan and the powers of worldliness—so I would hardly call them Islamic. That aside, we might wonder if our President being named after Hosein is a change for America’s destiny drawing us further into the middle Eurasian snares set for us by Bin Ladin—the wizard of Os.

Iran is a cognate of Aryan. Long ago the Aryan nation was in Iran. Eventually it became Persia. Persia sprawled down-slope into Mesopotamia and shared a common history with the people of the Tigris and Euphrates for the past three or four thousand years. Before that there was also wandering contact along the high plateau of Iran as it was a crossroads for all points. That makes Iran today and important locale in the junction between India, Russia, China and the Middle East. The United States wants to be careful about bungling over-much into the midst of these peoples.

A kind of romanticism exists based upon ecstatic experience. From the Cult of Dionysious to the Sufism of the 12th century and mystics such as Rumi there are those that have sought a kind of unification with god through love or wine. Sometimes that romanticism is opposed to the insiders ruling in orthodoxy at court or in religious priestly classes sharing social power with nobles. Occasionally the transcending power of liberation existentially through worship of love is a revolutionary political expression. Sometimes romanticism inspires movements such as German fascism to return to the noble spirit of the heart. Romanticism as an irrational movement may produce math death, yet so does the orderly beheadings of the swords of men like Tamarlane who made piles of hundreds of thousands of skulls as a warning to those contemplating civil disobedience.

Salvation through faith in Jesus Christ as fully man and fully God is the only direct way to God. Worldly approaches to God intentionally though ecstatic mysticism such as Sufism or the heyschasm of neo-Platonism would bring one to experience a fervor without grace. Faith in Jesus Christ is a coincidentally rationally supportable way to the non-contingent Being of God.

The underlying worldliness of scientific theory and personal experience may be interpreted as evil, or as fallen and changed into temporality from timeless eternal forms yet one cannot transcend it through bowing to Mecca, calling it illusory, searching for a multi-verse to neutralizing anthropic principle constants fine-tuned to support the existence of life or a search for the spiritual within the worldly. We may find sham (sun) men leaders of orthodoxy that mislead in order to avoid the errors of romanticism or to liberate, yet the only way to avoid moksha, sin, and bondage to a world of sorrows is the Lord Jesus Christ.

There is a popular trend toward belief in a Hegelian kind of secularized god as the Universe evolving to realize itself that might be acceptable to evolutionary atheists for a natural explanation. Ancient Sufi mystics of the 13th century personify some of that intellectual effort in effete U.S. circles to renormalize religious beliefs with the natural world of experience; at the heart of physical being is a transcending spiritual encounter with god. Without approaching God through the narrow gate of faith in Jesus Christ, the broad road leading to destruction lay in the choice to sample a sector of the Universe of experience in a mystical way and call that god.

The United States finds itself heavily invested in Iraq and Afghanistan attempting to transfer an ideal democratic reformation upon those nations while simultaneously running vast current accounts deficits at home with a great divide between the visions of the two major political parties for the right course for the nation to take on economic development and taxation. Each party has a wrong idea for macro-economic policy yet that is outside the scope of this essay. In Iraq and Afghanistan we face a disconformity between our ideas for development of those nations and the actual historical and political forces that exist within and without those nations. Such an inconsistent appraisal doesn’t add up to likelihood for successful actualization of policy.

Abu Abbas started the Abbasid Caliphate. The President of the P.L.O. Mahmoud Abbas was invited to talks with Prime Minister of Israel Netanyahu by the Obama administration. Since we have withdrawn all but 50,000 troops from Iraq and a zillion contractors spending billions and billions, this seems like a propitious time to move toward establishing a peace without cooperation of Hamas (means violence) in the Palestinian areas of former Israeli possessions on the West Bank and the Gaza. Is this a meaningful movement toward substantial stabilization with security for Israel and a deescalation of Palestinian violence?

In Iraq the two major parties cannot agree on who the Prime Minister should be. Maliki was one of the major schools of Mohammedanism. Prime Minister Maliki is a Shi’a unwilling to leave office for a rival with more votes but not enough to form a majority. After six months the Presidential election is still unsettled and so is the course of Iraqi history sort of balanced before a phase transition.

We cannot foresee what such a phase transition will bring. U.S. interests there complicate things as the oil contracts for Exxon-Mobil require our presence to reinforce whatever government guarantees the oil. Oil in the U.S.A. perpetuates an anachronistic transportation mode of fossil fuel engines and a misfiring economic engine replete with import deficits. Because of our enmity with Iran we do not want to see the natural rapprochement between the Persian peoples of Iran and the Shia of Iraq develop, and neither would several Arabic elements including Al Qa’eda a radical Sunni reform party opposed to royal Saudi rule perhaps.

The millennial old problem of Shi’a and Sunni fighting over Baghdad or control of a Caliphate will not be solved in a week or two. Some advocate that the Sunni demolition of the World Trade Center should be followed up with construction of a Shi’a mega mosque near ground zero in New York. A more romanticist version of Mohammedanism (Tamarlane was a Mohammadanist) such as Sufi and the popular ancient poet Rumi aka Mawlani (from the 13th century-not Donald Rumsfeld) may connote is more palatable for those lay atheists waiting succor from a religious expression of Darwinianism or at least an organic evolutionary political ethic. A procreative urge of explosive organic union in politics in which salvation may develop through a direct worldliness without concern for an anthropic principle with metaphysical implications seems to be a driving desire of actualizing sublimation in U.S. politics. If only natural impulses worked effectively for political utopia today, such as might exist in a happy bee hive, the troubles requiring constructions of intelligent abstract thought would not be required to overcome immanent environmental and behavioral challenges.

If we believe the lost are leading the lost, perhaps that is so. Like a centipede or Chinese dragon the political evolution of investment abroad in Iraq and Afghanistan occurs in variegated advances and withdrawals turning and twisting with borrowed money and levered funds. Patriotism sparks the engines of military industrial investment now and then though many citizens find it difficult to determine how American interests are secured with the ‘fighting’ over there. Occasional terrorist plots narrowly thwarted by intelligence or dumb luck like when the guys underwear failed to detonate in a plane over Detroit remind us that more should be spent on intelligence and secure and fewer billions on war abroad.

What to do with Iran and Afghanistan and the other stans of Central Asia? We learn that historically invaders tended to take the entire region at once from Ctesiphon and Baghdad to Persepolis and Merv. The United States is rather modest in its invasion plans, yet we spend a lot more than the generations of invaders of the past. We seek security yet haven’t a clue about how to establish peaceful and prosperous societies in the Middle East and on the High Plains of Central Asia. What is worse; our state Department is worth a damn as an ecological economic planner in a hard political environment so they must pursue the econo-phenomenalism of baksheesh or bribery and intimidation to try to put puppets in power.

So in the absence of a known public plan for either Afghanistan or Iraq we have relied upon military and counter-insurgency strengths that would allow a default democratic society to coalesce with our reinforcement. That abstraction is supposed to become so desirable that it will continue after America withdraws its military forces having squandered as many trillions as the public is willing to relinquish to those earning a living spending the trillions. We are skeptical that the entire mission is planned better than the Bush Ii administrations plan for reconstructing Iraq for 5 billion dollars.