Category Archives: Fatwa

Big White Father Does the Umrah: Imam Trump Preps for Saudi Trip by Immersing in Studies of Quran and Hadith……

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The Big White Father is heading to the Middle East to bless the natives this week. And the potentates are excited that finally they can deal with a man who “looks real American”, like a Good White Father should look. A man more willing to accommodate their sectarian agenda than the more clever dark one that preceded him. For a stiff nominal fee, of course.
President Donald Trump is flying to Saudi Arabia this weekend, as I posted earlier. His first official visit abroad since taking office, and it will cost his royal hosts dearly. They are already throwing many billions his way in gratitude for the honor of a visit.

But there may be a catch for Donald: the hosts just might want him to fight a couple of new regional sectarian wars on their behalf (something they tried with Barack Obama and failed). While American courts dismantle his first Executive Order banning Muslims from Muslim countries that are not absolute monarchies and/or big weapons buyers from the West.

Mr. Trump has made Islamophobia acceptable and even cool among a large sector of the U.S. population, especially in certain states that cleaved to him in the elections. He has brought it into the White House. Yet he is chairing a summit of many Muslim and Arab countries whose rulers tend to obey or listen to the Saudi royal commands. A coalition of the willing, the bribed, and the coerced. Now, hold onto your seats when you start the next paragraph.

Mr. Trump is reportedly going to make a speech about Islam!
I assume that means he will delve deep into Islamic Sharia, its evolution, the Five Pillars, and how the Quran and the Prophet’s Hadith form the Islamic Faith and its Culture. How it is also to some extent an extension of the Old and New Testaments. He may try to explain its evolution over the fifteen centuries, from the days of Halima Al-Saadiya and the Prophet Mohammed to the current Ottoman Caliph Erdogan the First (why do I feel that I have left out one or two recent Caliphs?).
Which means he will have to cram for it, and Donald doesn’t seem like a cram-able type of student.

He will no doubt focus on the Orthodox Sunni version of Islam, perhaps more specifically on the Wahhabi sub-sect that dominates in Saudi Arabia and all the mosques and Madrassas it builds to spread its ideology of love and freedom around the world. The same sub-sect that spawned the Taliban, Al Qaeda, AQAP, ISIS, and all the terrorist attacks in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East.

As a gesture to his best client princes, those who spend hundreds of billions buying weapons, Mr. Trump might feel characteristically comfortable enough to issue his own Fatwa: that henceforth Wahhabism is the mainstream sect and that it is the closest Muslim faith to Christianity (be it the Las Vegas, New York, or Evangelical version of Christianity).

That in itself should get him more clients for his exports. No doubt his family, kids and in-laws, will make a bundle expanding into the Arabian Peninsula. We might even see a Trump Tower Hotel in the heart of Mecca, catering to faithful pilgrims during the Hajj and the Umrah. Being something of a practical joker, Mr. Trump may even don the Ihram white Toga of the pilgrims and circumambulate the holy Kaaba by special permission, to the serious approval of Their Highnesses the omnipotent Princes.

More on this later…..

Here are a few relevant recent posts of my blog:

The Obama Doctrine….

Persian Gulf Game Theory at Camp David: Obama and State-Sponsored Terrorism….

The Arab Islamic American Summit Comes Up With a Trump Motto: Holy Art of the Deal….

Trump Visits His Wahhabi Empire: Saudis Summon Sunni Arab and Muslim Satraps and Viceroys to Riyadh….

Ignorant Abroad: is Trump Encouraging a Foolish Prince to Start a Sectarian War in the Persian Gulf?….


Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

A Farce is Not a Joke: Saudi Arabia ‘Elected’ to UN Commission on Women…….

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“Electing Saudi Arabia to protect women’s rights is like making an arsonist into the town fire chief,” Hillel Neuer said.


Saudi Arabia was elected to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. The addition of the Gulf nation was first flagged by UN Watch, a nongovernmental body that monitors the United Nations. The Commission on the Status of Women’s main mission is to assess the challenges to reaching gender inequality, according to the U.N. website. The organization’s executive director slammed the election, which occurred in a secret vote during the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council. Neuer called the election “absurd,”……..

This is a serious news item, it is not a joke. It is a farce, like everything involving Saudi Arabia and the United Nations and its Human Rights Council. But it is not a joke: done in the dark of the night, in a secret vote, no doubt a Fatwa engineered by a shameless Nikki Haley and the humorous British ambassador to the UN.
It is getting even better: the Misogynous Humorless Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a top U.S. ally, is also on the U.N. Human Rights Council.


Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

Donald Trump’s Brief Airborne Syrian Fling: My Fatwa for Next Year………

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President Trump has managed to gather some sort of consensus, at least within the media and among politicians, around his brief air-war fling with Syria. As usual in the initial phase of a military action, both parties and the media have managed to praise his action, in some cases for fear of looking unpatriotic or “too outlier” (fear of bullying is not confined to school children).

Soon they will be asking: what next? What? No more? Especially cable media will go through severe withdrawal symptoms, being used to some thirty years of covering (ad nauseam) non-stop foreign wars. Some are already beginning to ask the question. Then the absolute rulers of the allied Muslim countries will push him to support a “democratic” Syria (where power can be shared between the Wahhabi Salafists attached to Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood attached to Turkey’s strongman Erdogan). A claustrophobic democratic experience they would never allow their own peoples to enjoy. Apparently Trump has been listening to the potentates lately, and he seems to be impressed.

My guess? My Fatwa: sometime well before the summer of 2018, Democrats will look back and say that Trump did his Syrian fling in order to divert attention from “other” more pressing “America First” issues he could not handle. The quick disenchantment happened with LBJ, Bush (pere et fils), and perhaps others.

A one-week apparent success (meaning no American casualties) while his foes’ knives are being temporarily hidden. Foreign action trumps domestic failure, but only for a while (just ask George H W Bush who presided over the end of the Soviet Union and a swift American victory in the Persian Gulf War).
The infrastructure will still need to be dealt with, and Trump may soon have some Obama-style stonewalling by the Republican Congress on the required spending. Then there is Healthcare, then a mechanism to keep and create jobs inside the USA, then a mechanism to encourage young people to enroll in STEM education (preferably within the excellent traditional mode of a broad American undergraduate college education that we all enjoyed).

The risk is that America First may become America Later. Looks like George Dubya Bush was right: being US president is a hard job……

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

Islamic Mercenaries of the Persian Gulf: Have Quran, Will Travel………

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This is not a new phenomenon on the Persian Gulf: religious sheikhs (clerics) for hire.

Often they come from Egypt, Jordan, North Africa and other Arab countries/regions. They usually attach themselves to one or another among the ruling absolute oligarchies, of the Gulf, especially in the UAE or Qatar. Attracted by money and opportunity, they start issuing statements or Fatwas in favor of their benefactors and against others who displease these benefactors. They are absolutely mercenaries: clerics for hire. No different from the armed foreign mercenaries that some Gulf regimes hire to do their repression or wage their regional wars.

Here is a man with the impressive-sounding title of Deputy President of the International Union of Muslim Clerics, basically a clerical bureaucracy for hire. He is here accusing another cleric-for-hire, the Religious Adviser, whatever that be, of the top man in the UAE, Mohammed Bin Zayed (MBZ), of being among “devil worshipers”. He also called him a religious traveling salesman. MBZ and the UAE are among the strongest anti-Muslim Brotherhood in the whole Middle East. This is a sore point of contention with their Saudi “allies” in the stalling war on Yemen.
Of course all this name-calling is a case of one soot-covered pot calling another pot ‘black’.


The Persian Gulf GCC states are full of these hired expatriate clerics, like Al Qaradawi (in Qatar) and others, basically mercenaries, religious guns for hire. Often they are either Muslim Brothers who have found the joys of oil money (in Qatar) or others hired by the UAE potentates to blast the Muslim Brotherhood. Islamic gunslingers and mud-slingers.

All these people do their own interpretation of the Quran or Hadith to serve their masters. They are almost as bad as the Salafis, almost.
Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

Sheikh of Azhar After Brexit: All Europe Will Go To Heaven…….

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Remember that old film “All Dogs Go to Heaven“?

It seems now that all Europeans also go to heaven, or they will soon. Even those who may not want to.

Thus a new fatwa by the Sheikh Ahmed Al Tayeb , chief of the once-revered-but-no-more Al Azhar in Cairo.

Fresh from a visit to Rome, the former Mubarak crony fatwad that Europeans are not Muslims only because they have not been exposed to the true Islam. Ergo: it is not their fault that they are not Muslims and don’t believe in the ‘message’.  Heathens by default. Which is not a bad argument, although quite self-serving. As well as a back-handed compliment to Europeans, possibly a clever one but most likely accidental and narrow-minded.

The sheikh apparently does not understand that not all Europeans are good Christians or even bad Christians (in fact hardly any are in an American sense) or good Jews. He apparently thinks they are all good Christians (or Jews), just as all Muslims are very good pious Muslims indeed. Which means the majority of Europeans who are either agnostic or atheist are in trouble, screwed, (or maybe not, depending on what they think of this sheikh’s heavenly connections).

I have one problem with this Azhar sheikh issuing such broad  “certificates of Indulgence“, broader than were issued by the Catholic Church in Europe centuries ago. Who the hell authorized him to issue these mass Indulgences? I need to see a copy of this Godly Power of Attorney, notarized and witnessed.

(And what about South Americans and East Asians and Africans?)
Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

Battle for Aden: the Fatwa Stands……..

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It looks like the alliance of Houthis-Saleh have been pushed back from certain regions around Aden. The Saudi alliance of cluster-bombers are claiming a victory. Former president General Hadi Bin Zombie and his hotel cabinet in Riyadh are also declaring a victory. Everybody is declaring a victory in Aden, except the Houthis. Everybody except those who may have been crucial in achieving that partial ‘victory’: Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the Southern Independence Movement (Hirak).
Western media are copying Saudi media and claiming a victory for ‘Hadi supporters’. Except that almost all Hadi supporters are not fighters: they are suited politicians and corrupt Islah potentates ensconced in hotels in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The people of Aden are no doubt against the Houthis and Saleh encroaching on their city, but they also remember that General Hadi was sent by Colonel Saleh in 1994 to shell Aden and force it into an unwanted marriage with Sanaa.

The battle of Aden apparently continues, but it is telling that the Hadi ghost cabinet is staying away in the safety of exile. One thing is certain as I predicted months ago. Actually it was almost a fatwa by your truly that Hadi will not return to rule in Sanaa. A serious and irrevocable fatwa, no matter who wins in Aden, no matter who wins in Sanaa.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter
[email protected]

Fatwa on Dynastic US 2016 Election ……….

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My Fatwa for the US ?
Old Corporate Money vs. New Corporate Money = Jeb  vs. Hillary
New Corporate Money Wins…….
     

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter
[email protected]

A Fatwa on Battered Yemen: Hadi’s Last Look at Sanaa……..

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Yemen‘s weakling former president AbdRabuh Mansour Hadi was elected in a strange election where he had no opponent, arranged by the usual suspects: the absolute princes of the GCC with the accommodating international bureaucracy of the UN looking on. He “won” by an astounding but very typically Arab 99.8% of the vote in 2012: the other .02% of the voters were stoned on election day, or maybe they were the only sober ones. He proceeded to preside over a new/old regime that was as corrupt as any in modern Yemeni history. Lucky for Yemen his reign did not stray far from a couple of cities.
Still under pressure from the resurgent Houthis, he renewed for himself when his term expired in January, something the Arab despots understood and cheered. He was put under house arrest for a few weeks by the Houthis. As soon as the house arrest was eased he escaped, allegedly dressed as a fat woman, and headed for his native region around Aden. A rebellious city General Hadi had bombed and helped conquer for former absolute ruler Ali Abdallah Salih in 1994.
From Aden, he called on the Arab tribal princes, shaikhs and assorted self-styled kings and entitled family field marshals to bomb his country in order to restore him to power. Never mind that he never had much power. Never mind that his foreign allies had neglected Yemen for decades, keeping its people on the verge of starvation as they provided limited aid on political conditions.

From Aden a legend developed about Hadi’s whereabouts last week. He was on a rickety boat to Djibouti. He was on his way to Riyadh. He was living with BinAli and the ghost of Idi Amin in Jeddah. He was holed up somewhere with the slippery Waldo. In the end he did show up smiling and kissing the princes who are bombing his countrymen and countrywomen and country-children. A final shameless act by a stooge.

Whatever happens in this new savage war being waged on Yemen by rich oil princes and their hired Arab mercenaries, however it turns, Generalissimo Hadi has seen the last of Sanaa. He will not be the president of Yemen anymore.
This is my Fatwa, and it is at least as good and valid as any I have seen recently. A Fatwa that is backed by the history of Yemen in the past hundred years, if you bother to read that history carefully………..

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter
[email protected]

A Sporting Fatwa, a Wahhabi Kosher Fatwa………

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Saudi Arabia is in the throes of a profound theological controversy that evolves around sports. Saudi Prince AbulRahman Bin Musa’ed Al Saud is the president of local sports club Al Hilal (many if not all heads are princes because they can deliver the goodies and they like to lord it over lesser beings). The prince had asked his fans and supporters to pray and beseech Allah to grant his club victory in its coming soccer match against an Australian club.
Enter Herr Doctor Shaikh Sa’ad Al Drayhim, apparently some senior cleric, who issued a fatwa that it is not ‘permitted’ or Halal or Kosher to seek divine intervention in soccer games. This has created the controversy. Apparently most Wahhabi clerics would permit seeking divine intervention, provided it is done within the legal Shri’a rules. Meaning? If it is done after getting permission of the Wahhabi clergy.

And these are the people Mr. Obama said he is proud to “stand shoulder to shoulder” with in Iraq and Syria. These are the people who seek to liberate Syria for democracy and freedom and modernity, preferably via a Caliphate.
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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