Dallas College Cape Town 2005 and Dailin Nur

An Introductory Note by Abuzuhri of Dailin Nur affiliated Teahut of Miyazaki :

Recently in early 2007 our friend Assoc.Professor Dr. Hakimi Ibrahim , Science University of Penang visited us in Putrajaya enroute to KLIA airport. Together with wife Dr.Norizan , they are travelling to visit Dallas College in Cape Town, south Africa and to present a paper in a youth seminar organized by its director Dr. Abdal Basir Ojembara. This college is unique due to its combination of islamic, sufic and contemporary subjects taught and inclusive of leadership cum service training to produce a new core elite capable of understanding the kufr forces and transformation of the self-heart and society. Here we give a glimpse of this hope.

Dallas College Opening Speech By Rais Abu Bakr Rieger
Cape Town , October 2005

One of the weaknesses of the recent Western analyses from Heidegger to Rufin is that despite the obvious urgency of the situation, they fail to define any guidelines for action. Asked about the possibility of action, a concerned Heidegger proclaimed in an interview with Der Spiegel: “Only a god can save us!”

It is here that the masterwork of Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir, ‘Technique of the Coup de Banque’, comes into its own. The book adds to the numerous modern analyses by clearly and boldly naming the ‘invisible hand’ in European history: the Banking Elite. The book completes the story of the much-vaunted Enlightenment by a portrait of the power-games of the financial elite. As in Aristotle but in the modern context, the ‘princip contra naturum’, usury, is openly described in its effects and consequences. After reading this book, the thinking man becomes open to the Qur’anic categorical imperative on the Muslims: Trade is permitted - usury forbidden. The guideline has been found, the lost unity of knowledge and action once again made possible. The European question of how to limit unbridled capitalism is revealed in Islamic Law, since only there is the endless increasing of capital forbidden.

In this place - and here we have Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi to thank - the transmission of knowledge will once again become possible. With the help of the Qur’an and the Sunna, the zone of action of this College and its areas of study in this moment in history can be illuminated:

- In the field of language we move within the contrast between language as Revelation and language as excessive information on the internet.
- In the field of geopolitics we move within the contrast between World Statism and the possibility of order and location.
- In the field of law we move within the contrast between genocidal oligarchies and a just nomos for the Earth.

It is in the field of technology in particular that we confront modern nihilism, which Heidegger described as “a confrontational challenge to the creation”. Of course, this College will also teach all the modern methods of information technology, but in a way which Heidegger defined as “composed”. Only with inner and outer laws can man escape the modern law of technology, a law which Heidegger expressed as follows: “Man believes he has technology in his hands, while in reality it is the other way around.” In other words - in our words as Muslims - man is either a slave of Allah or a slave of the technical project.

This attitude of “Yes” and “No” towards technology is portrayed by Heidegger in his book Gelassenheit, a book which moves unusually clearly towards the Sufic outlook on life. In it he says:

“We can say yes to the inevitable use of technical objects, and we can say no at the same time, in that we refuse to allow them exclusively to make demands on us, and thus bend, confuse and finally make barren our innermost nature.”
Heidegger was asked thereupon, if we are to simultaneously say “Yes” and “No” to the technical objects in this manner, will not our relationship to the technical world become ambiguous and unsure? Heidegger answered as follows - and here his viewpoint peaks in a Sufic confirmation of our relationship to the “Dunya” :

“Quite the opposite. Our relationship to the technical world becomes simple and calm in a most wonderful way. We allow the technical objects into our daily life, yet we leave them out of it at the same time. That means we leave them to be as things; not as something absolute, rather as entities reliant on something Higher. I would like to describe this attitude of a simultaneous Yes and No to the technical world by means of an old word: ‘Composure, in regard to things’.”

The overcoming of the dominance of technology is undoubtedly an inner and an outer project. Every Muslim has the knowledge to undertake it. It requires that we remember Allah and establish a just economic order. It is also doubtless the project of all of the authentic Tariqas and their traditional, living knowledge which peaks in the creative insight that man already knows everything, but that he must remember it.

Even the German founder of the kindergarten, Friedrich Fröbel, was aware of this foundational principle of every education. He taught that “Education means having to bring something out of man, not put something in.”

It is one of the basic principles of our world-view to see people, and especially young people, as our true capital. Above all else, Islam and its great communities bring about People. In this, every Muslim is a knower. Foucault was of course absolutely right when he saw the end of every society and every politique in the establishment of christian, pastoral power. In the secular State this depoliticising function continued with the idea of representation, in the end resulting in the consumer, devoid of meaning and offering up his affairs. Our political thinking is the old platonic concept of the Political embodied in the image of the weaver. The process of weaving does not separate, it joins, reconciles opposites, founds societies, brings about unity, thus revealing in the pattern of the cloth the invisible Hand of Allah ta’ala. So it is that the graduates of this College will not represent - they will weave.

The College, therefore, prepares the last stages of education. “Education,” Mark Twain once said, “is what’s left over when the last dollar is gone.”

I wish the teachers and the students and the community in Cape Town every conceivable success. As Allah says in Ayat 282 of Surat al-Baqara: “Have taqwa of Allah and Allah will give you knowledge. Allah has knowledge of all things.”