UNITY

Bismillah. Benoit Mandelbrot passed away on Thursday, RIP. Studying fractals & the Mandelbrot set has given pleasure to millions of people over the years. http://nyti.ms/aCy0RG

From Abu Ammar Mangorangca:

Salaam. There is an interesting article on the visible stars with Arabic names, 210 of them, entitled “Arabic in the Sky.”

This is found and may be downloaded from: http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/201005/arabic.in.the.sky.htm

Bismillah. I attended Friday prayers today at Palmers Green Mosque in North London (www.mcec.org.uk). 1/6 of the site is for a Hindu temple, 1/3 for the mosque, 1/2 for two football pitches used by local schools + the mosque. (Remind you of inheritance calculations, anyone?) Ayodhya: we beat you to peaceful coexistence! 🙂

Bismillah. A request from a friend, below. Perhaps it should be renamed the Arabic-Persian-Pashto App, or the APP App for short? 😉
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If you have an iPhone, an iPad, an iPod Touch or use iTunes would you please read on. I have an App which some friends have launched and we would welcome your sampling and review. It is the first of a series of language learning apps and is for Pashto. The Dari/Persian one is also available and the Arabic one is being developed. If the platform works they are planning to expand into teaching these languages and especially classical Arabic.

The App Pashto is £1.79 – please buy it if you can. Please have a look at the App and please do write a short review. Search on iTunes for App Pashto by the Curzon Initiative Ltd.

Bismillah. Please refer to the “next new moon” at http://www.crescentmoonwatch.org: the moon is invisible tonight but visible from most of the world tomorrow (Thurs 9th). Hence, Eid-ul-Fitr (The Festival of Breaking the Fast, 1st Shawwal 1431)should be on Friday 10th September 2010 for the whole world.

Saudi have the right date for Eid – they’ve announced it for Friday.

The ECFR / Leeds Mosque announcement of Eid for Thursday 9th September follows Sheikh Ahmad Shakir (using conjunction rather than visibility) and is similar to the Jewish method: it’s their New Year tomorrow (Rosh Hashanah).

Bismillah.

TIPPING POINT FILM FUND DRAWS ON PUBLIC SUPPORT TO BACK CHALLENGING, TRUTH-TELLING CINEMA DOCUMENTARIES THAT COMBINE THE POPULAR APPEAL OF FILM WITH AMBITIOUS INTERNATIONAL OUTREACH CAMPAIGNS.

Dear Friends, To mark the re-release on DVD this summer, join us on:-

Monday 20th September 7.15pm, Lexi Cinema, Kensal Rise NW10 for a special film screening of LIFE AND DEBT followed by a panel discussion:

‘When will rich countries own up to their responsibility in keeping developing nations poor in order to grow their own wealth?’

With Dr. Robert Beckford, Dr. Patricia Daley, Nick Dearden (Jubilee Debt Campaign) http://www.tippingpointfilmfund.com/news/tpff-screening-of-life-and-debt-at-the-lexi-cinema-September-20/

The Film and Panel

Whether you have seen her film before, know of it by reputation, or are hearing about it here for the first time, Stephanie Black’s film LIFE AND DEBT is a classic feature documentary and to mark its DVD re-release this August, Tipping Point Film Fund is launching its film club with this powerful film, followed by a panel discussion which will delve deeper into the truth behind why many developing nations are still under-developed.

‘Who owes who’ in the relationship between the rich north and the poor south? A timely discussion in light of the recent petition of France to return to poverty stricken post-earthquake Haiti, the 90 million gold francs (£14bn) it took as ‘compensation’ to French slave-owners for Haiti’s independence in 1804.)

This event follows the successful TPFF hosted sell-out screening and panel debate of Oliver Stone’s ‘South of the Border’ at the Lexi in July.

We hope you can join us for this next one! And feel free to forward this email/ PDF Flier to colleagues and friends.

Booking tickets

Tickets cost £10 purchased through The Lexi Cinema website
http://thelexicinema.co.uk/bookings/?event=ic4drr

Or by calling the box office on 0871 704 2069 (lines open 9.30am – 8.30pm and there is a £1.50 Booking Fee).

Free to Tipping Point Film Fund regular donors

Getting there

The Lexi Cinema is located at 194 Chamberlayne Road, Kensal Rise, NW10 3JU. It is around 7 minutes walk from Kensal Rise over-ground station and a good bus service runs from central London. The 52 (from Victoria) and the 6 (from Oxford St) stop directly outside the cinema.

We do hope you can join us.
Best Wishes
The TPFF team
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LIFE AND DEBT

“A must-see film” NEW YORK OBSERVER

“Powerful! … offers clearest analysis of globalization and its negative effects that I’ve ever seen.” 4 STARS – NEW YORK TIMES

“Mandatory viewing for anyone interested in globalisation” 4 STARS – THE GUARDIAN

“Engaging… incisive… Life and Debt is a very powerful weapon in the arsenal of the global movement for a more equitable economic order.” LINTON KWESI JOHNSON

“A timely, powerful work” 4 STARS – WHAT’S ON

“Brilliant” 4 STARS – BBC MOVIES

OUT NOW ON DVD: Axiom Films
http://www.axiomfilms.co.uk/Catalogue.asp?col_scheme_ref=0

Bismillah. We returned to the UK last night from Afghanistan, praise God: a day in Kabul + a week in Helmand (Lashkar Gah & Nad Ali). FCO PBM delegation. Over 30 years of war have blighted the country: the fighting needs to end. Neither ISAF / GIROA nor the Taliban can win militarily. National reconciliation + reintegration of insurgents + shura/democracy + elimination of corruption would seem to be the only solution. God help ’em!

It was great to return to Afghan, 20 years after our 3-man JIMAS delegation with the Arab mujahedin in Kunar, 1990.

I hope to blog more about both visits in due course, God-willing.

Bismillah. This is a request from the founder of FC UNITY.

You may wish to vote for “Team Iraq” by FC UNITY in the Changemakers “Changing Lives Through Football” competition. They have made it through to the top 10 finalists out of 293 entries. Voting closes on 18th August 2010.

Team Iraq by FC UNITY: http://www.changemakers.com/node/78420 Finalists: http://www.changemakers.com/football/finalists

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Team Iraq: Summary

Iraq is living through a period of violent ethnic and religious conflict. Many of its young population (60% of Iraqis are under 25) lack positive
opportunities. Yet research and experience shows that to prevent future violence and extremism, young minds need to be nurtured towards a positive role in civil society.

One of the few activities capable of unifying the whole population is football. This was shown when the Iraqi national team made up of dedicated professionals from all parts of Iraq won the AFC Asian Championship in the summer of 2007. Yet, the conflict has seen the complete destruction of grass-roots sports facilities and a widespread lack of youth football opportunities.

Team Iraq has begun to turn this situation around. It uses the power of football to bring together young people from all ethnic, religious and social backgrounds, through a number of football-related initiatives with emphasis on creating local youth led programmes to help develop and empower and ultimately employ young people.

Bismillah. More from Sabbir Rahman below.

Last Thurs (1st Ramadan), BBC R4’s Beyond Belief recorded a discussion on “The Origins of the Universe,” about the Big Bang theory & questions about God, etc. especially in relation to the latest LHC experiments at CERN and the search for the Higgs boson (the so-called “God particle”).

Ernie Rae chaired as usual, and I was one of the three panellists. The others were an agnostic 42-year-old physics professor at Manchester (Jeff something), and David Wilkinson, a physicist and Christian theologian at Durham. It was David who had first introduced me to the name of Polkinghorne, 21 years ago at Cambridge. Our paths hadn’t crossed since then, but we eventually remembered each other.

For the radio show, we discussed cosmology, God etc. The final question was: “What do we hope or expect to learn from the new high-energy LHC experiments?” My answer was largely something I’d learnt from Sabbir. 🙂

The show will be broadcast on Mon 23 Aug 2010 God-willing, although the date may change.

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Assalamu `alaikum,

It has been just over five years now since I posted the proposal below that our universe was perhaps just one black hole in a hierarchy of black holes.

As you can perhaps imagine, I was a little surprised then to discover just yesterday that a certain Dr Nikodem Paplowski, a physicist at the University of Indiana whose papers I came across while researching into Einstein-Cartan theory and general relativistic torsion, has quite recently (i.e. since April 2010) achieved fairly widespread recognition for making almost precisely the same proposal!

Articles about his proposal appeared in the last couple of months in USA Today, New Scientist, the Daily Telegraph, the National Post and even the MIT Technology Review blog. The university of Indiana appears to have been quite active in promoting their young star through press releases to the media.

I have written to Dr Pawlowski to explain that his ideas are not actually new (in fact, a lot of work on the interpretation of the maximal extension of the Schwarzschild solution has been done by others in the past well before myself), and have asked that he acknowledge this in future.

I have also written the following to the newspapers and magazines above:

“The proposal that the universe may be located in the wormhole of a black hole in an even larger universe is not new. I proposed exactly the same thing five years ago, both on the UK_Islamic_Astronomy Yahoo! group (of which I am a moderator) and also in a technical paper submitted to the electronic archives:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/UK_Islamic_Astronomy/message/623
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0607102v1(See particularly sections 4.1 and 5.5 of the paper).

Whether Dr Poplawski’s proposal is correct or not, it is NOT original.”

In addition to the above, I have spent much time discussing (and arguing about!) the interpretation of the Schwarzschild solution with other physicists on the sci.physics.research and sci.physics.relativity newsgroups, for example in the following two threads from 2007:

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/sci.physics.relativity/browse_thread/thread/267ff8e77d29583f/18fa8fba0b3d2819?#18fa8fba0b3d2819
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/sci.physics.relativity/browse_thread/thread/1081505bf0c5a8c7/c58d1785fb1135a3?tvc=2#c58d1785fb1135a3

The latter thread makes specific reference to the interior of the black hole being stable and physically separated from the exterior.

This is not to say that I am not very impressed by Dr Poplawski’s recent work, which shows considerable promise, but credit should go where credit is due! I have also made reference to my prior work on his Wikipedia entry to try to set matters straight:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikodem_Poplawski

Anyway, enough of this wingeing and whining about who said what first!

One good thing that has arisen from thinking about this again is that when I first made the proposal all those years ago, I had only considered the possibility of a spherically symmetric black hole universe. But of course, if it is indeed the case that our observable universe emerged from the gravitational collapse of matter from an even larger universe, then the matter would of course have been rotating as it collapsed, so that our universe is not in the interior of a Schwarzschild black hole, but in the interior of a (rotating) Kerr black hole. But the ring singularity of the Kerr black hole is that of a Klein bottle-like double torus – and if this hypothesis is correct, then our universe is actually toroidal in shape! This links in quite nicely with speculations I have previously posted about by Dr Vladimir Yershov at UCL regarding how the Klein bottle shape of the universe might determine elementary particle masses. Note that Hoyle-Narlikar electrodynamics also makes similar assertions, so these speculations may be worth revisiting now that we have a more concrete proposal.

Note that although no-one yet actually knows the shape of the universe, there is a very nice book called “The Shape of Space” authored by Jeffrey Weeks which discusses various possibilities. I have only read the 1985 first edition but apparently there is now a second edition out:

http://www.amazon.com/Shape-Space-Pure-Applied-Mathematics/dp/0824707095/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1281916735&sr=8-1

It is a fascinating read and not too tough for a layperson to follow.

Anyway, I hope you are all enjoying a blessed Ramadan insha’Allah!

Wassalam,
Sabbir

Bismillah. I received this from UMA (United Muslims of America). The statistics are shocking, and the charitable effort described below is inspiring. May Allah bless their efforts and be with orphans everywhere.

Here are some Islamic teachings about orphans:

Nay! But it is you who do not honour the orphan. (Qur’an: Surah al-Fajr or Chapter, Dawn)

Did He not find you an orphan, and provide shelter? … So, as for the orphan, do not oppress him or her. (Q., al-Duha: Forenoon, nos 6,9)

Have you seen the one who denies the (Day of) Judgment? Such is the one who repels the orphan. (Q., al-Ma’un or Neighbourly Needs, 107:1-2)

The Messenger of God (himself an orphan once, peace and blessings be upon him) said, “The one who takes care of an orphan and I will be like this in the Garden,” and he indicated by putting his forefinger and middle finger together.

For a UK context, our population is about twice that of Iraq. The Iraqi orphan population is already over half of that of London in number. Imagine the proportional situation: a city just bigger than London, composed entirely of orphans!
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The Orphans of Iraq

War and ensuing violence in Iraq have taken over a million lives, and left behind an enormous number of orphans. The need is immediate & the numbers are high.

Sunday, 22 August, 2010, 6:00 p.m.

Chandni Restaurant, 5748 Mowry School Rd., Newark, CA 94560

Speakers:

* Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, Zaytuna College * Imam Zaid Shakir, Zaytuna College * Dian Alyan, GiveLight Foundation
* Dr. Mohammad Rajabally, NISA

Individual: $20; Couples, $30; Family, $40(No one will be turned away for lack of funds – Come for the iftar.)

There are 5,000,000 orphans in Iraq (Iraqi Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs Report: February 2, 2010)

16% of the total Iraqi population of about 30 million are orphans.

70% of these 5 million were orphaned since the U.S. invasion in March, 2003.

(i.e. There were about 1.5 million orphans before the invasion. The total now is more than triple that number.)

At least 600,000 children in Iraq are presently homeless, living on the streets.(Iraqi Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs Report: February 2, 2010)

Consider the numbers in proportion to the US population of 308 million: 5 million orphans would be the equivalent of 49.3 million US orphans. That’s the size of the combined populations, all ages, of our six biggest US cities. Imagine New York, LA, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, and Philadelphia, all comprising of orphans. 600,000 homeless Iraqi children would be like 7.6 million homeless children in the U.S.

If you are concerned and willing to help, please contact:

Alalusi Foundation Iraq Orphans Project, 1975 National Ave., Hayward CA 94545 510-887-2374
alusi1421@yahoo.com
http://www.alalusifoundation.org

Alalusi Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Donations are tax-deductible to the full extent of the law. Tax ID # 91-2158518