Sohail Ahmed Interview (Former Islamist)

Sohail Ahmed is a hard man to get a hold of. A reformed radical Islamist, he was instrumental in exposing the prevalence of radical Islamism in a number of UK Universities. Today, he works as a counter-extremism & counter-terrorism expert, offering advice to UK government agencies and a number of NGOs. He has appeared in the media in the UK and the US and written about his personal journey in a number of publications. He also campaigns for LGBT rights in the Muslim community, and has been a strong steady voice against Islamic extremism.

I’ve known Sohail for many years and have wanted to interview him about his life for a very long time. As you’ll hear, it’s quite a story. We cover his growing up in a radical islamist environment, the process through which he was further radicalized and how he eventually broke free from that environment. We talk about Islam today,what a progressive version of Islam might look like and how we could get there. We talk UK politics and immigration and about how his views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict changed over the years.

I hope you enjoy this discussion.

On YouTube:

On SoundCloud.

Can a democracy change its mind? (The Mytilenean debate)

The place is Athens, the year 428 B.C. The war between Sparta and Athens has been raging on for about three years now. Pericles, Athens’s most influential politician, died the previous year in the plague that swept the city. The city is in disarray.

More disturbing news: one of the city’s closest allies and member of the Delian League (something like an ancient NATO), Mytilene, has decided to secede and side with Sparta. The Spartans have decided to help them, but the powerful Athenian navy, which has control of the seas, manages to capture Mytilene with the support of the local pro-Athenian faction.
The Athenian general contacts Athens: What shall we do with Mytilene?

The Athenians assemble to discuss this. The opinion of Cleon, a strident populist, expertly exploits Athenian anxieties and feelings of betrayal and ends up dominating in the debate: Mytilenians must die.

A ship is dispatched to Mytilene to deliver the orders. While the ship is on its way, Athenians strongly opposed to this decision demand a new debate, which is approved.

In this second debate, Cleon is furious and accuses Athenians of being victims of their own pleasure of endless debates in political matters. He urges the population to uphold the decision and not to be traitors to themselves: a decision has been made and we should stick to it.

Diodotus speaks next in support of the opposing view, arguing that haste and anger are the two greatest obstacles to wise counsel. Using Cleon’s arguments against him, he reframes the question: it is not about Mytilene’s guilt or whether it is right for Athens to seek vengeance, but about what is in Athens’s best interests. Would the proposed death penalty deter a potential future revolt and support the efforts of the Mytilenean pro-Athenian faction or would it further alienate Mytilenians?

At the end of the second debate, Diodorus’s rational arguments have swayed the opinion of the assembly towards sparing the general population of Mytilene and executing only the leaders of the revolt. A second ship is dispatched to deliver the new decision and annul the first one. Perhaps because the first ship was in no rush to deliver such grave news, the second ship arrives first and the Mytileneans are spared.

source: Thucydides, "History of the Peloponnesian War", book 3

Thomas Paine - Agrarian Justice

"... Having now gone through all the necessary calculations, and stated the particulars of the plan, I shall conclude with some observations. It is not charity but a right, not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for. The present state of civilization is as odious as it is unjust. It is absolutely the opposite of what it should be, and it is necessary that a revolution should be made in it. The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye, is like dead and living bodies chained together. Though I care as little about riches as any man, I am a friend to riches because they are capable of good.

I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it. But it is impossible to enjoy affluence with the felicity it is capable of being enjoyed, while so much misery is mingled in the scene. The sight of the misery, and the unpleasant sensations it suggests, which, though they may be suffocated cannot be extinguished, are a greater drawback upon the felicity of affluence than the proposed ten per cent upon property is worth. He that would not give the one to get rid of the other has no charity, even for himself.

There are, in every country, some magnificent charities established by individuals. It is, however, but little that any individual can do, when the whole extent of the misery to be relieved is considered. He may satisfy his conscience, but not his heart. He may give all that he has, and that all will relieve but little. It is only by organizing civilization upon such principles as to act like a system of pulleys, that the whole weight of misery can be removed.

...

In all great cases it is necessary to have a principle more universally active than charity; and, with respect to justice, it ought not to be left to the choice of detached individuals whether they will do justice or not. Considering, then, the plan on the ground of justice, it ought to be the act of the whole growing spontaneously out of the principles of the revolution, and the reputation of it ought to be national and not individual.

...

Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.

...

When wealth and splendor, instead of fascinating the multitude, excite emotions of disgust; when, instead of drawing forth admiration, it is beheld as an insult on wretchedness; when the ostentatious appearance it makes serves to call the right of it in question, the case of property becomes critical, and it is only in a system of justice that the possessor can contemplate security.
To remove the danger, it is necessary to remove the antipathies, and this can only be done by making property productive of a national blessing, extending to every individual. When the riches of one man above another shall increase the national fund in the same proportion; when it shall be seen that the prosperity of that fund depends on the prosperity of individuals; when the more riches a man acquires, the better it shall for the general mass; it is then that antipathies will cease, and property be placed on the permanent basis of national interest and protection."
- Thomas Paine, 1795

Thus Spoke Zarathustra - The Pitiful

"...

O my friends! Thus speaketh the discerning one: shame, shame, shame- that is the history of man!

And on that account doth the noble one enjoin on himself not to abash: bashfulness doth he enjoin himself in presence of all sufferers.
Verily, I like them not, the merciful ones, whose bliss is in their pity: too destitute are they of bashfulness.

If I must be pitiful, I dislike to be called so; and if I be so, it is preferably at a distance.

Preferably also do I shroud my head, and flee, before being recognised: and thus do I bid you do, my friends!

May my destiny ever lead unafflicted ones like you across my path, and those with whom I may have hope and repast and honey in common!

Verily, I have done this and that for the afflicted: but something better did I always seem to do when I had learned to enjoy myself better.

Since humanity came into being, man hath enjoyed himself too little: that alone, my brethren, is our original sin!

And when we learn better to enjoy ourselves, then do we unlearn best to give pain unto others, and to contrive pain.
..."

Hannah Arendt interview

Hannah Arendt interviewed by Günter Gaus (1963)

"Gemma" by Dimitris Liantinis (paperback edition)

Following the e-book edition of Gemma by Dimitris Liantinis (translation and commentaries by me, introduction and editing by Nikolitsa Georgopoulou-Liantini), I am pleased to announce that the paperback edition is now also available via Amazon/Createspace 

The book includes a short interview of Nikolitsa Liantini at the end.

https://www.createspace.com/4405539

http://www.amazon.com/Gemma-Dimitris-Liantinis/dp/1492179698/

Cyclopean (part 3 - the myth of the Cyclops revisited)

Cyclopean (part 2)

Cyclopean (part 1 - prelude)

Cyclopean (Introduction)

For some time now I have been entertaining the though that it would be an interesting challenge to attempt to translate into English certain passages from the books of the late Prof. Dimitris Liantinis. His writing style, marrying lyrical didactical prose with untranslated passages from English, German, Italian, Spanish, Ancient Greek and Latin works as well as frequent references to traditional Greek demotic poetry guarantee the daunting nature of this task.

Liantinis' was a passionate speaker and in his writings he cares nothing for political correctness. His works are highly critical, primarily focused on the Hellenic society, and have extremely high expectations from the reader. They were not written for a mass market but for a tiny minority. These are often satirical, spirited, blatantly honest works and they traverse the existential spectrum from the Apollonian to the Dionysian end, creating a  treasure chest in which he collects, pebble by pebble, his world view. His ecstasy in the face of (natural) beauty is ostensibly contagious while in his darker moments he reaches for the solace of lyrical melodic writing, not so much in order to eschew the mists, but in order to sail smoothly along these dark waters and befriend the soul with the inevitable in life. In that, his clarity of mind is of a Socratic nature.

The passage that I will start working on is "Η ΚΥΚΛΩΠΕΙΑ" (Cyclopean) from the book ΓΚΕΜΜΑ (Gemma) and it will be posted here in parts over the next few days, weeks, months, however long it takes. I intend to take a lot of liberty with the translation in my attempt to convey the essence and style of the passage to a non-greek reader instead of attempting a - virtually impossible - literal translation. It deals with the meaning of the encounter between Odysseus/Ulysses and the Cyclops Polyphemus.


The translation has been removed after the request of the copyright owner.

The three virtues

Introduction to Citizen Ethics in a Time of Crisis by Philip Pullman.

At first sight, of course, vice is more attractive. She is sexier, she promises to be better company than her plain sister virtue. Every novelist, and every reader too, has more fun with the villains than with the good guys. Goodness is staunch and patient, but wickedness is vivid and dynamic; we admire the first, but we thrill to the second.
Nevertheless, I want to say a word in praise of virtue: the quality or qualities that enable a nation and its citizens to live well, by which I mean morally well.
And to see what virtue looks like, we need to look not to lists of laws and commandments, but to literature. Was a lesson on the importance of kindness ever delivered more devastatingly, or learned more securely, than Mr Knightley's reproof of Emma in the novel that bears her name? Was the value of play in childhood (a profoundly ethical matter) ever more memorably conveyed than by Dickens's description of the Smallweed children in Bleak House?

The house of Smallweed … has strengthened itself in its practical character, has discarded all amusements, discountenanced all story-books, fairy tales, fictions and fables, and banished all levities altogether. Hence the gratifying fact, that it has had no child born to it, and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced, have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds.

The lesson of every story in which the good is illustrated is, as Jesus said after telling the parable of the Good Samaritan, "Go, and do thou likewise." The genius of Jesus – and Jane Austen, and Dickens, and every other storyteller whose tales are as memorable – gives us no excuse to say we don't know what the good looks like.
When it comes to public virtue, William Blake's great poem Auguries of Innocence reminds us in forthright and indeed prophetic terms that the personal and the political are one:

A dog starv'd at his Master's Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
A Horse misus'd upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood ...
The wanton Boy that kills the Fly
Shall feel the Spider's enmity

And, in a couplet the Blair government should have remembered before licensing the creation of super-casinos:

The Whore & Gambler, by the State
Licens'd, build that Nation's Fate

In fact, ethical guidance is something we have never actually been short of. Those who insist that all ethical teaching must be religious in origin are talking nonsense. Some of it is: much of it isn't.

But when it comes to public or political virtues, are there any in particular that ought to characterise a virtuous state? I can think of three that would make a good start.
The first is courage. Courage is foundational: it's what we need so as to be able to act kindly even when we're afraid, in order to exercise good and steady judgment even in the midst of confusion and panic, in order to deal with long-term necessity even when short-term expediency would be easier. A courageous nation would not be afraid of its own newspapers, or toady to their proprietors; it would continue to do what was right even when loud voices were urging it to do wrong. It would stand up to economic interests when others were more important, and yes, there are interests that are more important than short-term economic benefits. And when it came to the threat of external danger, a courageous nation would take a clear look at the danger and take realistic steps to avert it. It would not take up a machine-gun to defend itself against a wasp.

The second virtue I want to praise is modesty. Modesty in a nation consists among other things of fitting the form to the meaning, and not mistaking style for substance. A modest kingdom, for instance, would have to think for a moment to remember whether or not it was a republic, because the members of the royal family would be allowed to spend most of their time in useful and interesting careers as well as being royal, and their love affairs would remain their own business; and people would always be glad to see them cycling past. Acquiring modesty in our public life would be a big step towards developing a realistic sense of our size and position in the world.

The third virtue I'd like to see in a nation (all right: in our nation, now) is intellectual curiosity. Wakefulness of mind might be another term for it. A nation with that quality would be conscious of itself and of its history, and of every thread that made up the tapestry of its culture. It would believe that the highest knowledge of itself had been expressed by its artists, its writers and poets, and it would teach its children how to know and how to love their work, believing that this activity would give them, the children, an important part to play in the self-knowledge and memory of the nation. A nation where this virtue was strong would be active and enquiring of mind, quick to perceive and compare and consider. Such a nation would know at once when a government tried to interfere with its freedoms. It would remember how all those freedoms had been gained, because each one would have a story attached to it, and an attack on any of them would feel like a personal affront. That's the value of wakefulness.

To finish I want to say something briefly about how virtue manifests itself in daily life, local life. I saw two little things recently that give me hope that the spirit of common, public, civic virtue is still alive in this nation of ours when people are free to act without interference.
The first is an example of "folk traffic-calming". People living in a residential road in Oxford, home to a lot of families and children, a road which normally functions as a rat-run for cars, recently decided to take matters into their own hands and demonstrate that the street is a place for everyone, not just for people in large heavy mobile steel objects. They set up a living room right in the road, with a sofa, a carpet, a coffee table, and held a tea-party. They parked their own cars in a chevron formation all the way along the road and put planters containing bushes and small trees there too to calm the traffic down. They set up a walk-in petrol addiction clinic. The result was that cars could easily get through, but drivers couldn't see clear from one end of the road to the other and didn't feel it was just for driving along at 30 miles an hour. Everyone shared the whole space. It was a triumph: wit in the service of a decent human standard of life.

The second thing I saw was a television programme. It was about the work done by Michael Rosen when he was children's laureate, a project he undertook with a school in South Wales where books had been undervalued. He showed the children, and the teachers, and the parents the profound value of reading and all it could do to deepen and enrich their lives, and he did so not by following curriculum guidelines and aiming at targets and putting the children through tests, but by beginning with delight. Enchantment. Joy. The librarians there were practically weeping with relief and pleasure at seeing so many children now coming in to search the shelves and sit and read and talk about the books they're enjoying.
But I seem to be describing delight. Is that a virtue too? Well, it's like the canary in a coal mine: while it continues to sing, we know the great public virtue of liberty is still alive. A nation whose laws express fear and suspicion and hostility cannot sustain delight for very long. If joy goes, freedom is in danger.

So I would say that to sustain the virtue of a nation, we need to remember how the private connects with the public, the poetic with the political. We need to praise and cherish every example we can find of imaginative play, of the energy of creation, of the enchantment of art and the wonder of science. A nation that was brave, and modest, and curious sounds to me like one that understood that if it told its children stories, they might grow up to feel that virtue was in fact as interesting as vice.

The last lecture of Randy Pausch

The late professor Pausch giving the Lecture that evolved into the book which topped the charts. Not that topping the popular book sales charts is a necessary qualifier, but regardless, Randy's talk is inspiring and fun stuff, delivered expertly, while it elegantly avoids resorting to sentimentalism.


Randy died on July 25th, 2008 from pancreatic cancer; a year after the lecture.

Ken Wilber on Ray Kurzweil's Singularity

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". - Arthur C. Clarke.

As the gap between today and tomorrow is closing at a staggering rate, the future continues to become more and more surreal. A good example comes from the work of inventor/futurist Ray Kurzweil, who often talks about a point sometime in the next few decades when our rate of technological progress begins to approach the infinite—an event he calls "the Singularity." This essentially represents the event horizon of our own technological evolution, beyond which we simply cannot imagine. Is there actually something to the concept of the Singularity, or is it just a sort of mythical Rapture for tech geeks? What are the implications of such exponential advancement of technology to human consciousness?

Philosopher Ken Wilber shares his thoughts on the subject

Ken Wilber on Science and Spirituality

Philosopher Ken Wilber talks about the methods of science and how these can be extended to include investigation of broader phenomena and ideas.

Spirituality and the Three Strands of Deep Science

The Four Horsemen - Hour 1

"On the 30th of September 2007, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens sat down for a first-of-its-kind, unmoderated 2-hour discussion, convened by RDFRS and filmed by Josh Timonen.

All four authors have recently received a large amount of media attention for their writings against religion - some positive, and some negative. In this conversation the group trades stories of the public's reaction to their recent books, their unexpected successes, criticisms and common misrepresentations. They discuss the tough questions about religion that face the world today, and propose new strategies for going forward."

Krishnamurti at the UN

I'm making a short intermission before I continue with the second part of the Astronomy lecture by Alexei Filippenko.

In this video Jiddu Krishnamurti addresses the UN one year before his death. The date is 11 April 1985 and he was invited to talk about world peace.