The Leftfield Mullah

Sorry for going AWOL , hope this poem makes up for it:

Fitr
So we are poured by the slipped sight of moon
Billion craned to the red singed sky
Dropping from 30,000 feet of Sawym head
Hitting the asphalt, nose to mat
Line by lane by line by lane,
Those of us who stuck dry our stomachs
And those of us who hid them
And all this because one man's tear
Pulled out a voice from the mountains
Wracking the artifice and shaking out "READ"



So, move on from scoff at dawn, Date at dusk
Take some of the mechanism of the Month
The jolting guide rail of the sun
The ease with which you collapsed your head
The heave with which you raised your hands
And apply.

By Ali Naqvi

Copyright LeftFieldMullah 2005

What The Ground Said.

Last week the bombers came to the places I lived. This week the police came to the places that live. In the solid yellow stare of a July sun blue and white tape sealed off roads and black helmets watched my every move. Noses wrinkled at the car I was driving as if the exhaust was pumping out skunk air.

I was lying in bed, shuddering from a chest infection, when the red band broke across the screen telling me about the bombs in London. Names that were part of my daily routine, stairs I had shuffled up to get to lectures that were always too early, the wheel rattle of old red and blue carriages and the suffocating heat of too many people pressed too close together. The level crossing I had dragged my bag across to get to the bank now had bits of roof and bits of people across it. I always sat on the top deck , where the Plexiglas at the front curved up and had the top support struts ripped off. My seat wasn’t there.

There were always the guilty moments, the heart skip when the tube failed to rumbled on time. When it smacked the sides of the tunnel and sparked. When it ground down some coke can under its wheels. I would stand in the first carriage of the Piccadilly line train waiting to jump off quickly at Russell Square next to the exit but there was always the thought that if “they” wanted to – this would be a readymade mausoleum. So we stared blankly into the walls while letting the peripheral scan those around us. On that day someone got under the vision, and left a rucksack set for 8.50am.

Today, they came in their white vans, jumped out the back and laid down the law over a block square of street. It was stealthy. Bleary eyes met with the high-vis jackets in the dawn and people shuffling out of the front door looking at what was going on. They were searching for “them”. Like the guilty moments on the tube, the possibility of this had flitted into our minds every time we walked out of the door.

It was like the possibility of the strip search and the missed flight. The possibility of the wrong name and the wrong face being met with sweaty interviews in closed of rooms while you failed to exist outside the room.

Such is our life now. Wrongness permeated with other wrongness. There is no real innocence except maybe for those who live under the age of reason and those who live beyond it. Those of us who live in the shelters of the west, surrounded by the concrete and civility of our societies can no longer ignore the meat grinder that spins outside our havens. Those of us who would like to carry on as if the currents of life only feature our own needs can no longer live with that luxury as the images of headless children reach out to drag us in to the nonstop whirl of it all.

There are men and some women who made it so. There are men and some women that suspended souls somewhere and denied the whispers of conscience that were built into them. They do this in boardrooms and caves, in mosques, in air conditioned hotel rooms or the backs of Teutonic chariots.

Thus I draw moral equivalence. That taking a life is taking a life. Suspending a life, curtailing the right to live, holding up the right to be as a crime and preventing all of us to be able to strive for safety are morally corrupt. A GPS guided bomb that drops on the sleeping child has the same affect as the rucksack on the backseat. That those who make the policy, those of our race who sit over death toll figures and collateral damage estimates are complicit in setting up the teeth of the Grinder. That there can be no prayer with the smell of blood in the nostrils, there can be no humanity with the thoughts of obliteration of others foremost on your mind. That injustice cannot be cured with more injustice.

When Kane killed Able the ground betrayed him. When asked the ground will tell its tales. From Srebinica to the wall behind Rami Al Durra, from the splattered front of the BMA to the hulks of metal in Madrid the ground will speak. It will not say Muslim killed Jew because of this or that, it will not say that Arab was massacred here by Christian. It will say man killed man and I know not why.

Dear Peoples,

You all keep leaving anonymous postings on the comments board, whichis great but I want to actually have discussions with people so I switched the setting so you have to register.

I hope this doesn't put you off actually commenting, all comments are welcome and i would love to develop the threads with you - but I would like it to be proactvie so the thread isn't just a one off - so please register to add you comment so you can read my reply in your mail box and we can keep chatting

Hows this for sad irony. The US don't want information coming out that would embarass several "freindly" countries and the part they played in makin Saddam the monster he was and is, so they are witholding evidenvce from the court they themselves set up!

Dear Iranian Progressives,

Your good people, I know, you want to build a better Iran and all that.

All good things on their own. I just want to say one thing:

A Handshake? For goodness sake! You think that doing the opposite of what the status quo is rebeliion. Give me a break!

Let me put it this way. I was born and brought up in the west. Lived here all my life.

I never would let any individual shake my mother or sisters hand. Thats a red line for every muslim who lives here.

At what point are you going to stop making idiots of yourselves and actually start talking issues

When I tell my freinds that I am being descriminated against because I am Muslim - I rarely get believed.

I was applying for jobs in 2002 and this guys experiences are exactly the same as mine. I hope this opens people up a little to the possibility that maybe people weren't as liberal tehy thought....

This is a report by Anthony Cordesman who is one of the leading thinkers on International Affairs in the US