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Baba Kadiri,
More grease to your elbows!
In the ideal meritocracy of our own creation, this lucid exposition of yours, this wonderful demystification of the haze around the fuel subsidy frenzy would have deserved at the very least, a great many thanks, even by the most dim-witted ignoramuses.
Jesus said,'' Father, forgive them for they know not what they are doing”
A later day Rabbi said,” Father, forgive them for they know nothing!”
Real ignoramuses. Maybe ignorant and innocent, but what about when the criminals are not innocent, when the criminals know what they are doing and are 100% as GUILTY as hell?
”After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”
Ah, if it’s democracy that we’re talking about, that’s where and when the well-oiled and well-functioning machinery known as the Nigerian Criminal Code comes into play, stands up to be counted, and the other well-oiled arm of the executive known as the Nigerian Judiciary swings into action, without mercy, shedding bitter tears, the miscreants should say of the Nigerian Chief Justice, “There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger”.Crime and punishment, and needless to say these 419ers must vomit the money - all of it - and Baba Kadiri, the dripping machine method should be used, if necessary…
If you had delivered the contents of your submission as a lecture at one of the innumerable conferences convened where they are usually convened - like this one where delegates were given a mere 5 to 10 minutes to spill their beans when even 5 mins are not enough time to read the long string of degrees and other titles behind their names, well, if your lecture had been delivered at one of such venues, the 15 minutes lecture would have probably been followed by you asking your listeners/ audience, ” Any questions?”
And that’s when just like David Niven one of them would have stood up to ask,” What time is it?”
Accountability time of course-
As Cornel West famously said,.”Justice is what love looks like in public.”
“Democratic prebendary as practised in Nigeria is government in which the political class, civil servants, armed forces and judicial officers merely use their offices to share power and national patrimony among themselves to the exclusion of the masses” ( Solomon Kadiri)
Baba Kadiri, the whole of that paragraph and your subsequent paragraphs tally completely with Olufemi O Taiwo’s definitions here Elite Capture: Philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics
Please take note!
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Bukola A. Oyeniyi
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Missouri State University
College of Humanities and Public Affairs
History Department
Room 440, Strong Hall,
901 S. National Avenue
Springfield, MO 65897
Email: oyen...@gmail.com
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Stockholm
Sweden
21st June 2023 ( just before midsummer
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju,
On the lighter side, here I am, addressing the whole man, trying to soften him up a little.
The people in this forum that I like to tickle are three
and absolutely unlike the members of the Blessed Trinity:
1. Kenneth Harrow
2. Chidi Anthony Opara ( like Kenny Rogers)
3. Augustine Togonu-Bickersteth
Baba Kadiri? I tickle him all the time.
Ojogbon? I dare not….
Kperogi? May the Good Lord save us all from contempt….
My friend Krishna once confided in me that he had stopped sleeping with his wife. I asked him,
no more whoopee,
you no longer like good booty?
.“Familiarity breeds contempt”, he replied.
Seriously: Consider: Under Gaddafi petrol was free for Libyans, electricity was free, and education and medical treatment were free for all Libyans.
So, with all that oil, why are things so different in Nigeria?
Corruption? Big Booty? Big Population?
The good news is that we don’t hear about Fulani Herdsmen or Boko Haram anymore, not even on this website; they seem to have receded into the background or disappeared into the darkness altogether, and, if what you say about the latter is correct - that Nigeria's new Vice-President may be said to be able to have a restraining hand on their trademark terrorism activities, shouldn’t you be happy about that? Shouldn’t you be happy whether it’s Jesus or Beelzebub that has a restraining hand on Boko Haram?
I sincerely hope that in no time at all the regular blackouts ( good time for making whoopee), the nightmares without neon lights that you have been suffering from in Lagos, having to read and write by candlelight and all that, will soon be a thing of the past from the very beginning of the Tinubu dispensation. And thus you will begin to judge and develop - as you should - more love and affection for JAGABAN as you begin to view Nigeria’s First Citizen in a more positive light, even begin to measure time according to the new calendar: BT ( before Tinubu) and DT ( During Tinubu). Alternatively, AB ( After Buhari).
Of course, you probably have no choice but to agree about BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) and the Islamic calendar AH ( after the Hijrah) by which calculation you are now alive and kicking in the year 1444 - the year 5783 after God’s first day of creation, according to the Hebrew Calendar, but what about BC ( before Colonialism ) DC ( During Colonialism) NC ( Neo-colonialism) PM (postmodernism) and NWO ( The end of the dollar - the Day the Dollar Die ( God forbid) and what the Bric countries ( in alphabetical order) Brazil - China- India -Indonesia-Iran -Russia-Saudi Arabia - South Africa’s soon to be declared New World Order?
From an entirely logical point of view, and for the six reasons advanced here from the Israeli point of view the Messiah has not arrived yet, one more reason why they are still hell-bent on killing Palestinians with impunity, because, reason number seven when he comes, for at least 1,000 years there will be no wars ( such as Russia's Military operations in Ukraine) and there will be light always!
So, in the meantime, Sabr -we’ve got to be patient.
Harry Belafonte: We Are The Wave
“Call no man good,” said Jesus of Nazareth - according to Mark. Well,I can testify but not verify that you are a good soul all the way round except for when it comes to all the signs, traces, blotches, and insignia of Islamophobia that - regrettably -you sometimes display, sins that mar your utterances in connection with your every word about Fulani Herdsmen
On one occasion back in 2014 (Dec 20, 2014, 5:41:12 AM) I had reason to respond to that kind of mentality as follows:
“I am disturbed by a term which has cropped up in the anti-Tinubu diatribe, “Yoruba thinkers” as a very distinct category - like “Greek philosophers”. It sounds more like a blanket not so abstract category such as the blanket term “Nigerian corruption” which hopefully excludes people like the Chief Justice and the minister of trade and industry and all other members of Goodluck Jonathan’s cabinet, although as Bayo Amos just pointed out, “one does not have to be in government to be corrupt, to have corrupt access to state resources”
It should not be easy not to remember the good old days of your man Goodluck Jonathan crying that “ Boko Haram is everywhere!”
To quote him more exactly, nine years ago he said
in the executive arm of government,
in the legislative arm of government
and even in the judiciary. Some are also
in the armed forces, the police and other security agencies”
God willing, , what was insurmountable for Goodluck Jonathan will prove to be less so for President Ahmed Bola Tinubu
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Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju,
We can’t afford to be too dogmatic about these matters.
Please pay attention to the bold black letters that wind up the excerpt I have quoted. I first heard these words from my part-time mentor Alpha Dumbuya and later on confirmed that he was quoting directly from F.R.Leavis’ “ The Great Tradition “ :
“ The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, A Henry James and Joseph Conrad to
stop for the moment at that comparatively safe point in history. Since Jane Austen, for special
reasons, needs to be studied at considerable length, I confine myself in this book to the last three.
Critics have found me narrow, and I have no doubt that my opening proposition, whatever I may
say to explain and justify it, will be adduced in reinforcement of their strictures. It passes as fact
(in spite of the printed evidence) that I pronounce Milton negligible, dismiss 'the Romantics', and
hold that, since Donne, there is no poet we need bother about except Hopkins and Eliot. The
view, I suppose, will be as confidently attributed to me that, except Jane Austen, George Eliot,
James and Conrad, there are no novelists in English worth reading.
The only way to escape misrepresentation is never to commit oneself to any critical judgment
that makes an impact that is, never to say anything.”
Pretending to be innocent, in spite of the printed evidence you ( Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju) want me to “demonstrate in what ways (you ) are Islamophobic “.This is reminiscent of the Pharisees and Sadducees requesting that Jesus should show them a miraculous sign from heaven so that they could start believing in him,at which point he told them,” A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign!”
Not that I’m accusing you or your generation of being wicked and adulterous ( adulterous in the sense in which Jesus meant it as meaning not being faithful to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) but if you as a non-Muslim were to take a good look at what Islamophobia implies and then compare some of what you have said variously in this forum, you will find more than enough evidence in print to quod erat demonstrandum convict you of that which I suggest you are guilty of when I wrote that,
” you are a good soul all the way round except for when it comes to all the signs, traces, blotches, and insignia of Islamophobia that - regrettably -you sometimes display, sins that mar your utterances in connection with your every word about Fulani Herdsmen”
I don’t convict you, your own words convict you. Look and you will find there’s more than enough unambiguous evidence down here :
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Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju,
Many Thanks in Return.
Sincerely, you are so polite ( mostly), civilised, circumspect, respectful, fair in judgement, sometimes pious, thank God that at least you never strike me as being a bigot, “holier-than-thou “ or unctuous or overbearing, or worst of all, arrogant - Satan the accuser’s specialty (arrogance). I’m oddly reminded of the Siddur footnote to “Good Prophets “ :
BTW on the issue of President Tinubu’s cabinet appointments, I’m most interested in who he is going to appoint as the Attorney-General / Minister of Justice. It's a wide field of potential appointees in the much wished-for, soon-to-be-announced Government of National Competence. Who is going to hold the Security, Education, Agriculture, Petroleum, Finance, Information, and Foreign Affairs portfolios are a little less interesting.
I think that we (you and I) are in essential agreement that in Nigeria, and indeed in much of cyberspace, Islamophobia per se is not a criminal offence and from that point of view I'm not suggesting that criminal charges should be brought against you or that you and e.g.Peter Obi and Nnamdi Kanu and Cardinal Arinze and Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah of Sokoto should be dragged to a Sharia Court in Zamfara or the Pontus Pilate of Owerri representing Rome/ The Vatican/ Amnesty International for any crude or not so subtle perceptions that the religious divide in Nigeria is in fact tantamount to an ongoing “religious war” between the forces of good vs evil or the contending religious factions for political or economic dominance,” Northern hegemony” etc.
You are of course entitled to your opinions just as I also have mine, about Islam, Muslims, idol worshippers, cute little booty, big booty, LGBTQ rights, same-sex marriage, Christians, pagans, Jews, Zionists, anti-Zionists, Semites, Bruno Schulz, , Nazis, anti-Semites, Marxists, Ojogbon, Capitalists, the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, Malcolm X, Pius Adesanmi, Joe Biden, Ezra Pound, Aleister Crowley, Tony B-liar, Saddam Hussein, warmongers, Vitovsky, comedian Zelensky, Mayakovsky,
Because of the anti-Semitism that resulted in the Holocaust while some people of so-called conscience choose to look the other way, never again means that anti-Semitism has to be nipped in the bud and not allowed to flourish, just as likewise, wanton Islamophobia has to be outlawed, criminalised without further delay.
I’m not about to dissect you, your cosmology, your poetry, the way that T.S. Eliot has been dissected and infallibly associated with anti-Semitism.
I wouldn't like to embarrass you; I don’t want you to be brought to trial or crucified for whatever harmless opinions you may entertain about any of the aforementioned or whatever you have expressed from time to time down here below, none of which deserves the death penalty, but please be aware that there are places where you cannot ask certain questions -not even in their philosophy y departments ( I had several meetings with a Sheikh at al-Azhar in Cairo soon after Ramadan in 1991. I had been a good student of Sayyid Sharafuddin al-Musawi , his Al Muraja'at // Al Muraja’at ( another translation), you should read it. There was a look of thunder on the face of the learned Sheikh, he looked daggers at me when I asked my first question at that bastion of Sunni Orthodoxy, so I pursued the matter no further.
And dear Oluwatoyin there are certain “things' that you have said down below here that you couldn't have said to the learned Sheikh over there, either.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju:
These are weighty words of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala revealed in Surah Al-Maidah Ayat 3
Perfected and Completed….
As I have stated in this forum on a number of occasions Shehu Uthman dan Fodio is the greatest Nigerian that ever trod this earth. That you may have a different opinion or an alternate candidate doesn’t alter the fact. You are also free to disagree or dispute the proposition that The greatest man in history is Prophet Muhammad - salallahu alaihi wa salaam.
Inevitably, any discourse about so-called “ Islamic Terrorism” in this USA-Africa Dialogue Series or elsewhere is more than tenuously linked to the religion of al-Islam .
You often make more than a tenuous connection between the Fulani and their religious identity which is Islam, sometimes - and not sympathetically either, you attribute Islam as a motivating factor for whatever terms it pleases you to use and you are sufficiently aware enough to confess a special need when you say, “ I have taken pains on this group and other platforms to refine my terminology and definitions in relation to the escalation of Fulani imperialism through the agency of violent Fulani herdsmen, Fulani militants, Miyetti Allah Fulani Socio-Cultural Organizations and the Buhari govt.”
You “have taken pains”? Really?
Whether it’s Israel and the Palestinians or the Janjaweed Militias doing their ethnic cleansing by decimating fellow Muslims in Darfur once again, discussing “Political Islam” and deciding what's right for others or that they should rather follow you and Immanuel Kant, is not an easy matter or the easiest solution available.
How would you like the term “ Christian ransom kidnapping”? “Christian looting”? Christian rape and carnage in Ukraine?
You and most other commentators' critiques of Boko Haram for example are based on some misunderstandings about the very name that you have foisted on that movement: “Boko Haram “which is a mistranslation of their very aims and raison d'etre nor do their critics seem to be aware of how Islam values education. The very first word of the Quranic revelation is in fact an imperative :IQRA: READ! ( recite)
AQL ( intellect) is mentioned 77 times in the Quran.
Worth tuning into sometimes:
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Stockholm
4th of July, 2023 - Congratulations to the US of A
Dear Baba Kadiri,
Kudos and many thanks for dispelling the fog that has been befogging what’s finally emerged in your clear as daylight revelations in such punctilious, verified detail, about this vexing issue. Hopefully, in due course of time, as a matter of national urgency, your epistles will be numbered among Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju’s holy buks…
Special thanks and appreciation too to Ibrahim Magu for the courageous work he has so dutifully accomplished.
May the Almighty, richly reward him…
That was some sound, well-intentioned advice from Baba Kadiri to JAGABAN Tinubu. In view of “ The state of the dedollarisation?” as represented in that short discussion, hopefully, Jagaban will not rush into anywhere where angels fear to tread…and of course, wherever Nigeria plunges, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and little Gambia is sure to wanna follow
Somehow, whenever communicating with you, I find myself in the default mode of proverbs. A default African position, maybe subconsciously trying to live up to Chinua Achebe saying that “the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten.” Some words of comfort, wisdom, and truth. Proverbs. Words. And thus the Igbos are appeased. (It’s a health issue and we should be careful not only about palm oil but also about olive oil )
One more truism for the journalist who professes the journalism of self-glorification and all those who earn their daily breadcrumbs that way should take due note: an idle mind is the devil's workshop
Be very careful: For the unwary, here are some more propaganda misunderstandings in flux
Where I’m coming from we are all aware that in the absence of correct, clear, and precise information there's always room for doubt, mischief, miscalculation, misinformation, mistranslation, and more often than not, misguided, malicious, even savage speculation by those who have always had an axe to grind with e.g. the Jesus of the New Testament, Goodluck Jonathan, Islam, Presidential Brother Muhammadu Buhari or other good men, including prophets, imams, kings, and judges, in authority.
May they never be satisfied.
“When the wicked rule, the people mourn—The righteous consider the cause of the poor—A fool speaks all that is in his mind—Where there is no vision, the people perish” ( Proverbs 29 - The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints)
There’s “The Incoherence of the Philosophers” which Adepoju referred to recently, and which is at quite another level and probably incomprehensible to the average non-Muslim Nigerian, bereft of a clear definition of the standard Arabic and equivalent philosophical terms derived from Greek Philosophy texts that were first accessed and made accessible to scholastic Europe through translations of the original into Arabic. My dear Pir Sultan Husayn Tabandeh, Reza Ali Shah, May the Almighty be pleased with him, for example, wrote a treatise/ commentary on Plotinus - another testimony to the relationship between Neoplatonism and Sufism
From the incoherence of the philosophers of yesteryears we can move on to the incoherence and incompleteness of that special class of today’s Nigerian political commentators and hack writers , although, on the contrary it’s often not so much the incoherence but the obfuscation and the intentional or unintentional distortion through big or great grammar, the eloquence of misapprehension and the eloquence of misconceptions which make it all such a lot worse by adding a great deal of mis-understanding to the ongoing confusion as to how with the best of intentions, a good-hearted, good-natured, progressive Islamic movement wholly engaged in peacefully propagating the teachings of the Prophet of Islam, sallallahu alaihi wa salaam, and in the absence of the social welfare state of the type we have had in Sweden all these years, have been doing what they have been religious mandated to do , community social work among the destitute, the disadvantaged, the neglected, the marginalised, the poverty-stricken, the widow, the orphan, all this was sabotaged - violently disrupted by the wicked assassination of their leader Mohammed Yusuf the martyr, and so continues the tragic story that has no end in sight.
In Hausa : Jama'atu Ahlis-Sunna Lidda'Awati Wal-Jihad
Given the Islamic and Arabic roots of the original name of the movement I dare say that we can break it down as follows:
# The meaning of Jama’at : a group of people.
(For instance, I have been on the road in Sweden, Denmark, and the United Kingdom with a dawa group known as Tablighi Jamaat and also to an Islamic conference organised by them in Oslo, Norway, where I met Yahya, the so-called “leader of the Muslims in Australia” (smile) and we were not terrorists)
# The meaning of Sunnah (The sayings and traditions of Islam’s Blessed Prophet , sallallahu alaihi wa salaam
# The meaning of Ahl as-Sunnah
The enemies of Islam of course would like to make a big song and dance ( and big grammar) about the word JIHAD being a part of the name of that organisation and immediately see red, see blood, see fire, see holy war, see terrorism, see death and destruction, see treason. About themselves, just like the three wise monkeys they see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, just as their comrades-in-arms, the enemies of Islam, the gunrunners being led by Satan the accursed whilst doing their own thing, spreading mischief and mayhem throughout the earth don’t call it terrorism. I was thinking about this last night as I listened to some Israeli propagandists at the Jerusalem Centre For Public Affairs trying to do some damage control about their most recent demonic actions in Jenin. You invade a people, seize their lands, militarily oppress and terrify their entire populations - their old men and women, youths, children, and babies on a daily basis, and when they protest, you call them “ terrorists” and “terrorist sympathisers” whilst referring to yourselves as “ peacemakers only”
The Prophet of Islam, Sallallahu alaihi wa salam emphasised the distinction between the lesser jihad and the greater jihad
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju:
At least the United States has not made the mistake that Sweden has and would not persist in the folly of providing police escort and protection for some miscreant to burn a copy of the Holy Quran outside a main mosque in Washington DC. or outside Saudi Arabia’s Embassy or - also God forbid - the burning of a Torah Scroll, outside the Israeli Embassy or outside a major synagogue in New York City (the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s ” Hymietown!) not because the United States doesn’t have the First Amendment, but because the United States knows that the fallout wouldn't be the kind of joke that they would be able to handle, that in fact it could be the beginning of the end of the United States as we currently know it. I don’t believe that Israel would provide some police protection for some rag Jewish settler or holy rabbi to -God forbid -burn a copy of Islam’s holiset scripture outside the Al-Aqsa Mosque…
And if it had been a Palestinian that had assassinated Yitzhak Rabin
“terrorism apologist”?
“ A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?”
For your immediate attention: Chris Hedges: They Lied About Afghanistan. They Lied About Iraq. And They Are Lying About Ukraine
I don’t suppose that his revelations deserve a place in any of your holy books.
Narrating a sequence of events does not make anyone a terrorist or a terrorist apologist?
The only piece of world history that I know fairly well, is The British Empire Under Queen Victoria, some aspects of the history of the Second World War, and of course the Holocaust.
My Scottish stepfather was a decorated war soldier - of the British Royal Navy - read two to three war novels a week (after which I read them too. I remember Cornelius Ryan’s Two Eggs on My Plate and The Longest Day”; I also read D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley's Lover - under the cover immediately after he read it, and of course, all the sleaze about the Profumo scandal as reported in the UK press ) but what remains incomprehensible is that he never spoke about the WW2 - except on one occasion and that was during the FIFA World cup final when England was leading Germany 2-1 and just a few seconds to full time, Germany equalised - my brothers and I cheered and he briefly exploded !!!NZ!!!! about WW2
As the saying goes, “ he who feels it knows”
By the same token, hopefully, you are not about to refer to Sergey Karaganov as a “terrorism apologist” because of what he has been saying here ?
I suppose you’ve heard about the terrorism bombardment during the Second World War?
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, you are already forgiven ( by me) so please pray for us in Europe, pray for our salvation….
And by the way, Congratulations, because of you - and because I’m tired of being entirely ignorant about the subject, I’m now reading Transcendental Magic - by Eliphas Levi ( translated by Arthur Edward Waite
Wow! BBC: Chinese naval ships on rare Nigeria visit
( Next move, to checkkmate China, Uncle Sam is going to promise that he going to send some Nigerians to space. Soon.More national glory.)
Oluwatoyin Adepoju, great-grandson of Adam,
Many thanks for your forbearance.
I had expected a more irate or robust response, some more chest-beating about the miscreant’s right to burn any book that he likes. As a rastaman was complaining to me the other day, ” Me, I cyan’t even burn some holy weed outside the mosque without getting arrested but them give the baldhead police protection to burn Quran outside the main Mosque in Stockholm !”
Another Bro then chipped in that before he became a born-again Christian, there was a time when he had run out of Rizla, and he had simply torn off one of the pages of his Holy Bible to roll his spliff….
Great grandson of Adam, you who are dedicated to “Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge”, you who are not afraid that “curiosity killed the car”, this is to you in particular. I think that the best way forward is that we start with Martin Buber’s” The Way Of Man: According to the Teaching of Hasidism, all of it, but this excerpt from the very beginning should suffice to keep us focused on the rest of the journey, no matter where we are right now:
“Rabbi Shneur Zalman, the rabbi of northern White Russia (died 1813) was put in jail in Petersburg, because the mitnagdim (adversaries of hasidism) had denounced his principles and his way of living to the government. He was awaiting trial when the chief of the gendarmes entered his cell. The majestic and quiet face of the rabbi, who was so deep in meditation that he did not at first notice his visitor, suggested to the chief, a thoughtful person, what manner of man he had before him. He began to converse with his prisoner and brought up a number of questions which had occurred to him in reading the Scriptures. Finally he asked: “How are we to understand that God, the all-knowing said to Adam: ‘Where art thou?’” “Do you believe,” answered the rabbi, “that the Scriptures are eternal and that every era, every generation and every man is included in them?” “I believe this,” said the other. “Well then,” said the zaddik (so the leaders of the Hasidic communities are called), “in every era, God calls to every man: ‘Where are you in your world? So many years and days of those allotted to you have passed, and how far have you gotten in your world?’ God says something like this: ‘You have lived forty-six years. How far along are you?’” When the chief of the gendarmes heard his age mentioned, he pulled himself together, laid his hand on the rabbi’s shoulder, and cried: “Bravo!” But his heart trembled.”
Son of Adam, there’s the idea of making a fence around the Torah
As a matter of fact, in one of the commentaries on that Garden of Eden episode in which the serpent tempts mankind’s great-grandmother Eve, it’s there that we find the idea of building a fence around a Divine commandment or prohibition and the possible pitfalls of precisely making such a fence. The Almighty's instruction to Adam is explicit. In The Holy Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, God's Instruction to Adam is clear: Genesis 2: 15 - 17:
“God יהוה settled the Human in the garden of Eden, to till it and tend it.
And God יהוה commanded the Human, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you are free to eat;
but as for the tree of knowledge of good and bad, you must not eat of it; for as soon as you eat of it, you shall die.”
Immediately after the Almighty said those words to Adam, the next sentence in the Torah is as follows:
“God יהוה said, “It is not good for the Human to be alone; I will make a fitting counterpart for him.”
So, immediately after the Almighty told Adam “Of every tree of the garden you are free to eat; but as for the tree of knowledge of good and bad, you must not eat of it; for as soon as you eat of it, you shall die.”, the Almighty then created Eve; this means that Eve herself did not hear the Almighty’s direct instruction to Adam.
Fast forward, to Genesis 3
Now the serpent was the shrewdest of all the wild beasts that God יהוה had made. It said to the woman, “Did God really say: You shall not eat of any tree of the garden?”
The woman replied to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the other trees of the garden.
It is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said: ‘You shall not eat of it or touch it, lest you die.’”
Since God had expressly told Adam that he must not eat that particular fruit, Torah commentators have asked the question, from whom did Eve get the additional idea that she must not even “touch “ it?
Some Torah commentators have thus concluded that Adam must have built his own fence around God’s commandment, with the extra protective layer to his wife that she must not even “touch” the fruit.
So the next stage must have been for the brilliant serpent to have told Eve that the Almighty was lying and then persuaded her to touch the fruit, and when she did so, to discover - to her surprise that she did not experience instantaneous death, and from there the next stage of disobedience was to actually eat the fruit and to be pleasantly surprised that she was still alive…
To the matter at hand :
Quran 2:102 mentions Harut and Marut
In your essays, you have often referred to magic, so-called White Magic, from a Christian Missionary point of view, strictly speaking, what’s known to be “Black Magic” and its many affiliates. If like me, your policy is to dig deep where you are standing, to “Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring”
then you’ve got to be very careful; at the very least you’ve got to have some kind of rough road map of where you’re heading because you can never know in advance exactly what you’re getting into. For example, I was off on a mission to find out the exact relationship between Moses and his brother Aaron because in that Sunni-Shia debate which was convened by Shah Nader in 1746 (you can read the whole transcript of that debate@the English version of the book Hujaj-i-qat’iyya, by Abdullah Suwaydî,in Part One of Documents of The Right Word) the Shia Scholar’s opening argument started with these words:
“Hadrat Prophet ‘sall-Allâhu alaihi wasallam’ stated as follows about Alî ibn Ebî Tâlib ‘radiy-Allâhu anh’: ‘Whatever Hârûn (Aaron) was in relation to Mûsâ (Moses), you are the same with relation to me. The only difference is that no Prophet shall come after me.’”
In trying to understand the relationship between Moses and his Aaron, so far, I have wound up reading the five books of Moses and diverse commentaries on them more than twenty-six times….
At a very early stage, I was advised to beware, to stay away from Left Hand Tantra, and I have never been near it or touched it.
You did once mention Eliphas Levi here in passing and his book (Cornerstone Edition published in 2014) which I have on my desk right now is certainly interesting, some of it reminds me of Castenada’s ”The Teachings of Don Juan” but infinitely more textually dense. I'm more than satisfied with the rough idea that I nowhave of the whole enterprise and intend to go no further. (By the way I know some magicians, real ones, also right here in Sweden )
But back to your man: Try this for size and texture Chapter 14 - “ Transmutations “ and in the middle of page 125 of his “ “Transcendental Magic” - a very catchy title indeed and you can read the whole book here at Internet Archive 👍’
“ Apuleius speaks of a Thessalian woman who changed herself into a bird; he won the affections of her servant to discover the secrets of the mistress, and succeeded only in transforming himself into an ass. This allegory contains the most concealed secrets of love. Again, the Kabbalists say that when a man falls in love with a female elementary—undine, sylphide, or gnomide, as the case may be—she becomes immortal with him, or otherwise he dies with her. We have already seen that elementaries are imperfect and as yet mortal men. The revelation we have mentioned, which has been regarded merely as a fable, is, therefore, the dogma of moral solidarity in love, which is itself the foundation of love, and alone explains all its sanctity and all its power. Who, then, is this Circe, that changes her worshippers into swine, while, so soon as she is subjected to the bond of love, her enchantments are destroyed? She is the ancient courtesan, the marble woman of all ages. A woman who is without love absorbs and degrades all who come near her; she who loves, on the other hand, diffuses enthusiasm, nobility, and life.”
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Ken
Shalom!
I Googled “The nazis marched through skokie” and I'm left wondering, did such a march eventually take place or did it only happen in your nightmare, "with police protection" etc?