Ah Laury, if you had ever been in polygamy, you would have encountered time as a commodity, time debts, attempts to claim that time owed to a wife can be paid off with (say) a box of duty-free chocolates instead…

Totally, the time owed to a first wife can be indexed by the price of duty-free chocolate. I love the element that tariffs are avoided, that could in some way taint the choco. Very Halal this deal. Is it Whitman’s or Godiva? I would only agree to a time owed index payment based on Scharfenberger Nibby Bars, though. At least the Nibby Bars are better than a polygamous husband at home or “abroad.” Get that in your marriage contract next time.

PS I’ll write the post I promised to write you later in the week.

Then I want a refund on all the worthless khutbahs I’ve sat through. Chocolate will do, cash is better.

Curious, hamster-like person that I am, I searched on "Khutbah" and found that it means "sermon." 

http://www.isna.com/services/library/khutbahs/

Jumma Khutbah (Friday Sermon)

A khutbah is a sermons made on Friday in a congregational mosque before the special prayer (salat al-jum'ah). The custom goes back to the time of the Prophet (peace be upon him). Khutbahs are mostly given from a minbar or a series of small steps that represent as a pulpit.

I am pondering the various issues raised at

this site, progressiveislam.org.

It would be possible for someone to re-design Islam, into, let us say, a reform version, which might be called, Isntlam. I am quite serious. Well, the new name is somewhat humorous.  The conservatives would protest that the new religion ISN'T Islam. And we could reply, "Quite right you are! It isn't Islam, it is Isntlam."   I say it would confuse the conservatives considerably. They would be at such a loss for words. Kind of like that old Abbot & Costello routine, "Who's on first base, what's on second, I don't know's on third."

In the interest of post brevity, which pleaseth hamsters and Laury, I shall post this also at

http://literarydiscussions.myfreeforum.org/ftopic1065.php

and should I feel the need to say more about the excellent first link on Jumma Khutbah then I shall do so there, and not here.

Well, I am off now, to run on my little exercise wheel, round and round, getting nowhere. Ta Ta!

Oh Sitaram, Good joke actually, since I love a pun and word play I appreciate it! But we wouldn’t be here if we did not want to remain Muslim along with everyone else. We believe that our tradition is diverse, rich, and able to hold us all. We do not want to have methodist churches or reform synagogues, we want to be able to walk into any mosque and greet our brothers and sisters and them greet us in kind, make salat shoulder to shoulder, and after turn to everyone around us no matter their position on any matter shake hands and say “May God accept your prayer.” We aren’t the only dreamers. So many of us want this. I am going to repost Coolidges suggestion for a core of Islam with a summary of the responses some time this week. There is something we can all agree on there. But really, you know what, I think that what most of us agree on is remaining Muslim together.

Isntlam, LOL. Maybe that's what I'll call myself. Of course the idea of walking into any mosque and shaking hands is nice. I think of PL Wilson in Sacred Drift, saying that in the old days the Dar-al-Islam viewed itself as a world that had room for all kinds. I think I might be like one of the kooky gnostics, who might've kicked it with Rumi, though unlabeled. Not muslim, not not muslim. No matter what though, hu's on first!

hakim

PS I had to try to google hu to find out what it really means—on a possibly New Agey web site I see "Hu is an intensive; it means God himself, God present here".

And if you go into time debt, do you have to eat healthy and exercise to live longer? Or are you reincarnated with debt at birth? Or are your debts (sins) passed on to your children? Supposedly my wife is already damned to hell because she's a bastard. Lifting the sins of the mothers from the children: another theme addressed in the New Testament and, if I recall correctly, in the Qur'an?

hakim

Well this is the thing, your time is set. So eating well wouldn’t help. I wonder, though, if you could work off time debt. A friend suggested that if one is in time debt, one could work it off by hourly wage in trade with a person who has time they don’t need or time they want to sell—perhaps someone with Alzheimers? The debts passed on to the children is a good question. Do children carry the time debt of their parents? I will have to investigate that question…..

Laury asked me if I had any thought on this topic, so here goes.

First of all, there is obviously a Qur’anic precedent for trading time — of all things as dowry in marriage. Shu`ayb tells Musa (p) that he’d like to marry him to one of his daughters, and the dowry is 8 or 10 years of service.

Second, Jordanian banks have been using time in place of interest: If a bank suffered from a liquidity shortage, it would borrow the needed sum from the central bank at zero interest. It repaid later by depositing an equal sum for an equal period of time, also without interest.

Likewise, every time I helped a friend move, and they reciprocated in kind, it was a time-trade to fulfill debt.

Now, if you can exchange time for marriage (the Musa story), you can obviously exchange it for anything else. In the case of Musa, he married Shu`ayb’s daughter and owed him time (the Qur’an does not tell us whether he finished 8 or 10 years, only saying “fa lamma qaDa mUsa al-‘ajala wa saara bi ‘ahlihi ‘anasa min janibi aT-Turi naara”).

Sufis often speak of “waqt” that is owed.

Existentially, one can think of two non-renewable resources: land and time, so ultimately, all trades can be reduced to those basic units.

Indeed, one can think of the labor theory of value (which Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, and other classical economists tried to support, before John Stuart Mill destroyed the entire enterprise) as trying to reduce all value to human time (labor). Combine that with the physiocrats (e.g. Jean Frnacois Quesnay) who viewed working with land as the only productive activity, you can see how up until the early 19th Century, most humans wanted to reduce all value to time and land: the two non-renewable resources.

I attended a lecture at Houston recently by an Accounting professor. The title of the lecture (given to a group of Muslims who meet once a month was “time management in Islam”). She quoted all the usual verses (e.g. “wa al-`aSr”, etc.), and her premise was the importance of using time productively, etc.

I commented later with the Hadith Qudsi of “la tasubbu ad-dahra fa ‘ana ad-dahr” (I know, Laury, we have debated how to translate dahr in this Hadith), which I translated as “Do not curse time, for I AM TIME”. My argument was then that most acts of worship are actually about “not doing” things with time (fasting = not eating, prayers and i`tikaf = not conducting our worldly affiairs, etc.), so in fact worship means not doing so that we may drink-up time to nourish our souls…

yes, being a child of the moment (ibn al-waqt) takes you out of historical time (zaman), of gain and loss/credit and debt, to remember God as the Aeon (Dahr), perfect….[the translation wars continue]....

Sins of mothers from the children? Off hand, I cannot think of such a

topic in the New Testament.  

Here is Clement's letter to Corinthians, which is not part of the Bible, and

was some centuries after Paul and Peter.

http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1010.htm 

One does find in the 51st Psalm of the Old Testament "behold I was conceived in iniquities; and in sins did my mother conceive me"

But, it is in the Old Testament we find many verses which argue against

the notion that children bear the sins of their parents or ancestors:

Jeremiah 31:29 In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge.
30 But every one shall die for his own iniquity: every man that eateth the sour grape, his teeth shall be set on edge.

And earlier, Deuteronomy 24:16 The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.

Similar verses to the above may be found here:

http://www.topical-bible-studies.org/18-0011.htm 

I would certainly be curious to see passages in the Qur'an regarding sins of

parents upon the children.

I had originally written fathers, and my dear Shaykha Sharqi suggested it should be mothers. Because the woman usually gets the worst of it when caught in transgression with a man, I figure it’s more honest to say the sins of the mother rather than the father.

It’s interesting you found that material in the OT, because I thought it was more of a Jesus thing. Maybe it’s just a prophets thing overall, which makes me wonder if it comes up in Zoroaster, who seems to have been the original prophet. OK, I know, technically Adam was the first. And his sins sure came down on us! But wait, it was Eve who offered the fruit, so we can blame it on the women.

hakim

The material I found is a denial of inheritance of guilt from ancesters. The prophet Jeremiah says that it is a false notion. The Deuteronomy verse as well declares that children are not punished for the parents transgressions.

It is the Roman Catholics in the West, after Augustine in the 5th century, who embraced a doctrine of "original sin" of Adam's transgression being inherited by all future generations. The Greek Eastern Orthodox Christians always rejected the notion of "original sin". While Paul says, I think in the Epistle to Romans, that "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" i.e. every person is a sinner, they are personal sins committed because of the fallen human nature but are not somehow a sin inherited from Adam for eating the apple.

Interestingly, smoking a cigarette is the closest thing i can think of to this kind of life-span credit card. If smoking 50,000 cigarettes takes 5 years off your life, smoking each one should take off about an hour off one’s life.