Medicine of Avicenna Course

Student Excerpts: Intuition by Avicenna

2010-06-30T18:44:00.001-05:00

The following passage came from the homework of student, Ann Neadermann in Norway. I thought it was a wonderful description of Avicenna's views and intuition in general:

Ann Neaderman
Unit Four
Medicine of Avicenna

11. How does Avicenna define intuition? Do you think he believes in using it in healing a patient?

It receives the essences of universal things in so far as they are universal. The perfection of this power is to become an intellect in act. The first way is called reasoning, while the second is called intuition. Yet intuition can be very powerful or weak or mediocre.If the speculative intellect reaches this perfection by having present the first and derived intelligible principles, and these are there actually and in full view without being absent, then the derived principles are related to the first as "light upon light"; this is the acquired intellect, because it derives from both kinds of principles. The soul has mastery of intelligible principles and is able to recall them whenever it wants without effort or assistance, that power is called the intellect in act, and this is the "lamp" that it makes use of whenever it wants. You must know the difference between reasoning and intuition.

Great Supplemental Resource in ARABIC

2010-01-25T11:41:00.001-06:00

Dear Members,

A student shared this website with me earlier this week. I know some of you were asking about resources you could read or listen to in Arabic - this looks like a good one. If this resource is not useful for you, you can just ignore this message.

I thought you might like to read about Dr. Jameel el-Deweik al-Qudsi (currently working from Jordan) if you have not yet heard about him. He is specialized in Quranic and Prophetic medicine and sells DVD sets (only in Arabic unfortunately) of his major work in herbal and nutritional quranic medicine.

Here is the site: http://www.dr-jameel.com/Default.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

Best regards,
Muhammad Mansour

Missing Links in Unit 5 Replacements

2009-12-01T18:01:00.001-06:00

Question: Dear Kristie, I was trying to finish up unit 5 but the sites except for the one about olive oil and henna will not work, all of the domains are for sale. Do you have those sites in your files or should I ignore it. I'm not sure what to do.

Answer:

When you need to find files that are missing or have a question you can check here at the FAQs on the new website or you can still check the BLOG. Here is an example of what you would find at the BLOG:

http://naturopathichealingcourse.blogspot.com/search/label/Missing%20Files

Help categories can be found in the right hand column.

The best place to find replacement links and help, however, IS this new website. For the answer to your question (where can you find some of the broken or missing herbal links?) you can visit the main student website and scroll down the left hand side to the fourth section called "resources". You will find the first webpage is called "Broken Link Replacements".

If these links do not help you please send me the EXACT LINKS that you are missing so I can add more replacement links to this page. Thank you!

New Upgrade Link (not Paypal)

2009-07-24T18:38:00.002-05:00

Some students wanting to upgrade do not want to use Paypal to make their payment. I have created an alternate link for you at:

http://naturopathichealing.weebly.com/upgrade.html

Cumin in Healing Animals

2009-07-24T16:43:00.002-05:00

A student had the following information in their assignment for unit one in answer to the question, "What are some modern usages for these Ancient Egyptian herbs?"

In diabetic animals, cumin reduces blood glucose levels. Cumin seeds contain flavanoids, which are now generally recognized to have antioxidant activity. (www.NaturalNews.com)

I found that very interesting and wanted to share that!

Blessings & Health,
Kristie Karima Burns, MH, ND

Upgrade Link to Include Naturopathic Healing Classes

2009-07-23T16:50:00.000-05:00

Dear Members,

Some members have asked if they could upgrade their membership from "The Medicine of Avicenna Course" to "MOA AND The Naturopathic Healing" classes. At the website you can register for both classes for a discounted price and these students wanted to know if they could pay the difference and upgrade to taking both courses.

Yes.

Usually I have a 30-day limit on upgrades, but since I will be raising prices the first week of August I will allow any student to upgrade until August 1st using the link below. Using the link below you will be allowed to pay 3 payments (over the next three months) of $50.00 each to upgrade to being a student in both courses.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=7001231

or

http://tinyurl.com/ko8q5z

If you have questions about The Naturopathic Healing Courses please visit www.TheAvicennaInstitute.com for a short description or e-mail me at:

herbnhome@gmail.com

Blessings & Health,
Kristie Karima Burns, MH, ND

How Can I Login to the Islamic Healing Course Forum?

2009-07-08T15:32:00.002-05:00

I was trying to get into the site that you set up for us where we can email each other, and if I remember correct you asked if we had all read the Cannon of Medicine. Some of the members have their photos up. I've tried to get into several times, and it's so strange because I was looking at it just a few days ago. I was just going to write that I have read almost half of the cannon. - A

Dear A,
I have just sent you a new invite. If any other students need a new invite please tell me! You can access this student forum via your class page.

Blessings & Health,
Karima

Note to students : Remember to use the tech support form at www.TheAvicennaInstitute.com to submit any tech support questions. This question took two e-mails and one day to answer because I had to write back and ask for more information about the original link she provided. This delayed the response to her by one day since she lives overseas. By using the tech support form she would have had an answer within two hours instead of one day.

Password Problems?

2009-06-15T15:01:00.000-05:00

Dear Students,

The system I am using to password protect my pages has changed and made itself more secure and added features. I tested it myself to make sure it still works. It still functions the same. However, now, when you enter your username and password it will bring up another screen that asks for it again. Other pages only have a button with "login" now and no username and password blank until you have clicked the login button.

You will use the SAME username and password as you have always been using. You can find this in the following three places:

1. Your welcome letter
2. The FILES section of your group

If you are having any trouble with the new system please tell me.

Blessings & Health,
Kristie Karima Burns, MH, ND

Free Promotion for IHC Students

2009-05-22T13:16:00.000-05:00

Dear Students,

I just updated the PUBLIC student page again. Please check to see your information is correct. If your information is not included please fill out the form on the page and include all the information that was provided by the other students.

http://naturopathichealing.weebly.com/students-amp-graduates.html

Blessings & Health,
Kristie Karima Burns, MH, ND

Course Corrections: File Added to Unit Four

2009-04-24T11:50:00.001-05:00

A file that used to be a link is now available as a PDF file for students who are working on Unit Four. You can download this file from the year member's page. Or, if you are not a member of the entire course you can download it from the Unit Four file page at:

http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/Unit4/files/

Student Excerpts: Homeopathy and Islamic Medicine

2009-03-07T23:12:00.003-06:00

A student today compared Homeopathy and Islamic medicine in one of her assignments. I thought the following passage from her work was insightful and thought that many of you would also find it a wonderful insight:

Homeopaths insist that serial dilutions of a substance remove only the toxic effects of that substance, but retain its essence/vibration/energy and, therefore, its medicinal power; they further argue that it is the process of potentisation itself (the vigorous shaking of a substance) which activates and then releases the energy from that substance. From this we can see that homeopathic remedies are derived from a process which is very different from other substances in history who followed the “like cures like” model of healing.

Foods and herbs recommended by Islamic medicine practitioners have been successfully used to treat illness by people from around the world for millennia. Moreover, foods/herbs of the hadith have all been proven as healing medicines by numerous scientific studies carried out for decades by both Muslims and non-Mulims.

Finally, according to Islamic medicine, the energy/vibration of a healing food/herb exists in that food/herb in a synergistic manner along with all the other healing aspects of that divine medicine. The energy from that medicinal food is not activated by potentisation and succussion, but by saying, “Bis mil Lah” and “Alhamdulillah.”

Consulting Client Tip #3 IHC: Starting the Consult

2009-03-07T23:09:00.001-06:00

A student who turned in her test this week provided the following reminder as to how we should all start our consultations. I wanted to share this with you all:

Even the divinely blessed remedy is said to work only with the power and permission of Allah (Qadr Allah); and conversely, if Allah does not allow you to be healed then you will remain ill no matter what you do to get better. This is why Muslims precede any action by reciting Allah’s name and then follow every intention by reciting, “In Sha Allah” (If Allah wills).

Student Question: Questions about the Temperaments

2009-01-31T09:36:00.002-06:00

The following questions on the "Temperaments and Typology" unit were submitted by a student last week. They are VERY GOOD questions so I wanted to share them (and the answers) with you all. The questions are in black. My answers are in blue.

1.In your introduction to Unit 3: You state that different societies had different humors and then you say that for Ayurveda there is just 3 elements. However, in the online link about unani tibb, they have a chart comparing the humors in different traditional healing methods and they list Ayurveda as using five elements just as TCM has 5 elements. I found another good article online which also states that Ayurveda includes 5 elements/humors and not 3. Yet I have read many times in the past about the 3 doshas. I am confused. Does Ayurveda use 5 elements like the online articles say or do they only use 3.

It is confusing because, you are right, Ayurveda recognizes five humors, but it does not use them in the same way Greek medicine or Unani Tibb does. It is misleading to put them on a chart in comparison. If you look into depth at Ayruveda they actually have more than 3 - but do not limit diagnosis to 5. Here is a summary of how they view the systems: Panchamahabhuta or five basic elements: The basic material constituents which exist in the universe and in man are called the Pancha-mahabhuta or five basic elements of Prithivi (Earth), Jala (Water), Teja (Fire), Vayu (Air), and, Akash (Ether). However these are not used in the same way Greek or Islamic medicine uses them. In Greek or Islamic Medicine these are considered as the main forces for disease and healing. In Ayurveda these are viewed a bit differently and the divisions are different. Ayurveda does not view the body as "five elements" of disease and healing - but rather of seven basic tissues and three basic elements - that can then be further divided into 35 total elements of disease and healing.

These are: Dhatus: The human body consists of seven basic and vital tissues called Dhatus. Dhatu means “constructing elements”. These seven are responsible for the entire structure of the body. They maintain the functions of the different organs, system and vital parts of the body. They play an important role in the development, nourishment and even protection of the body. Dhatus are the resultant materials of the functions of the three Humors. They are: 1. Rasa dhatu: predominates the “Jala (water) “Mahabhuta. Function: Prinana(Nurishment) 2. Rakta dhatu: predominates the “Tej (Fire)” Mahabhuta. Function: Jevana(Invigoration) 3. Mamsa dhuta: predominates the “Prithivi (Ether)” mahabhuta. Function: Lepana(holds skeleton) 4. Meda dhatu: predominates the “Jala (water) “Mahabhuta. Function: Snehan(Lubrication) 5.Asthi dhatu: predominates the Vayu and Prithivi. Function:Dharan(support) 6.Majjja dhatu: predominates the Akash Mahabhuta. Function: Purana(to fill the bones) 7.Shukra dhatu: predominates the Jala and Tej Mahabhutas. Function:Garva utpadan(reproduction)

Tridosha or Three Humors: In Ayurdeda the basic elements of human body are Vata, Pitta and Kapha. These are called Tridosha or three Humors. Our body is controlled and regulated by the coordinated and balanced functions of Tridosha. It helps the body to be alive. All the physical and mental functions of the body are governed by these three humors. According to Ayurveda, various health problems are caused by an imbalance in at least one of the three humors. In Unani Tibb or Greek medicine it is thought that imbalance is caused by one of the five humors. It is a bit confusing that the translation of Dosha is humors in the same way they translate the word Panchamahabhuta (elements) of the body and the universe to mean "humors". They are different words in the Indian language and provide a subtle distinction. So the word Panchamahabhuta and the word Dosha are not the same but many articles you read in English translate both words to mean HUMORS. This is incorrect. Below you can see, however, they do further divide these Doshas...

Vata: The physical characteristics of Vata are different from others. It is light, dry, mobile, cold, abundant, rough, swift etc. Its fundamental Elements are Ether (Akash) and Air (Vayu). The physical functions are: it is responsible for body movement, speech, Blood circulation, breathing, Excretion, Brain functions, formation of fetus, sexual act, anxiety, grief. etc. There are five types of Vata according to their characters and locations. 1.Prana Vayu 2.Udana Vayu 3. Vyana Vayu. 4.Saman Vayu. 5.Apan Vayu.

Pitta: Pitta is hot like the basic element which is derived from Agni or fire. It is also characterized as being sharp, sour, pungent, fluid, soothing and mobile. It is responsible for vision, hunger, thirst, and digestion, the regulation of heat in the body, softness and luster in the complexion, cheerfulness, intellect, and sexual vigor. There are five types of Pitta which were first indicated by Acharya Susruta. 1.Pachaka Pitta 2.Ranjaka Pitta 3.Sadhaka Pitta 4.Alochaka Pitta 5.Bhrajaka Pitta. Kapha: Kapha is also called Slesma, and is derived from the fundamental elements earth (Prithivi) and Water (Jala). It is smooth, cold, heavy, dull, and viscid.

Kapha constitutes the entire solid structure of the body. The functions of Kapha are unctuousness, binding, firmness, heaviness, sexual potency, strength, forbearance, restraint and the absence of grief. Kapha was also categorized into five divisions: 1.Avalambaka Kapha 2.Kledaka Kapha 3.Bodaka Kapha 4.Tarpaka Kapha 5.Shleshaka Kapha.

2. More confusion: The assigned readings say that the humoral theory existed among Greeks even before the time of Hippocrates. So why is Hippocrates given credit as the originator of humoral theory in healing? Is it because he named 4 specific types and used them in a practical system? The text also says that Galen is the one who came up with the idea of 4 temperaments which correspond with the 4 elements/humors. Does that mean that during time of Hippocrates up until Galen, people were only focusing on the physical aspects of the humors and that Galen then originated and developed the system which used the humors to describe emotional/psychological traits? This is important because Hippocrates lived about 6 hundred years before Galen.

People have used the humors in all their aspect probably farther back than history has recorded. However, this is a very typical and classical case of "the historical credit problem". This is a problem I try to point out frequently during the course but I do not always suceed in doing so enough. The problem is that all medical and healing traditions are actually discoveries of many different people or peoples. Many of these traditions have been used for hundreds of years before someone "took credit". However history always gives credit to the person who was able to define the tradition and write it down. So credit for iridology is given to the first person who created a chart. Credit for reflexology is given to the first person to create the zone system. Credit in homeopathy is given to the person who created a comprehensive book of all the remedies. In some ways this credit is deserved - the person was usually responsible for A: Defining the tradition in a way everyone could understand so that it had more chance of surviving over time and being taught to more people and B. Expanding and devloping the tradition beyond what it was. In the case of homeopathy it had been used before but nobody (that we know of) had taken the time to test so many rememedies before., Hahnemann was amazing in this respect. However, in reality the system of any healing tradition cannot be attributed to one person.

3. In the reading from the columbia encyclopedia source, it lists winter as the corresponding season for the phlegmatic type which does not seem right because phlegmatic types are considered cold and moist which fits more with autumn and melanchoic fits more with winter because it is marked by cold/dry qualities which fits winter best. what do you think?

Corresponding the humors can be confusing! I can often see how one or more types could fit in each season, in each character, etc...but ultimately you are looking for the basic characteristic of the person or season. Autumn definately has a DRY dominant side because the leaves fall in the Autumn and are dry. The earth is dry. However, phlegmatic is very wet. So they cannot go together.

Winter is actually very moist because of the snow and ice that is classic of a traditional winter. However, one interesting thing about modern times that I noticed - since we use heaters in our homes we have actually created a very cold and dry environment for winter. I think this is responsible for a lot of the health problems we have in the winter. We are not allowing our bodies to cycle through the natural seasons and we are making a "wet" season into a "dry" one.

Course Corrections: Unit Three

2009-01-19T21:08:00.004-06:00

Dear Students,

There are some updates and corrections for Unit Three. They are as follows:

1. There seems to be some ongoing trouble with the "Cooking for the Humours" file so I have created an entirely new one that does not involve any links. I will be uploading it to the site in the next day or two.

2. The Unit titled "Humors in Islamic Medicine" (Unit 3:Chapter 3) should be titled "Humors in Unani Tibb".

3. There is a sentence missing at the end of "The History and Theory of Temperaments in Islamic Medicine" in Unit 3:Chapter 1. The end should read:

It is believed that a person is born into a certain temperament though their physical and mental qualities, but by using all the faculties, especially the spirit. I have now corrected it in my files and have filed the new corrections under "updated Unit 3 files". When I update the site I will include these corrections and updates.

It would be confusing if I constantly changed files as I made updates every few weeks or months so once or twice a year I make all the updates at one time to prevent overlap, confusion and double-download problems. Because of this continuing state of updates you should ALWAYS check the updates page to see if the Unit you are reading has any updates. This page is at:

http://islamichealingcourse.blogspot.com/search/label/Course%20Corrections

Changes to the Course: Friday Office Hours

2008-12-23T12:44:00.001-06:00

As many old students know, there has been a new schedule of test correcting that I have been "trying out" since April. Instead of returning exams once a month, I have been doing them every week, and have created office hours on Fridays.

This has been running at about an 80% success rate and I am quite pleased with it. However, some modifications will be made for the next year to accommodate the few times of year that I have an extra load of lectures or work from other sites. I have not finished modifications to this schedule yet, however, my vision for it is that it would stay intact as a weekly schedule but I would add in some 'school breaks" a few times a year, much like you would have at a regular university (spring break, winter break, a couple weeks for summer break, etc...). This does not mean that I would not be available during these break times for tech support or other questions or that you cannot work during these times. It would only mean that during those "breaks" I would not be correcting exams on a weekly basis and would not have office hours on those weeks. As I mentioned before, the "weekly" office hours were a new venture this year and everything else about them has been going well. I just forgot to build in some "break or vacation" time - and certainly everyone needs some of that. And without that it may appear that the schedule is "unpredictable" when, in actuality, I can predict with accuracy when those breaks will need to happen. This will help you to plan better as well.

My main goal is to serve you as students and make sure everything goes smoothly, and I believe part of this process is clear guidelines and communication. I have been very happy with the Friday office hours, as this has improved both. However, some misunderstandings have ensued on weeks that I was out of town for lectures or had to take a break for holiday season mailings.

Blessings & Health,
Karima

Student Question: Help with Clients or Extra Work

2008-12-23T12:16:00.002-06:00

I received a letter from a student this week:

I've sent you an article on (topic deleted for privacy) about couple of weeks ago, I would be very grateful if you are able to provide any feedback.

That sounds like a very interesting topic. I do receive an overwhelming number of articles, requests for reviews and extra questions from students and members, however, since June of 2008 I am answering all extra questions via the chat list at www.herbnhome.com - members of this list are able to e-mail me on or off list with extra questions about clients, their own work or health issues and I either answer their question on-list or I re-post it without their name. I do comments and corrections on tests and quizzes every Friday. There are a few students who are members of this list that have been consulting with me about their clients and business on the list.

Blessings & Health,
Karima

TECH SUPPORT: Page Numbers for IHC

2008-12-23T12:01:00.002-06:00

Dear Students,

Thank you to Mujahid for pointing out that Unit One, that has been re-formatted is still missing page numbers! I corrected the file today. A glitch happened where the page numbers had been removed because when I went into the file to correct it everything was actually "out of alignment" by one or two lines, indicating something was missing from each page.

This has now been corrected and re-posted to the site.

Additionally, I have changed the site a bit more to reflect the units that are re-formatted and the units that are not. When a unit is re-formatted it will be added put in the column under "updated". This way you will know at a glace which units have been finished and which have not.

Thank you for your patience in this matter. This course was originally distributed as individual files and everyone in the courses received the files via e-mail. With the new delivery options I now have for the course E-books are now possible but it does take some time to re-format the individual files into the e-books. If anyone is working on an individual file or particular quiz it is quite easy for me to send you an individual file.

Although I have office hours every Friday I do try my best to answer quick questions and tech support questions as soon as possible.

If you send me a quick e-mail "I need Unit One: Chapter One" or "I need the Unit One Quiz" I can easily send that to you if you have any trouble with the e-books that are not yet reformatted.

Blessings & Health,
Karima

Student Question: Office Hours

2008-12-22T19:04:00.002-06:00

Dear Students, I have had one or two students contact me in the past few weeks with some confusion about office hours. This was my response:

I think there might be a misunderstanding in the way the office hours work for students. I have office hours for students every Friday and that is the only day that I commit to answering questions from students. A few times a year I need to skip one Friday. Usually twice in the summer and once during Western Christmas Season. I do my best to answer questions before Friday if they are short (like "What e-mail should I send this to?" or "Where is the link to the student Facebook site?"). If a student has a tech support question (they cannot access a file) I try my very best to get back to them within 12-hours but sometimes if the problem is complex it takes longer.

However, if I do answer an e-mail before Friday, this is done on a voluntariy basis by me and is according to the time I have available that week.

However, on a regular basis, as a rule, I have student office hours ONLY on Fridays. Tests used to be corrected once a month, but to make things more convenient for students I changed it last year to once a week. Any Friday you may IM me, call me or e-mail me and I will respond on that day. Or you can e-mail me before Friday and I will respond on Friday.

Keep in mind that one reason I specify Fridays is because I want students to know that if they do not hear back from me that something may have been lost - or sometimes mis-filed. A few times I have dragged an e-mail to the "student" box and it was mis-filed in another box. Mistakes and Internet errors do happen so I want to make sure students know that I am responding to them on Fridays.

Hope this helps!

Blessings & Health.
Karima

Student Dialogues - More Depth to the Temperaments

2008-12-13T19:49:00.001-06:00

This is from a student's test comparing homeopathic temperaments to the Islamic temperaments. The answer is correct, but I wanted to comment (for the benefit of everyone) that you CAN expand the Islamic temperaments beyond the four by combining themkin the same way homeopathy does - there is no rule against this. I often find it useful. Assignment and my comment are below...

Homeopathy also further breaks down the four major temperaments into 12 minor groups as individuals may not fit completely into only the four temperaments. These minor groups are: cholero-phlegmatic, the sangino-phlegmatic, the nervo-phlegmatic, the phlegmo-choleric, the sanguino- choleric, nervo- choleric, the cholero-sanguine, the phlegmo-sanguine, and the nervo-sanguine, the cholero-nervous, phlegmo-nervous and sanguino-nervous. The nervous is known as melancholic in the Islamic temperaments.

Very good. Although when one starts using the temperaments you can also break them down yourself as well. I will often combine temperament evaluations and have noticed, for example, that a melancholic sanguine is much different than a melancholic phlegmatic.

Student Excerpts: Useful Website for Herb Studies

2008-11-14T22:55:00.002-06:00

Student, Aida, found the following studies on Cumin for her Unit 1_3 exam. I am posting this link here just in case other students might find the same website helpful.

In studies done on mice, cumin seed (when mixed with lard) has been reported to have antioxidant activity, elevating levels of glutathione and stimulating other antioxidant systems.
Source:

www.Drugs.com

Student Dialogues - Temperaments

2008-11-11T11:14:00.003-06:00

I made some comments on a student's test about the temperaments I wanted to share with all of you who are studying that unit. I am always learning more about the temperaments and the more I learn the more fascinating they become. I wanted to share the following tips/comments with all students in the hopes that you can gain some more insight into the temperaments. Insight and depth of understanding is what will help you create temperament profiles for clients, friends and family members. That insight and depth will increase over time.

My Comments are in BLUE:

I am going to insert some comments into the below. These comments do not indicate that your answer is wrong, because I do not know and have not met the woman. I am simply giving you some more ideas so you can gain some more insight into each temperament and find new ways to “read” people by asking in-depth questions about “why” or “how often” they do certain behaviours. Another tip is to ask them, “have you been like this your entire life?” How they acted as a child after the age of 7 is a good indication of their core temperament”

Choleric attributes:

§ She is very ambitious, and when she is energetic she tries to instill it upon others.

This can also be sanguine. It depends on HOW the person does this. Does she do this all the time or only when she is energetic and feeling well? A Choleric person could be “on their deathbed” or ill and still pushing their desires and opinions on people. A Sanguine will do the same, but NOT when they are ill, or feeling low. Sanguines have very passive mood periods – they come and go and are of varying degrees, but a true Choleric has very few passive moments.

§ She is dominating, although she has learnt to be passive, although her desire is to take control and can get agitated if asked for her opinion and it is not taken.

This can also be a melancholic trait. Although usually melancholics and cholerics cannot learn to be passive. If they do they would most likely suffer great physical and emotional stress from this.

§ She gets extremely irritable if she asks someone to do something and they do not conform.

This can be an attribute of any of the temperaments. A melancholic typically does this. A phlegmatic will do this when pushed and a sanguine will do this a lot too because they feel a need to balance their own “butterfly-like existence” with the firm security of the things and people around them. So they can become VERY upset if people do not conform. Even if they do not always conform themselves, they feel most comfortable when other people do.

§ She has always started things and never completes them, recently she has been more organised and completing projects.

This is more of a sanguine trait. The phlegmatic is “slow and steady” and usually completes , the melancholic is “like a train on a track” in completing things and usually completes, the choleric is “like a fire sweeping through the forest” in completing chores and tasks and may stay up all night just to finish something. If a choleric is not completing their tasks it is because they have a hint of sanguine as well.

§ She has yellow/orange soles and palms, she has excess body hair (although not abnormal for Mediterranean ethnicity), she has a slim face (quite bony), is of a yellow complexion (although naturally a light olive complexion, she says it becomes brighter with exercise).
§ She has very lively eyes (however, due to depression they can look dim and lifeless)

This is a sanguine and choleric trait

§ She craves sugary, sour, hot spicy foods.

This can also be sanguine

§ She suffers from hypoglycemia, and has a circulatory problem (blood does not flow correctly in her left calf (medial)).

What you need to look for in a person is those one or two traits that make them unquestionably fall into one category or another. You cannot finish your evaluation of their temperament until you have at least two traits that you can say “no other temperament would do this” and “she does this all or most of the time”. Even better if you can trace the behaviour back to her childhood.

Student Dialogues - Temperaments and Children

2008-11-11T09:54:00.001-06:00

Student Assignment Excerpt: Typology is not a tag; it is a method that allows one to understand a person and to deal with them accordingly. This is helpful when dealing with children, a personal example is my son (2 years 9 months); he is energetic, lively and has a very fiery temper, yet he is natural leader. My son does not speak very much and he chooses to be this way, when he is with other children he has a tendency to lead them although he does not speak fluently, he determines what games they play, and decides when the play should stop because he wants to drink his milk I found it quite difficult to understand my son, from the moment I can remember he was very strong willed and was not going to be forced to do things and didn’t like to be interrupted. I just didn’t know babies could have such strong characters.

Karima's Comments: Surprising...isn’t it? A few years back I actually started an informal study (that I was not able to finish yet) on analyzing the temperament of a child in the womb of the mother – while she is still pregnant. They even have their own temperament then. My goal was to see if this temperament could somehow predict their adult temperament.

Student Excerpts: The Temperaments

2008-11-11T09:44:00.002-06:00

Student Huda, provided an excellent "translation" for her assignment on the Temperments. This is taken from Chauser's "The Four Complexions":

Melancholic:

The water,
which is moyste and cold,
Makth fleume,
which is many fold
Foryetel, slou and wery sone
Of every thing which is to done:
He is of kinde sufficant
To holde love his covenant,
Bot that him lacketh appetit,
Which longeth unto such delit.

Interpretation:
The water, which is moist and cold,
Makes phlegm, which is manifold
Forgetful, slow and wearisome
Of everything which is to be done:
He is of kind sufficient.
To hold love his covenant,
But that he lacks appetite,
Which longs unto such delight

She further shares:
This is very much the typical characteristics of a Phlegmatic, a phlegmatic’s humour is wet (moist) and cold, consequently producing phlegm. Characteristics of the phlegmatic are forgetfulness, slowness and fatigue. Phlegamatics consider love as a covenant, the phlegmatic has many friends and are reliable and compassionate. The phlegmatic suffers from a lack of appetite however; they crave pleasurable foods, which are likely to imbalance them such as milk, sugar and wheat.

Course Corrections: Unit One and Unit Nine

2008-11-06T22:23:00.002-06:00

Following is a dialogue I had with student, Aida, who is an excellent editor. I re-arranged the course two years ago and moved some files from Unit One to Unit Four and Unit Nine. I thought I had also moved all the quiz questions. Many students have turned in work for Unit One since then with complete answers so I did not notice that there were still some extra questions in Unit One. Note that ALL questions related to alchemy that are in the Unit One test should be in the Unit Nine exam section. I also noticed that Unit One became left-justified when I created ONE E-book from the five smaller E-books. I will be fixing this problem soon. However, in the meantime I want to post this note so if you are working on Unit One you will not have the same confusion that Aida did.

Here are some of the more specific questions she had and some of my answers...

Student Question: (from: Chapter on Medical History Overviews (sections 1-7))

On "Question 15: What does the first author claim to have been the center of all Muslim education? But what evidence in Emilie Smith's writing contradicts this?" I am not sure which author you are referring to. Are you talking about one of the authors in the lecture notes or one of the authors for the online readings. I am confused as to who I am supposed to focus on here. Also which time period are you referring to? Unless I am mistaken, the center of Islamic education changed to different areas in different periods (Starting in Baghdad and then transferring to Spain). please advise........

Karima's Response:

One possible answer is:
The First author mentions Cordoba, Seville and Granada as university centers. The second author mentions translation house in Baghdad established in 9th century. However, there is no contradiction as there may be as many centers of education as necessary.

I am referring to the “First Author” as the one who wrote “Science and Muslim Scientists”. The credit for this goes to the team from the “Islamic Scholar Software”.

Emile is the “third reading” that you link to online. You can find the quotes by the “first author” on page 13 of the E-book for Unit One.

Student Question Two:

On "Question 55: What was the number 1 thing a scientist did in islamic medieval times?" I can't find the source for this information. I am confused as to what you are looking for as an answer. I read the material in depth many times. Please advise............

Karima's Response:

He did translation. Information on the translation work scientists did can be found on page 42. I found this by typing in the word “translation” into the search engine in the E-book for Unit One.

Student Question 3:

On "Questions 56: The Arabic language was considered by the Christian scholarly world to be a language in which___________________? " I can't find the source for this information. I read the material in depth many times. Please advise.........

Karima's Response:

...."secrets of the natural world were hidden". However, a search on this yielded no results. This could be one of the sections that was transferred to a later unit. I will remove this question from the test.

Student Question 4:

On "Question 63: How is alchemy described in the last pages of this section?"
I am not sure which section is referred to here. Please advise.................

Karima's Response:

All of the main readings on alchemy were moved to Unit 9 two years ago. This question remains. I am not sure how students have been answering it these past two years! Good catch! I will move these questions to Unit 9.

BLOG Postings & Dates

2008-11-01T10:48:00.002-05:00

This BLOG has some dates missing as I took a period of time to send the posts directly to the students via the student list. We will soon be changing back to the BLOG format to make searching for topics easier for the students. If you need to see BLOG posts from some of the missing dates you can check the student archives for those dates. If you don't have the student archive address please e-mail me at: herbnhome@yahoo.com

Student Excerpts: Listing References

2008-09-25T21:40:00.001-05:00

Students - please remember to list your references! This is a good example from a student who turned in a paper last week. She did a fantastic job of listing references at the end of her assignment:

Ali, AB and Blunden, G. (2003). Pharmacological and toxicological properties of Nigella Sativa. John Wiley and Sons. Extract accessed from internet on 26 June 2008 from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12722128?dopt=Abstract

Boundok Sahbae. (2006). Barley Talbina : Advice from Prophet & a Scientific Tru. Accessed on July 15 2008 from http://sufi.forumup.co.uk/about357-sufi.html

Burns, K. (2006). Grains of the Prophet. Accessed on July 15 2008. from http://sufi.forumup.co.uk/about357-sufi.html

Burns, K. Islamic healing coursework notes: Unit 1

Burns, K. Islamic healing coursework notes: Unit 2

Collins Essential English Dictionary 2nd Edition 2006 © HarperCollins Publishers 2004, 2006 accessed on 15 August 2008 from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/cotton

Ead, H. (1998). Arabic (or Islamic) Influence On the Historical Development of Medicine. Accessed from http://www.levity.com/alchemy/islam19.html
on August 14 2008.

Ehret, C. How the word cotton came to harlem. Liguistic wonders series. Accessed on 15 August 2008 from http://www.yourdictionary.com/library/cotton.html

Huskey, R. J. Immune benefits of breast milk at a glance. Accesed from http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/8148/bmilk.html

Khan, M.L.A. (unknown). Kalonji (Nigella Sativa). Accesed on 26 June 2008 from http://www.crescentlife.com/dietnutrition/kalonji.htm

Naiman I, (internet source). Black cumin seed. Accessed from www.kitchendoctor.com/articles/blackcumin on 22 June 2008.

Unknown Author, medical discoveries: general information and biographies. Accessed on August 23 2008 from http://www.discoveriesinmedicine.com/General-Information-and-Biographies/Par-Ambroise.html

Unknown Author, “Ambroise Pare”. Accessed from http://www.comptonhistory.com/compton2/pare.htm
Wikipedia, Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi. Accessed from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_al-Qasim_al-Zahrawi

Wikipedia, (2008). Nigella Sativa. Accessed on 26 June 2008 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigella_sativa

Williams, R.D. Breast-Feeding Best Bet for Babies. Accessed on July 26 from http://www.fda.gov/Fdac/features/895_brstfeed.html

Student Dialogues - Wikepedia Research

2008-09-25T21:25:00.002-05:00

From a student assignment: "Wikipedia also states that the black seed shows significant results of improvement in cancer patients, as well as during the prevention stages of cancer and for patients who have undergone chemotherapy and surgery."

My Feedback: "This is correct information. However, do be careful of information found on Wikipedia. They can be used as a “starting block” for research, however, their information is not reliable enough to be used as a sole resource. "

Student Dialogues - Ayurveda and Diet

2008-09-25T17:35:00.002-05:00

Student Assignment: On an ending note something else I find interesting is Ayurveda that is slightly similar. I found a short chapter in the book The Directory of Complementry Therapies by Norman Shealy.M.D. PHd. It briefly explains the three DOSHAS or principles. governs mental and physical health and helps to balance their source. The doshas are Vata, Pitta, and Kapha. Vata is movement, Pitta goes with metabolism, and kapha with solid matter, flesh,a nd
bones. And an imbalance just like with Unani Tibb can cause illness. Simple remedies
are like the humours. For example to much pitta dosha associates with heat, then a
cooling activity, food, exercise or therapy can be prescribed to reduce it.
Vata personality seems like to be the Sanguine type. Pitta could be compared to
choleric type and and the Kapha could be compared to the Phelgmatic type .
Soooo Interesting. This is from India. I can see how they are all connected.

Yes, when it comes to measuring temperament of food with the body the Ayurvedic system actually has the most readily available information on the topic. If you are interested in doing more work with this topic and you need recipes and more inspiration – a good Ayurvedic cookbook would be a good place to start. Chinese medicine and Islamic medicine also work with these principles but sadly there are no really good cookbooks or books on either of those subjects (the specific subject of food and temperament) in English.

Consulting Client Tip #1 IHC: Balance - vs- Cure

2008-09-25T17:28:00.001-05:00

Dear Students,

Every week as I correct tests I will share student excerpts, student dialogue, consulting client tips and more as I go through the exams and speak with other students. That way you all can benefit from the discussions I have with other students.

Here is a consulting client tip that I shared with a student this week:

This is something to remember in all healing – it is a matter of balance and not cure. We will always being dealing with imbalance in the body. When we look at healing as a method to cure we will be lost. When we look at healing as a method to balance the body we will always be able to heal from anything by seeking that balance over and over – no matter what happens to the body.

Student Questions: What is the best way to restart my studies?

2008-09-23T13:19:00.003-05:00

A student wrote to me earlier last week asking what the best way to re-start their studies was. This is a popular question as some students sign up, do a little work (or not) and then leave their work for a while. Oftentimes picking up the work again is confusing. Here are some tips I shared:

Dear A,

You are registered for the Islamic Healing Course as well as the Naturopathic Healing Course Online. Because you have so many classes you are registered for and because your schedule in completing them may be irregular I would advise that you do them "in order" (do unit 1, then unit 2, etc...) You are not required to do them in order but this will probably work best for you.

The first unit of the Islamic healing course is located at:
http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/islamichealing/files/

Using that link above you can download your files from that link OR you can download the password from that link and access online. Most students tend to prefer this NEW online method. So I would recommend that you download the password from the link above and use that.

The first unit of the Naturopathic Healing Course online is located at:
http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/nutritionalhealingcourse/files/

Same instructions as above... When you are deciding which to do first, keep in mind that the Islamic Healing Course focuses heavily on medicine of the prophet and healing of the Arab world, whereas the NHCO has courses in iridology and reflexology included.

If you have any additional questions please IM, e-mail me or call me anytime.

All my contact information is posted at http://www.thedreamangels.com/

Blessings & Health,
Kristie Karima Burns, MH, ND

Student Questions: What is my Bravenet Password for the Course?

2008-09-23T13:10:00.003-05:00

A student wrote to me requesting access to the course and asking me to send this access to a new e-mail address. This was my reply:

Dear (H),

Thank you for asking!

If you need your e-mail address changed for the course you can go to:

To Change your Yahoogroups e-mail or settings to Vacation, Special Notices Only, No-Email or Leave Group please visit:http://groups.yahoo.com/group/(Name of Group)/join

The password for the course is located in the files section of each unit. Members of the entire healing course can locate their ONE-PAGE access code at:

http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/IHC_Unit12/files/

Blessings & Health,
Kristie Karima Burns, MH, ND

Student Excerpts: Aisha and the Melancholic Temperament

2008-09-05T20:17:00.005-05:00

I really enjoyed Huda's application of the temperaments to different people in Islamic history. Here is her description of Aisha as a person of the melancholic temperament:

‘Aisha (ؓ) was one of the seven who narrated more than a thousand hadiths; she was also one of the seven most prolific in giving legal opinions. In both sets she is the only female, which is a remarkable feat; she was revered by women and men alike. She is known for her deep love for the Prophet (ﷺ); she would sometimes get angered out of love for the Prophet (ﷺ). ‘Aisha had heard news of the Prophet marrying a new wife by the name of Saffiya, she was of Jewish heritage. ‘Aisha went to the wedding and remained veiled, the Prophet noticed her. When the Prophet saw ‘Aisha he asked her what she thought of Saffiya, she answered “she is the same as any other Jewess.” The Prophet (ﷺ) was always patient with ‘Aisha and his other wives, he understood their temperaments and knew how to handle each one. Every one of his wives thought she was the most beloved to him, it was only when he fell ill at the end of his life that his request to stay at ‘Aisha’s house let them know that ‘Aisha was the most beloved to him (although he loved them all very dearly).

Student Dialogues - Different Methods of Healing

2008-09-05T20:14:00.003-05:00

This is another excerpt from my dialogues with students this week...

Huda observes in her assignment:
There are some in homeopathy that are shied away from the idea of temperaments and humours, James Tyler Kent* seems to be one of them. Kent’s constitutional medicine had nothing to do with giving remedies by classical temperaments. Kent spoke out against the use of classical temperaments in Homoeopathy in his Lesser Writings.

Kristie Karima Burns, MH, ND commented back:
I am sure his system works well too. The trick to a system working is deep knowledge of the system, continuing education, faith and immersion in the system. When people ask me what the “best” healing method is I always say, ‘One that the practitioner and client deeply resonate with”

Student Dialogues - Typology in Different Traditions

2008-09-05T20:11:00.004-05:00

Each week or two I like to share some conversations I have had with students or excerpts from student work that I think would benefit other students. This week, student Huda, brought up a very good point in one of her assignments. This is an excerpt from her assignment and my comment on her assignment:

Huda:Personal Reflection: it is more suitable to look at the Chinese (and any other) typography as a system in its own right.

Kristie Karima Burns, MH, ND: You make a good point. I will be sure to include this in the student BLOG so other students can understand that this is the intention of the assignment - to look at a system within its own right is the best way to evaluate a person. Because each system has it own way of looking at things which encompass the entire system. There is a core belief that runs each system and without that you are missing out on the depth. So when you are diagnosing you do need to stay within one system.

However, for educational purposes it helps to see how the systems correlate so you can get a better feel for the way typology works and the way the different systems may or may not work together. Cross referencing typology is like studying history – you are not going to use the information...but your knowledge and ability to make decisions and learn will be enhanced by studying it.

Consulting Client Tip #1: Taking vs Giving

2008-07-06T19:12:00.003-05:00

more and more student work comes in I realize how very important it is for us all to share our experience with clients - tips, methods and whatever else comes to mind. The things that I share in this column will be directly related to student work and client work they have done and are posted as a response to that work. If you would like to comment on my posts or to add some information of your own please feel free to press "reply". We have a wonderful group of students here - many are already practitioners of some type - we have the potential to help each other out in so many ways.

Client Tip #1: Taking vs-Giving

Suggest some things to add to the diet, rather than take away. Often, people in depressive or restrictive situations don’t want to be told “don’t eat this”. It is more depressing! So, instead, tell them to eat certain foods every day – give them a list of “healing foods” – this list will of course, be true, such as offering oatmeal to lower cholesterol. However, what you won’t tell them is that by adding these foods they will be LESS INCLINED to have the “bad foods”. Don’t tell them that part. Don’t let on in any way you are saying NO to them. I used this method extensively in Saudi Arabia, where I used to live, as many of the women there were already restricted in their movement and other life choices. They would not have benefited from being told by yet one more person - "You can't do that". When healing you need to consider where and who are person is.

Karima's Consulting and Seminar Trip Dates

2008-07-04T02:53:00.002-05:00

Consulting & Seminar Trip July 2008: Kristie Karima Burns, Mh, ND

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Student Excerpts: Olive Oil

2008-07-04T00:12:00.005-05:00

Graduated student Monya did a wonderful job on all her assignments during the entire course. Over the next few weeks I will be sharing some snippets of hers that I have set aside and will be sharing them with you. The following excerpt is from her essay on Herbs and usage in Middle Eastern countries. I learned some things about olive oil myself and found the local usage of some of the herbs she mentioned very unusual and interesting. It is truly amazing what we can learn from other cultures:

Olive oil – I was born with a hole in heart and was a very weak child. At the age of 5 my mum took me to Morocco and left me there with my grandparents for 6 months. As I was not eating properly due to my condition, my grandmother would feed me everyday a big tablespoon of pure olive oil. I was given this every morning and I remember I would be in tears, as I hated the taste. After the 6 months in Morocco I went back to the UK and had an appointment at the hospital for a check up. The doctors were amazed that the hole in my heart had closed significantly and also the murmur had disappeared. As my health had improved significantly I had also put on a bit of weight as I had built an appetite and was eating really well during those 6 months. My grandma always talks to me about the pure olive oil days. (Bless her)!!! This practice of olive oil is recognized all over morocco. Most people use olive oil for cooking or hair and skin as well as those who are weak. Morocco is second only to Greece in exports of olives to the world market and are one of Morocco's primary exports. Morocco has been producing olives for over 2,000 years. Over 395,000 hectares of cultivated land are devoted today to olive production and they produce 350,000-400,000 tons of olives each year.

Congratulations Islamic Healing Course Graduate

2008-06-24T17:31:00.006-05:00

Congratulations to Monya, who has completed her coursework at The Avicenna Institute and has been awarded a diploma in Islamic Medicine.

Remember - Enrollment rates increase from 250 - $350.00 on July 1st, 2008

see: http://www.theavicennainstitute.com/ for more information.

Supplemental Study: BBCs Broadcast on the Four Humors

2008-01-25T20:44:00.001-06:00

The BBC has recently broadcast a wonderful program on the four humors from a historical viewpoint. It does not share much about how they can be used today or how they have been adapted to modern times but it does a good job of talking about how they were used in history. And as always, the BBC shows are wonderful!

Check it out at:
BBC: The Four Humors

If you are a member of the Islamic Healing Course you are able to download my lecture on the modern use of humors at the student site. If you are not a member of the group you can still download the entire 90-minute lecture for only $7.50 at:

Exploring the Temperaments by Kristie Karima Burns, MH, ND

Enjoy the Radio show and the lecture!

Blessings & Health,
Karima

News and Tidbits: Celebrate learning about natural medicine!

2008-01-19T14:30:00.001-06:00

Dear Students,

After reading this article I was even more thankful for all that I have learned, used and passed on having to do with natural medicines!

Did you ever wonder how much it costs a drug company for the active
ingredient in prescription medications? Some people think it must cost
a lot, since many drugs sell for more than $2.00 per tablet. We did a
search of offshore chemical synthesizers that supply the active
ingredients found in drugs approved by the FDA. As we have revealed in
past issues of Life Extension, a significant percentage of drugs sold
in the United States contain active ingredients made in other
countries. In our independent investigation of how much profit drug
companies really make, we obtained the actual price of active
ingredients used in some of the most popular drugs sold in America.

The data below speaks for itself.

Celebrex: 100 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $130.27
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.60
Percent markup: 21,712%

Claritin: 10 mg
Consumer Price (100 tablets): $215.17
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.71
Percent markup: 30,306%

Keflex: 250 mg
Consumer Price (100 tablets): $157.39
Cost of general active ingredients: $1.88
Percent markup: 8,372%

Lipitor:20 mg
Consumer Price (100 tablets): $272.37
Cost of general active ingredients: $5.80
Percent markup: 4,696%

Norvasc:10 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $188.29
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.14
Percent markup: 134,493%

Paxil: 20 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $220.27
Cost of general active ingredients: $7.60
Percent markup: 2,898%

Prevacid:30 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $44.77
Cost of general active ingredients: $1.01
Percent markup: 34,136%

Prilosec: 20 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $360.97
Cost of general active ingredients $0.52
Percent markup: 69,417%

Prozac:20 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets) : $247.47
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.11
Percent markup: 224,973%

Tenormin:50 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $104.47
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.13
Percent markup: 80,362%

Vasotec: 10 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $102.37
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.20
Percent markup: 51,185%

Xanax: 1 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets) : $136.79
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.024
Percent markup: 569,958%

Zestril:20 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets) $89.89
Cost of general active ingredients $3.20
Percent markup: 2,809

Zithromax:600 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $1,482.19
Cost of general active ingredients: $18.78
Percent markup: 7,892%

Zocor:40 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $350.27
Cost of general active ingredients: $8.63
Percent markup: 4,059%

Zoloft: 50 mg
Consumer price: $206.87
Cost of general active ingredients: $1.75
Percent markup: 11,821%

Since the cost of prescription drugs is so outrageous, I thought
everyone should know about this. Please read the following and pass it on.

It pays to shop around. This helps to solve the mystery as to why they
can afford to put a Walgreen's on every corner. On Monday night, Steve
Wilson, an investigative reporter for Channel 7 News in Detroit , did
a story on generic drug price gouging by pharmacies. He found in his
investigation, that some of these generic drugs were marked up as much
as 3,000% or more. Yes, that's not a typo.....three thousand percent!
So often, we blame the drug companies for the high cost of drugs, and
usually rightfully so. But in this case, the fault clearly lies with
the pharmacies themselves. For example, if you had to buy a
prescription drug, and bought the name brand, you might pay $100 for
100 pills.

The pharmacist might tell you that if you get the generic equivalent,
they would only cost $80, making you think you are "saving" $20. What
the pharmacist is not telling you is that those 100 generic pills may
have only cost him $10!

At the end of the report, one of the anchors asked Mr. Wilson whether
or not there were any pharmacies that did not adhere to this practice,
and he said that Costco consistently charged little over their cost
for the generic drugs.

I went to the Costco site, where you can look up any drug, and get its
online price. It says that the in-store prices are consistent with the
online prices. I was appalled. Just to give you one example from my
own experience, I had to use the drug, Compazine, which helps prevent
nausea in chemo patients.

I used the generic equivalent, which cost $54.99 for 60 pills at CVS.
I checked the price at Costco, and I could have bought 100 pills for
$19.89. For 145 of my pain pills, I paid $72.57. I could have got 150
at Costco for $28.08.

I would like to mention, that although Costco is a "membership" type
store, you do NOT have to be a member to buy prescriptions there, as
it is a federally regulated substance. You just tell them at the door
that you wish to use the pharmacy and they will let you in. (This is
true!)

(This article checks out with SNOPEs by the way as well as with many research and report papers I have read as a journalist) - Blessings & Health, Kristie Karima Burns, MH, ND

Congrats to Another Student!

2007-12-12T10:25:00.001-06:00

Congratulations to student Nur Inshirah!
She just earned her U.K. Diploma in Herbal Medicine.

Student News: Book Published by Student!

2007-11-08T12:58:00.001-06:00

From Student, Ivan...

My book on biomedicine is out. You might find it peculiar
that a book on post-genomic research starts with ... what
did you think of... a discussion of Unani medicine...

My best regards and thanks,
Ivan.

To see Ivan's Book link here:
BIOMEDICINE BOOK

Student Question: How can I change my e-mail for the course?

2007-10-22T00:07:00.001-05:00

The way to change your address for the course is to go into your Yahoogroups and then enter the group you want to change the address for and press on "Edit Membership" in the upper left hand part of the page. Once you enter that page it will give you the option to change your e-mail address.

For example, the direct link to change your address for the main group list (Islamichealingcourse@yahoogroups.com) is:

http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/islamichealing/join

It is a pretty quick operation. However, from my end it is a little more complex and can often cause problems in your account so I recommend if any student wants to change their e-mail that they enter their account (s) and use the method I described above.

Blessings & Health,
Kristie Karima Burns, MH, ND

LESSON: From a Car Accident Yesterday

2007-10-09T13:21:00.002-05:00

Dear Members,

Yesterday I was in the first car accident of my life. I had some injury to my back and neck. They say there are no broken bones but I have to wait a few days to see if the pain and swelling are just muscle stress or something more serious. I am hoping it all just gets better in a few days. Right now I am just able to work very slowly but I am thankful for a lot of things and I wanted to share these with you so you can learn from what happened to me and perhaps have a little time to reflect on the things that you are thankful for today.

I am thankful that...

1. ...The kids were in the backseat. Sometimes I do let the older child sit in front, but if he had been sitting in front he would have rammed his head into the dashboard and not the soft seat in front of him. Note to self - NEVER let even an older child sit in front!

2. ...The kids were wearing their seatbelts. Sometimes they "forget" and I have to remind them. And sometimes I forget to remind them and we go a few blocks before I realize they are not belted in. Note to self: Be 100% diligent about reminding them and don't forget in the future AT ALL!

3. ...I was wearing my seatbelt. I was rammed into very hard from behind. If I had not been wearing my seatbelt I imagine my face would not be too pretty right now.

4. ...That is was not worse. About the only thing I can do today is type a little and sit. So I was reading the paper a bit and there was a story about a lady who was in a similar accident 4 years ago and the spine injuries she sustained cause paralysis. She is looking for donations for a surgery that she needs. I think I will send some money.

5. ...That I was not talking on my cell phone or eating while I was driving. I have to admit (shame on me) that I occassionally did this in the past. Well, I realize if I HAD been doing that last night the accident would have been much worse. I had fast enough reflexes and was focused enough that I stopped before I hit the car in front of me. Of course my car hit him eventually anyway after the car behind me hit ME but the accident would have been much worse if I had not been completely focused on my driving at that moment.

6...That is was rush hour and traffic was slow. I usually hate 73rd street because of the slow traffic. I am learning to appreciate it now.

Wishing you all a safe driving day!

Blessings & Health,
Kristie Karima Burns, MH, ND
www.thedreamangels.com

IN THE NEWS: Hope for Hep C?

2007-09-26T15:49:00.003-05:00

From Al-Ahram Weekly

Hope for hepatitis?

By Mariz Tadros

Hepatitis C, a viral illness communicated through blood, long seemed
destined to remain incurable. It is estimated that anywhere between 15
and 40 per cent of Egyptians could be infected with HCV, which can
lead to liver disease such as cirrhosis (scarring of the liver), liver
cancer, or liver failure. Now, however, Abdel-Basset Mohamed, an
Egyptian scientist, claims there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
A professor of chemistry at the National Research Centre, Mohamed has
been granted patent rights by the European Patent Office for a new
drug to treat hepatitis C.
The virus has been on the increase internationally ever since its
discovery in 1989, in large part because poor screening techniques
have led to its propagation. Because hepatitis C is blood-borne, it
can be transmitted through blood transfusions, improperly sterilised
medical equipment, shared intravenous drug paraphernalia or, in a very
small minority of cases, sexual intercourse. Further increasing the
risk of transmission is the fact that it can take 10 to 30 years
before a patient is identified as being infected with the virus. A
medical source who preferred to remain anonymous suggested that the
lack of sterilisation of syringes and equipment in the late 1960s and
1970s in the nationwide inoculation programmes for the eradication of
bilharzia was a major source of hepatitis C transmission.
The drug for which Mohamed has received patent rights is extracted
from two wild terrestrial plants. "These plants grow in the Egyptian
deserts and in the coastal regions. They have long been known to be
beneficial for the liver. We removed the toxic agents from them and
tried them on a most resistant strain of hepatitis C," Mohamed told
Al-Ahram Weekly. Experimentation on mice and chimpanzees, he
explained, produced very positive results, which induced him to try
the compound on humans. The drug, he said, was tested in the United
States on 100 Egyptian American volunteers, whose condition ranged
from mild and moderate to severe. "The results were very encouraging:
78 per cent of the patients experienced complete recovery in a period
ranging between three to six months, with no relapse," he said.
Mohamed added that the new treatment had no side effects, but
cautioned that patients have to watch their diets and avoid all
foodstuffs contaminated with insecticides and preservatives -- advice
given to all liver patients.
After the treatment, however, Mohamed emphasised that the liver must
be protected to avoid a relapse. "There are 150 herbs documented in
the international medical literature that serve to protect the liver.
We have 57 of them in Egypt. I came up with a balanced mixture and
tested it on humans. In 80 per cent of the cases, the drug halted the
development of cirrhosis, increased the patients' energy levels and
led to overall well-being."
The potentially cataclysmic effect of this remedy, if it is proven
effective, can be measured better when one considers the fact that the
current treatment given to HCV patients, interferon alfa-2b, is
relatively effective in 50 to 70 per cent of cases, but that the
majority of patients suffer a relapse. Furthermore, side effects can
include flu-like symptoms, depression, rashes, nausea and abnormal
blood counts.
Mohamed says his new drug is the result of eight years of intensive
work -- part conducted in research laboratories in Egypt and part
abroad. Currently, he is negotiating with "some American companies"
for release on the market. He believes it will be available on the
market within two years, at a much lower cost than Interferon, the
most common medication used for hepatitis C so far. "Whereas a course
of Interferon costs LE12,000, a six-month course of my drug will cost
LE500" -- a crucial consideration for low-income patients. There are
rumours that the drug is already being administered to patients
suffering from HCV at certain private clinics in Egypt.
Mohamed claims that his discovery was an ordeal, because of the
absence of any support for his scientific ventures. "Then again, the
facilities and budget in this country for research are inadequate, and
there is an absence of teamwork on any project." He is a firm believer
in the inherent curative properties of wild plants and herbs, which,
he argues, have been ignored here despite a long and flourishing
history of Arab medicine. "If sufficient scientific research were put
into experimenting with these plants and herbs, we would be able to
find a cure for every disease, and it could become an important source
of national revenue, just as it is in China. But this, unfortunately,
is not the case".
Dr Hamdi El-Sayed, head of the Doctors' Syndicate, commented that "a
new discovery for the treatment of hepatitis C sounds very positive,"
but added that he would not take any of the results seriously until
the drug went through the traditional channels. "There is a big
difference between getting a patent for a drug -- which recognises
that the new drug is his invention -- and its release for the public's
use," said El-Sayed, expressing his anxiety at the haphazard way in
which drugs often reach the market and are sold to patients as
effective remedies. "I am just worried about all the press attention
being given to this new miracle drug, which raises people's hopes,
only for them to end up disappointed because it is not as effective as
it claimed to be, or because of its side effects." El-Sayed believes
that if Mohamed wants his drug to be taken seriously, and not be
treated like a popular herbal concoction, he will have to wait until
it goes through rigourous medical testing, and follow the traditional
channels like publishing his findings in a respectable medical journal.
Dr Rifaat Rifaat Kamel, professor of general surgery at Ain Shams
University and a liver specialist, also voiced suspicion. "Generally,
we consider a drug safe after it has been approved by the US Food and
Drug Administration. Of course, we would welcome any cure for
hepatitis C -- but many non-traditional alternative cures have
appeared claiming to treat hepatitis. I have seen many patients who
take such medication and do actually experience a temporary
improvement. They stop their check-ups because they think they are
going to recover totally, only to return later with a liver tumour at
an advanced stage." Part of Kamel's suspicion about these herbal-based
cures, he says, has to do with the confusion between their effect and
the natural course of the disease. "Hepatitis C, by its nature, goes
through highs and lows. The highs could be easily be mistaken for the
result of a drug, when in reality they are not. I am concerned about
the sustained impact of the drug and its possible side effects,
because patients infected with hepatitis C are usually very fragile."
Until the drug is proven to be safe and effective, Kamel suggests that
efforts should be directed towards the prevention of HCV. "In Egypt,
we have to pay special attention to making sure that dental equipment
is properly sterilised. Women who go for a pedicure or a manicure at
the hairdresser' s should make sure that they use their own things,
because this is one common way of transmitting the disease." The lack
of a national screening programme in Egypt is also a serious cause for
concern, noted Kamel, but the Ministry of Health has begun to set one up.
While not denying the high incidence of hepatitis C in Egypt, Kamel
believes the issue has been exaggerated, especially since only five
per cent of patients who contract the disease become terminally ill.
If it is detected early, he claims, patients can lead normal lives.
But given the high incidence of infection in Egypt, as well as the
limited treatment options, it is likely that poor and well-off
patients alike will be flocking to Mohamed's office at the National
Research Centre to see what he has to offer.

Student Excerpts: Great Work from Samina!

2007-09-26T15:20:00.002-05:00

Samina Tariq Khan's Unit Ten Quiz was great. Here is an excerpt:

1- Chapter: 30 , Verse: 22
And one of His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the diversity of your tongues and colors; most surely there are signs in this for the learned
This is fantastic! I have never really related these quotes in the Qur’an to Color Therapy but they are so appropriate. I can’t believe I missed the reference myself as I have been writing articles about the Qur’an and alternative therapies for 6 years! Very good job!

S 2- Chapter: 39 , Verse: 21
Do you not see that Allah sends down water from the cloud, then makes it go along in the earth in springs, then brings forth therewith herbage of various colors, then it withers so that you see it becoming yellow, then He makes it a thing crushed and broken into pieces? Most surely there is a reminder in this for the men of understanding
S 3- Chapter: 35 , Verse: 27
Do you not see that Allah sends down water from the cloud, then We bring forth therewith fruits of various colors; and in the mountains are streaks, white and red, of various hues and (others) intensely black?
The biggest source of light for our planet is sun so in the description I have included sun light also.
The word(s) "sun" appears 50 time(s) in 40 verse(s) in Quran in M. Khan Translation
(6) It is He Who made the sun a shining thing and the moon as a light and measured out its (their) stages, that you might know the number of years and the reckoning. Allah did not create this but in truth. He explains the Ayat (proofs, evidences, verses, lessons, signs, revelations, etc.) in detail for people who have knowledge.
( ÓæÑÉ íæäÓ , Yunus, Chapter #10, Verse )

Pineal glands, which is intimately attached to our brain control the daily rhythms of life, light and colors play a big role in controlling that rhythm. We live in a sea of energy where color is working within us.
Sunlight, or full-spectrum light, holds all the wavelengths of color in the visible spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and magenta) as well as infrared and ultraviolet light, which cannot be seen. Some of the tools used in color therapy are gemstones, candles, wands, prisms, colored fabrics, bath treatments, and colored eye wear. When light enters through the eyes (or the skin) it travels neurological pathways to pineal glands. It shines with in our divine self, and radiates upon us and traverses through our entire system. Different colors give off different wavelength frequencies and these different frequencies have different effects on physical and psychological functions. Research and observation has shown us that specific colors bring balance to our physical and emotional systems.
Colors of Foods:
It is through the choice of the right color foods that can work every day in our lives to improve health and prevent illness. The specific colour of food contains parallel groups of chemicals and other substances essential for health. Red, orange and yellow foods have an energizing and stimulating effect being acidic in quality, while green and blue foods are cooling and pacifying. These foods are alkaline by nature.
Following are the foods and their corresponding colors:
Red ray foods:
Beetroot, aubergine, red apples, red peppers, tomatoes, kidney beans
Orange ray foods:
Oranges, mangoes, peaches, carrots pulses and grains
Yellow ray foods:
Bananas, corn, peppers, yams, pineapple
Green ray foods lettuce, cucumbers, kivi fruits green vefetables
Blue ray foods:
Plums, blueberries, bilberries and fish
Violet ray foods:
Aubergines, purple, broccoli, beet root top, purple grapes
In the same way as the Orientals use the principle of Yin and yang (the positive and negative energies) as useful tools for working out a balanced diet, we can use color in much the same way.
Balanced Diet:
Man’s natural physiological as a tendency is to run from yellow to red, balance in his diet needs to be maintained by eating plenty of fresh green fruits, vegetables, and some blue foods. Unsaturated oils, yeast, honey, and fish have electromagnetic energy corresponding to the color blue.
Too much food at the infrared and red end of the spectrum such as red meats, eggs, and refined salt can stimulate extreme emotions such as anger, hostility, irritability, and impatience. Many studies have proven that eating too much food at the red end of the spectrum, raises ones chances of heart disease and illness related to high blood pressure so balance is necessary in every aspect of life.
Ultra-violet is the Yin end of the spectrum and infra red is the most Yang. The animal world is mainly yang, red to yellow end of the spectrum. In the west we eat a great deal of yang foods, red meats, eggs, and salt. The plant kingdom is represented by the middle colors of the spectrum, browns, yellows, and greens These foods contain within them transformed light energy from the sun’s rays. Our bodies in the form of essential minerals, nutrients and vitamins absorb this life-giving energy.
Properties of Food Colors:
It has also been found that color influences the evaluation of food and drink. For instance, red is commonly associated with sweetness (cherries and strawberries e. g.). Yellow and green are associated with citrus flavor and green especially with food that is unripe.

STUDENT ARTICLES: Unwholesome Harvest

2007-09-26T15:10:00.001-05:00

The following article was contributed by student Shireen Pishdadi. Thank you Shireen for your article!

Unwholesome Harvest

The Food Crisis in the World
and the Current Sell-Out of Halal Selling and Labeling

by

Shireen Pishdadi

IMAGINE SITTING AT an abundant tablespread of delicious food, the host describing the way it was acquired. Some of it was stolen from the neighbors. Some bought with money fraudulently taken from a poor single mother, her whole lifesavings, in fact. Other foods were procured violently, so that people were killed. Some of it is even laced with toxins. But today, you can eat of it freely, as much as you like. The price will be your children’s inheritance.
Would you eat that food? Or would you depart and find other provisions, even if it meant discomfort in the meantime?
I believe most people would choose to leave that table. I also believe that Islam dictates to us beyond any doubt that we must.
I have both bad news for you and good. The abundant and cheap food available to most of us today is not much unlike the scenario above. Yet the time is ripe for a rejuvenation of Islam’s divine laws regarding food and its production and consumption, and the reintroduction of its strongly humane and conservationist ethics. It is as simple as joining forces with your nearby farmers and the “sustainable food” movement to develop local food infrastructures. If it sounds archaic, you’ll see just how profound its beneficial effects can be, if you read on.

I. A Quick Primer on Agriculture in History

AGRICULTURE IS THE most basic of all human productive activities. Food is vital to life. So agriculture in its widest sense is vital to societies. Food is earth’s largest commodity. Everyone eats every day. Globally, 1.3 billion people work directly in agriculture and another 2.5 billion depend upon the food sector for their livelihood.
If you compare society to a house, the foundation you build on is agriculture. If it is to be strong and healthy, it must be founded upon a local economy that is built around a robust and wholesome food infrastructure. In this way, a society can be self-sustaining and independent. But if the local farming network is decimated, there can be no homegrown economy, and there is bound to be dependence and oppression.
“Today, rural North America is being ‘colonized’,” says John Ikerd, professor emeritus, University of Missouri, Columbia. “Multinational corporations are extending their economic sovereignty over the affairs of people in rural places everywhere, including rural America.”
The root of the world’s growing nutrition problem is that we live with so many unexamined myths relating to agriculture and food. The unspoken assumption is that we are either on the boat with modernism to progress, or sailing back to the Stone Age. Sure, what I propose as a solution means paradigm and lifestyle changes, but it does not mean regression.
On the contrary, it means going back to the Laws and ethics of the Quran and the way of its Messenger, salla Allah ‘alayhee wa sallam, not theoretically but in tried and true ways demonstrated by the best of those who went before us in this faith.
“The rapid spread of Islam into three continents in the seventh and eighth centuries was followed by the diffusion of an equally remarkable but less well documented agricultural revolution,” says historian Andrew Watson, whose important article on this very topic appeared in the Journal of Economic History in 1974. “By the eleventh century [the new agriculture] had been transmitted across the length and breadth of the Islamic world and had altered, often radically, the economies of many regions.”
Animal and plant husbandry within the ethical agricultural framework that Islam built was nothing short of magnificent—earthly manifestations of the Quran’s descriptions of the Heavenly gardens and egalitarian capital practices. Reports historian Lucie Bolens:
The great Islamic cities of the Near East, North Africa and Spain…were supported by an elaborate agricultural system that included extensive [conservationist] irrigation and an expert knowledge of the most advanced agricultural methods in the world. The Muslims reared the finest horses and sheep and cultivated the best orchards and vegetable gardens. They knew how to fight insect pests, how to use fertilizers, and they were experts at grafting trees and crossing plants to produce new varieties….Fields that had been yielding one crop yearly at most prior to the Muslims were now capable of yielding three or more crops, in rotation….Agricultural production responded to the demands of an increasingly sophisticated and cosmopolitan urban population by providing the [nearby] towns with a variety of products unknown in Northern Europe…The agricultural system of the Spanish Muslims, in particular, was “the most complex, the most scientific, the most perfect, ever devised by the ingenuity of man”….With a deep love for nature, and a relaxed way of life, classical Islamic society achieved ecological balance, a successful average economy of operation, based not on theory but on the acquired knowledge of many civilized traditions.
In other words, despite all that we are currently hearing of the inevitability of global warming and environmental holocaust, it does not have to be this way. Yet humanity must grasp that the solutions cannot proceed from capitalism’s pyramid profit schemes better known as multinational corporations. Rather, they can only come from belief in One God, the internalization of the spirit of His revelation, and a look at the successful pre-modern ecological practices of agrarian peoples.

II. What Is Wrong With Our Present Farming Industry?

IN A WORD, everything. Once, upright Muslims looked far deeper into food consumption than the simplistic no-pork, no-alcohol, letter-of-the-law attitude prevalent among us today. The great Imam Nawawi, for instance, refused even the food of the Muslim government of his day (calling it the “food of the tyrant”) out of fear for its ethical impurity.
Our thick ignorance of our own tradition with regard to food has placed us at the mercy of an increasingly elusive and consolidated industry, which has no ethical values beyond slogan-morals. The widespread assumption that all is well on the farm is deeply false. We see an abundance of affordable food before our eyes and blindly trust that some hidden federal agency is ensuring a safe food supply. We take it on faith that science and technology have finally delivered Adam’s offspring to an agricultural Eden.
The reason the dreadful food industry has escaped our notice is because our connection to food production is truncated at the grocery store, and our adherence to Islamic dietary Law has been severed at the most superficial standard. To us, food has become a mere commodity, instead of a basic spiritual right of all people. Our role in it has been reduced to complacent consumers instead of champions of the Middle Way bearing the message of the prophets.
I originally wrote a 7,000-word “summary” to explain the catastrophe of the contemporary global food industry. It would take a hefty volume to give you the gory details. But keep this in mind as I apprise you of just the grim outline. The world is not separated into comparmentalized countries that live in vacuums. “A successful and durable [multinational corporation],” says commentator Ruth Rama, “operates with resolute constancy as if the entire world or major regions of it were a single entity, selling the same things in the same way everywhere.”
Divisive nationalistic, patriotic, or tribalistic thought is irrelevant. Events everywhere are related and consequences eventually affect everyone. Poverty in the vast poor countries facilitates lavish consumption in select rich ones. The fact is a great amount of our food is grown in modern-day plantation countries and war is a primary trade tool.
When Muslims implemented the agricultural ethics of the Quran and Sunnah, their systems were far more sophisticated than the fairly primitive food structures of today. But they worked in and with nature not against it. Moreover, they understood that the key to such complexity was to disseminate their earth knowledge freely and widely.
The basic problem of the food industry is that such knowledge cannot be taken from the learned farmer and made generic so food can be mass-produced. That capital goal required companies and governments to usurp control of agriculture in order to create factory systems needing no knowledge so that people from anywhere—such as slaves, or migrant workers—could be mindlessly slotted in to plant and pick, raise and butcher.
Behold the dark magic of monocropping, just the kind of assembly line solution globalization needed.

The death of diversity
The myopic concern of agribusiness with efficient control of production and, hence, profit, has reduced dynamic farming to linear and quantifiable systems that require farmers to drop seeds for days and spray chemicals for miles in a technique called monocropping. One crop is harvested season after season.
In the 1960s, Northern “donor” agencies sold us this bill of goods as the “green revolution,” a benevolent plan to eliminate hunger in poor countries. With it, they wiped out community after community’s farming diversity, introducing a few uniform crop varieties that could not yield the promised bounty without torrential chemical and water inputs.
“It is a prime example of how an effort to ‘modernize’ can put the very basis of sustainable development at risk, simply by bypassing and undermining local resources, knowledge and experience generated over millennia” (read more at www.grain.org, which I am quoting here). “Rather than eliminating hunger, the ‘green revolution’ moved control over agriculture and rural livelihoods from local communities to international development agencies and private corporations.”
Loss of agricultural knowledge means the loss of farming communities, which leads to a society without a rural sector and the loss of culture.
Monocropping reaps large amounts of crops, but at many costs, like completely depleting topsoil, turning fertile land into barren desert. Topsoil is precious. Without it, crops can’t grow. Plains become infertile. No machine can readily create it. It takes from 200 to 1,000 years for 2.5 cm of topsoil to build up. Quite literally, we are eating off lands that the peoples of antiquity were wise and selfless enough to conserve.
Since 1945, an estimated 108 million acres of productive land has been lost to agriculture each year. That’s 4.85 billion acres, or around 35 percent, of the earth’s fertile land, according to the United Nations’ Environmental Programme. Put another way, of the world’s estimated 5,200 million hectares of agriculturally used dryland, 69 percent is degraded or subjected to desertification. In Africa, that ratio is 73 percent. In Asia, 70 percent (see Lawrence Geoffrey’s Capitalism and Countryside: The Rural Crisis in Australia).
The problem of monocropping gets worse. Modern agriculture is depleting the world's available fresh water—less than one-half of 1 percent of all the water on earth. At the current rate of doubling every 20 years, water usage will seriously deplete all fresh water in the world in 25 years. In the midst of this unmitigated catastrophe, the spooky World Bank is busy trying to privatize water for industry while at the same time reducing subsidies to poor people for obtaining fresh water (look up the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment).
What is the impact on energy? “The U.S. food system uses over 10 quadrillion BTU (10,551 quadrillion Joules) of energy each year, as much as France’s total annual energy consumption,” says Danielle Murray of the Earth Policy Institute. “Growing food accounts for only one-fifth of this. The other four-fifths is used to move, process, package, sell, and store food after it leaves the farm.”
It is true that food has significantly cheapened so that once luxury items like meat and sugar are now available to every one. But the price we pay at the store does not reflect the cost of water, land, labor, health, and pollution.

Illegal seed and killer genes
The business corollary to monocropping and its decimation of farming communities is biopiracy: The patenting of indigenous plants, seed varieties, and genetically selected livestock. You are forgiven if this takes you a moment to sink in. Companies now own seeds, plants, and livestock breeds—not the stuff themselves but their very existence as genetic life forms!
About six multinational corporations like Monsanto and DuPont have “been investing into biotechnology in such a way that patents have been taken out on indigenous plants which have been used for generations by the local people, without their knowledge or consent,” says Ronaldo Seroa da Motta, author of “The Economics Of Biodiversity In Brazil: The Case of Forest Conversion.” “The people then find that the only way to use their age-old knowledge is to buy [the plants] back from the big corporations.” The farmers of bio-rich Brazil have already lost half their plant species to business interests.
Typically, the food multinationals go around testing farmers’ crops to ensure they are not keeping any seed from last year’s crops, which is now illegal. If they want to plant again, they must, by law, buy again from corporations. But the Cargill/Monsanto cluster has found a solution to the troublesome testing. They are devising a way to insert a “terminator gene” into plants to render their seeds sterile.
“Seed, the source of life, has become a source of death in the hands of global seed and biotechnology corporations,” says A. Navdanya of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology. “Thousands of farmers have committed suicide in India and other countries since MNCs entered the seed sector through globalization. Farmers who have had to sell their kidneys or whose family members committed suicide gave testimonies of how seed/chemical monopolies are squeezing profits by extracting the very life of poor peasants.”
And you thought war was the Iraqi people’s biggest problem. Note the folks at grain.org:
Most recently, new legislation in Iraq has been carefully put in place by the United States that effectively hands over the seed market to transnational corporations. This is a disastrous turn of events for Iraqi farmers, biodiversity and the country's food security. While political sovereignty remains an illusion, food sovereignty for the Iraqi people has been made near impossible by these new regulations. When the new law—on plant variety protection (PVP)—is put into effect, seed saving will be illegal and the market will only offer proprietary “PVP-protected” planting material “invented” by transnational agribusiness corpor–ations. The new law totally ignores all the contributions Iraqi farmers have [for millennia] made to development of important crops like wheat, barley, date and pulses. Its consequences are the loss of farmers’ freedoms and a grave threat to food sovereignty in Iraq, as it has been in India and other countries.”

Got Pus?
In addition to desertification, expunging plant diversity, and cultural obliteration intensive monocropping made the industrial factory model possible for animal husbandry. The swath of ecological and health destruction cut by the meat and poultry industries alone is absolutely staggering, the merciless abuse of animals in the process beyond comprehension.
In their publication Blood, Sweat, and Fear Human Rights Watch correctly discerns the profit formula of the United States’ meat and poultry industry as dependent upon “achieving expanded operations with economies of scale, low costs, and accelerated production speeds.”
That profit “scale”, investment “cost,” and cash-in “speed” needed three ingredients: A pervasive monocrop, cheap oil, and slave-like labor. With miles of Midwestern corn and soy, war in the Middle East, and the virtual agri-colonizing of an ill-defined but aptly named Third World, all the pieces were in place to take the animals off the land and create low-budget meat houses in concentrated feeding operations better known as factory farms. There’s your low cost meat.
Right now, hundreds of thousands of cows live crammed in the most efficient space with no room to move. Wallowing in their own filth, they are branded, dehorned, and castrated, all without anesthetics. Naturalists once classified these animals as ruminants because they eat grass then chew the cud regurgitated from their specially designed multiple-chambered stomachs. Only, these bovines have no grass to eat, just monocropped corn. It’s called grain-feeding and dooms them to slow, agonizing death by poisoning.
Grain feeding cows is practiced to make them obese, because industry sells them mostly by the pound not according to health quality. The meat of the obese cow is also unhealthy for humans. Indeed, red meat got its bad-health reputation from grain-fed cows because the grain makes it high in cholesterol and fat.
Cows that eat the grass Allah made them to eat, while getting exercise on the pasture, are leaner and their meat is lower in cholesterol, higher in protein, and their fat is full of healthful Omega 3 essential fatty acids, vitamins A and E, and more.
Grain for ruminants is like candy, a good treat in small amounts. But a cow that goes from grass to only grain will die. And so it is that every university agricultural extension has instructions on how to introduce cows slowly to a grain diet without immediately killing them. Yet they will be sick cows, and so with the grains must go medication to keep them alive!
Enter the number one consumer of drugs in the world: The livestock industry—and if you’re getting the logic of the factory farm, you should have guessed by now that it is the leading incubation center for drug-resistant bugs in the world. “Specifically there is a growing cognizance of the relationship between increased antibiotic use and the development of ‘super-germs’,” says biotechnologist Kevin Jones in the Canadian Journal of Sociology.
The Union of Concerned Scientists says that American agriculture uses a minimum of 25 million pounds of antibiotics every year, making antibiotics the cornerstone of the industry.
The reason for this is simple. These farms are not much unlike the unsanitary disease-infested cities of the Dark Ages where plagues wiped out people. Factory farm cities have no sewage system for the 1.5 billion tons of manure annually collecting in underground water lagoons, some bigger than football fields, wreaking havoc on local ecologies and surrounding communities that have to live with the stench in the best scenario, leaking and spilling in the worst.
The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that manure has already polluted 35,000 miles of United States rivers. For example, in June of 1995, 25 million gallons of manure spilled from an 8-acre lagoon in North Carolina, killing 10 million fish in the New River and closing 364,000 acres of coastal wetlands to shell fishing—and this is just one of many cases.
Dairy and egg are the cruelest industries. Cows supposed to live 15 years, now go down in three (and hence are called “downers”), at which time they are literally dragged off to slaughter for further profit. Before that their udder-diseased milk becomes filled with somatic cells—otherwise known as pus.
If it’s a calf fated at birth for gourmet use, it’s hauled off, chained down, crated, and fed a milk substitute that includes cow blood. Anemic and often suffering from diarrhea, pneumonia, and lameness, it is killed young and fed to you as delightful veal.
Maximizing profit, of course, means animals that get fat fast or produce quick and often. Laying hens are jammed tight into crate-like cages with no room to stretch to even open a wing. Their beaks and toes are cut off to stop cannibalistic and aggressive behavior between stressed out chickens. Unhappy chickens (surprise!) are not productive, so they are subjected to forced-molting by two weeks of complete starvation, a practice that shocks their systems into laying eggs. This breed of chicken is not used for meat, so the male chicks are culled and mostly thrown live into dumpsters by the thousands. (It is the cheapest way to kill them).
If you’re really thinking ahead you will have already guessed that increasing antibiotic-resistant bacteria, incurable diseases like mad cow, and contagious epidemics like avian flu all are now seriously thought by researchers to have had their origins in the factory farm. But where others sense adversity the food corporations have smelled opportunity and the chance to blame and, so, nearly wipe out the back yard and small farm producer the world over, leaving us even more completely in the thralldom of the multinationals.

Few of us can imagine this land of milk and honey running dry, but the harsh reality is there is a reason why three-fourths of the world is destitute. We are consuming not only more than our share of the planet’s wealth, but irresponsibly using up our own children’s inheritance and almost guaranteeing their poverty.
These unimaginably cruel practices do not need a scholar of Islam to state the obvious. The place and treatment of animals in Islam is copiously addressed throughout this religion’s teachings. If the Prophet, salla Allahu ‘alayhee wa sallam, informed us of Hellfire for the woman who imprisoned and starved a cat to death, and Paradise for one who climbed down a well to water from a shoe a thirsting dog, what then is our responsibility before Allah for the treatment of the animals He gave us to eat, to say nothing of our own health?
In addition, one need not be an economist to understand that if it takes, along with a whole trough of antibiotics, an estimated 4.8 pounds of grain, 390 gallons of water, and .25 gallons of gasoline to produce a pound of beef, according to the Millennium Project, small sustainable farmers, who use their families, land, rain and sun to farm, will become extinct because they will be undersold by the rich industrial food giants—until, that is, the latter become our only choice. Then prices will continue to rise until the masses of people will not be able to afford even bread.

III. Pass the Carcinogens, Please

EVER-INCREASINGLY WE are bombarded with a growing list of health ailments, all food related—correction, all industrial-food related. It is no longer farfetched to say that we are consuming more toxic substances in our food than nutrients. Our food is grown swimming in chemicals, then processed with chemicals, then preserved with still more chemicals, and finally packaged in chemical plastics and transported. No wonder the hallmark of modern-day food is (worthless) artificial enrichment.

Hormones and Pathogens
Muslim leadership in the halal food industry currently deems as acceptable (by way of loopholes) the practice of administering artificial hormones to cows, whether to increase growth or milk production. Yet there is a growing body of evidence showing the deleterious effects of hormones in milk (and in the water supply by way of manure)!
The EU has banned the use of such hormones, whose effects include altering of the human hormone balance, developmental abnormality, infertility, cancer, and early onset of puberty in girls, which puts them at greater risk of developing breast cancer and other female-prevalent cancers.
Moreover, the sheer problem of automated, high-speed slaughterhouses makes it impossible for workers to clean off the manure caked all over the animals. Meat is inevitably contaminated, which has led to the new practice of irradiating it before it leaves the slaughterhouse. This kills all bacteria, good and bad, and destroys cells that research shows further degrades the nutritional value of the meat.
The excessive antibiotic use in factory animals has made one out of every six cases of campylobacter, a common food poisoning bacteria, resistant to the fluoroquinolones normally used to treat it. Nearly all staph infections are now resistant to penicillin and newer drugs. Salmonella, enterococcus, and shigella (dysentery) are all showing widespread antibiotic resistance for the same reason.
As more and more classes of antibiotics become useless, more and more sicknesses are becoming prevalent. In 2000, the USDA estimated the cost from just these five bacterial foodborne pathogens as $6.9 billion, causing 76 million human illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,200 deaths. In the same year, however, clinics reported cases of 250 foodborne pathogens.

Pesticides in our bodies
Pesticides are one of the most common toxic substances found in food. They impair the immune system and cause a whole slew of diseases. Time was, the primary public health concern for pesticides was acute severe poisoning by accidental exposure or ingestion, and the long-term potential for cancer.
Today, we know that pesticides in our food affect the nervous, endocrine (glands and hormones), immune, and reproductive systems. They also pose increased threats to infants, young children, the unborn, and other individuals especially susceptible to health problems caused by toxic pollutants. Pesticides have been linked to Parkinson's disease, learning disabilities, hyperactivity, emotional disorders, weakened immune systems, birth defects, and low sperm counts.
The vast majority of crops grown in the United States feed farm animals, not humans and contain far higher levels of pesticides than those meant for human consumption.
But pesticide residues accumulate in the fat and tissue of animals. More than 90 percent of the pesticides Americans consume are found in the fat and tissue of meat and dairy products, which in turn accumulate in our fat over our lifetime.
Furthermore, long after their use, pesticides remain in the soil and water. Despite being banned in 1972, DDT has been found in the breast milk of over 99 percent of all mothers in America. As the food supply becomes more consolidated and global, so does the risk of exposure to toxic pesticides that were banned in the United States, but which chemical companies still sell legally abroad to mostly poor countries which send it right back to us in the foods agribusiness grows on their lands.
According to the EPA, over 1 billion tons of pesticides are used every year in America. Centers for Disease Control studies show that more than 90 percent of the thousands of people tested carried a mixture of pesticides, many linked to serious health problems.

IV. The Deception of Halal Certification

A MUSLIM MOTHER walks into a store grateful to find the shelves filled with products stamped with a little ‘H’ inside a triangle. This symbol of halal assures her the food she is buying is good for both the bodies and souls of her Muslim family.
Little does she know these ‘halal’ foods are potentially harmful to the health of her children, that her money is going to support an industry that is oppressing her relatives back home in South Asia, the Middle East, North and West Africa, or South America; and that by eating what is lawfully questionable and certainly non-tayyib she is possibly not following the dictates of the Quran and Sunnah and positively not their spirit.
Certifying foods as halal and tayyib could be a great service to Muslims. The organizational leaders of a number of halal certification programs (HCP’s) have rightfully expressed much anxiety about fraudulent halal business activity in the Muslim community and tout certification as an essential protection for the Muslim consumer.
But these programs, as they stand, are a disservice to the Muslim community because they will mislead it, contribute to the degeneration of its health, and perpetuate the egregious injustices of the multinational food system on people in the name of Islam.
These are objections I have repeatedly raised in detail to the relevant halal food committees with no qualitative change beyond rhetoric and stonewalling. Such halal labeling programs have three major faults in their current forms that will render them stillborn and non-viable as far as a genuine Islamic response to the corporate corruption of the food industry: (1) There are non-tayyib and questionably halal foods that will be unavoidably certified; (2) Muslim buying power will be used in a way that is not in our best interests, rather in ways that damage Muslims and others; and (3) the issue of halal is far more comprehensive than no pork or alcohol and cutting the correct veins!
Modern food industry practices (the very little that is known of it in the Muslim community) may be acceptable to Muslim leadership partly due to a misapprehension that, practically speaking, there are no other choices for us and that any other way of getting food would be an excessive hardship for Muslims. This fallacy exists because there is a virtual vacuum in the community about food knowledge. In fact, not only are there solutions, but there are ways to implement them. Numerous studies have been and continue to be done on the ramifications of the food industry and the solutions to the health and welfare devastation it is wreaking. Many are the alternative groups at work on feasible food strategies.
There is no doubt that the challenge of seeking to educate the Muslim community about the grave problem of food today—and to do this in order to inspire them to participate in, and innovate, a local, sustainable food movement in conjunction with other urban Americans and local farmers—is palpably daunting.
Yet there is another reality about setting the direction of Muslims and food in America that is easily as influential over Muslim organizational leadership positions as the intimidating task of leading Muslims to activate local food system alternatives to the current food pharaohs; namely, the incredible attractiveness of being in a position to “get a piece of the pie,” as one speaker put it in an apt metaphor at a recent Halal Food Conference.
That is, the little halal stamp gives Muslim organizational agencies a whopping opportunity to share in the multinational food corporations’ billions of dollars of profits. Accepted or authorized halal food certifying entities will undoubtedly reap millions for affixing their seals of approval on food products.
This is not to mention the staggering profits awaiting halal food producers and resellers—all of which hinges on enacting halal standards that state and, perhaps, federal government agencies will enact into law and enforce thereafter, becoming, in the process, the unlikely secular arbiter of Muslim Sacred Law.

The Halal Standard Debates
The halal certification program argument goes something like this: It is understood that there are egregious health, economic, and animal treatment injustices in the current multinational food oligopoly throughout the world, and that this may even impinge on the halal nature of some food items. But Muslims must start somewhere, and the best way is to lead Muslim Americans to make concerted efforts to educate the industry and encourage it to cater to their requirements. We can then build up our halal standards little by little.
This 12-step type of 1990s response would be a logical one if we lived in another century or on another planet. But, the fact is this position is either incredibly disingenuous or amazingly naïve. There is no way to build up the halal standards little by little until we reach “full” halal and tayyib, that is lawful and wholesome, food compliance, food which is produced under just and ethical principles—not within a system that is virtually tyrannized by MNC’s powerful enough to bring down nations! Rather, the proposed “little” path requires baby steps that will go on and on supporting and perpetuating the mess of an industry so that we may one day have absolutely no remaining choices.
First, “our” requirements should consist of more than just partaking of the American consumer lifestyle minus the alcohol and pork! “Our” needs should include concepts of health and justice: Healthy choices for us and our families, and justice so that other people can choose healthy lifestyles for their families.
Second, the food industry is ultra complex to understand partly because it has undergone drastic changes in the last half century, and partly because of the unprecedented use of propaganda to mystify the masses with whatever image they portray of themselves and their products. Muslims need to x-ray the industry and understand it so as not to ignorantly fall under its control.
Third, “our” choice to give our spending power to the food giants is suicide. Muslims are a lucrative market, and so is certification. Either we will be paid off with a share of the certification business while directing our money, and therefore support, to the food giants by choosing them to provide us with food. Or, we can choose to control our own food by working with small scale and local food producers and consequently build up our own local communities’ economies, Muslims and others, in a far more beneficial and long lasting way than a handful of organizations just lapping up a few proceeds.
It is telltale that at one recent conference the main speakers were mostly businessmen, some of whom are key players in the formulation of the standards, a disturbing conflict of interest. Many tried point-blank to get the audience riled up about the million dollar businesses that will come about, the tidbits Muslims will be scraping up from the food industry. Inconceivably, no one spoke about the halal standards themselves. Indeed, I was sternly told not to speak about the food industry or the standards while on one of the panels.
Rather, “we,” the community, in whose behalf all of this is taking place, were promised that our increasing single mother families will have halal baby food, and the two-parent working homes will have halal fast food, and that the quality will surely be superior to what we are now exposed. The fact that the quality is now literally shameful, that the trend of the industry shows that not only is food becoming less nutritious, and more pathogenic, but also that we will have less and less choices, was never even touched on.
They promised us not only that we will get a “piece of the pie,” but that the pie is going to get bigger with us! All this in a world that is increasingly engaged in wars, with an agricultural industry that is destroying the planet we live on! So, was that a promise or a threat?
Muslims want to jump onto the unsustainable bandwagon for a “piece of the pie” as if we can magically create larger water tables, or arable topsoil, or oil! We think we can become competitive with the MNC’s, businesses so large they challenge the GDP of nations, corporations that have long ago left the sphere of competitiveness behind in their dust. (Over half of the world’s top 100 richest entities are corporations. The rest are countries).
It is bad enough that hydrogenated oils and high fructose corn syrup, even the sweetener that kills rats called aspartame, among many other artificially lab-created food ingredients that are proven health hazards and none of which have nutritional benefits, are currently considered ‘halal’!
Basically, anything that clears the no-alcohol or pork threshold is halal, even genetically modified foods that most of the rest of the world is fighting against. In an age where foods are created in labs and genetically modified and patented, we are encountering a new scale of issues that demands re-examination of our beliefs in light of the Shari‘ah and not FDA regulations (one strong belief now apparently being that if the FDA (which many now call the Faster Death Administration, instead of “Food and Drug”) allows things to be put in our foods it must be good for us).

Eight Halal Standard That Aren’t
Recently, I was able to see a current halal standards for meat proposal, which focuses mainly on two aspects, slaughter and feed, neither of which is addressed properly. On the surface, the standards look impressive: Humane slaughter, kindness and mercy to disease-free animals, vegetarian feed, no antibiotics and hormones. But reality is a lot more difficult to address than words. Look beyond the word makeup of the following eight proposed halal standards.
(1) Humaneness is simply not defined. Using words like “humane” or “natural” unspecified by law can mean anything. Is shackling, hanging a live, conscious one-ton cow by a back leg humane or not? Is restraining the cow by clamping metal tongs in its nostrils and pulling its head forward? It is according to these halal standards because these are common practices. In fact, aside from the few and far between humane slaughterhouses in the country, these are the only ways to slaughter that I have encountered, along with stunning, a practice which is made bizarrely permissible on chickens for the halal stamp.
(2) “Disease-free” is an oxy-moron in factory-farmed animals. All the animals coming out of industrial farming are unhealthy. But diseased? That depends on how you define it. So either none of the animals qualify or we are not agreeing on what disease means. Indeed, USDA law allows animals with tumors to be sold for food, though the liver cannot be sold because it is damaged by acidosis from the grain-feeding; and the spinal cord and head cannot be sold for fear of mad cow. Moreover, all the animals are drugged up on antibiotics. The point is disease is considered a normal part of modern agriculture. Thus farms and slaughterhouses have rules to deal with it.
(3) The references to hormones and antibiotics still allow their use because they address slaughterhouses and not the consequences of their usage on farms. In addition (a) hormone usage is by law subject to a quarantine period before slaughter. So animals may be technically free at the time of slaughter, but the damage is done. Moreover, the hormones have already been released into the soil and water via manure eventually getting to humans; (b) chickens are not given hormones by law so adding that to the halal disclosure form means nothing; and (c) if you look carefully at the standards it refers only to subtherapeutic antibiotics, which means that animals can and do still get massive antibiotics regularly in their water for medication purposes.
(4) Reference to vegetarian feed does not stipulate this must be the practice for the duration of the animal’s life. The standards allow a loophole to become the norm by quarantining animals for 60 days on vegetarian feed to make them halal. Does this protect us from mad cow disease and other cause-and-effect consequences of feeding ruminants meat, which is exactly what most gain-feed contains? No, it merely perpetuates the problem.
Moreover, vegetarian feed is not specific enough. It means not cow-healthy grass but cow-sickening grain-feed—all that genetically modified corn and soy that are replacing the Amazon and making the cows ill.
(5) That animals can be purchased from auctions, which many are, means that there is no way to verify how the animals were raised or fed.
(6) The issues not addressed in the halal standards are as significant as those inadequately dealt with—including pesticides, genetic modification, labor exploitation, ecological destruction, and animal cruelty.
(7) There are inconsistencies between the halal standards and the disclosure form that the halal act requires to be filled out and posted by anyone in the halal business. For example, there are no questions on the disclosure form addressing humane slaughter issues—issues that are, in any case, moot, unenforceable, and unrealistic in the current industry.
(8) Finally, the disclosure form allows for fraudulent misrepresentation of products, one of the major reasons for enacting the halal act. It lists numerous questions that allow for multiple standards, some higher than others. But halal businesses only have to truthfully answer questions that pertain to the standards of “their” certifying agency. Any questions beyond the scope of these narrow critieria can be falsely answered without any liability. In addition, how many businesses are going to seek out the higher standards when the economic environment we are choosing to operate in would make it difficult and unprofitable?

The Questionable Knowledge of the Knowledgeable
This brings me to the next point. The Islamic scholars, business people, nutritionists, and others who approved the standards know, on the whole, little about the whole food industry. Some know how the animals are raised, some about the thousands of food ingredients, and some the USDA policies on slaughter. Then there are our religious scholars with their invaluable Islamic knowledge, but most of whom know little about the food industry, which, frankly, makes their religious rulings suspect.
Totally missing are the food industry experts, the farmers, the local food specialists, the policy professional, the economic and ecology scholars. When I raised this blatant oversight to some halal standards representatives, their response was that such research and awareness can come at a later date. The current and only goal is enactment of these standards into law in states like Illinois and New Jersey as models.
This is like asking for approval for car safety standards from people who know nothing about car safety issues! I find it odd that someone like myself has to remind Islamic institutions that ultimately we are not talking about our own opinions, but the commandments of Allah, Most High.
The pervasive scope of the food dilemma granted, still we cannot derive rules of Islam applicable to our society without first thoroughly understanding our present day issues. Had the mad cow scare never been made public the Muslim community might well still be unaware that animals are fed animals, therefore making them haram (according to some schools) to eat. Isn’t it likely that there are other practices that would call the halalness of other foods into question?
A final word is in order about the notion of tayyib, or wholesomeness of food, which I have mentioned. Allah’s injunction to His prophets—O messengers! Eat of all that is wholesome, and do righteous deeds. Indeed, I am all knowing of all that you do (Sûrat Al-Mu’minûn, 23:51)—strongly indicates an ethical dimension to halal. In a widely distributed letter on this topic, one writer commented on this verse:
With these words, God enjoins His prophets with an essential permission that is also a comprehensive instruction: They may eat all that is wholly beneficial—from its substance, to its production, to its acquisition, to its consumption. If it was grown in purity, gotten lawfully, and eaten appropriately it was made permissible to them. In other words, the food of the men of God was necessarily to be naturally, morally, and spiritually good, with no adulteration in any dimension of this closed sequence of goodness. This is implicit in the Quran’s injunction and the operative Arabic word ‘al-tayyibât’ at its heart. In addition, many are the statements of the Prophet, God’s blessings and peace be ever upon him, in which he disclosed to the community his conscientious practice of not eating food the origin or transactional intent of which was not explicitly known to him.
Not upholding the critical aspects of our religion, which mandates that food be tayyib, not only halal, means that we have ridiculed our divine tradition in the name of ease, acquiescing in the mortal standards of others. Surely, Islam calls on us to show more concern about the issues affecting our food, especially that which would be receiving the official label halal.

V. A Homemade Solution

THERE IS MUCH to be said about how seemingly helpless individuals like us and as fragile a community as are Muslims in America can begin to make a difference in the food life of the nation and the world. As in all things, it begins with our own immediate and daily actions, the proverbial first pebble that starts the avalanche.
The odd fact is that both the Muslim and Jewish communities could be key players in any breakthrough solution because of the separation of state and religion ethos and because we both have such defined dietary laws. For now, religious food standards are untouchable by the government.
For this reason, it is essential that Muslims, first and foremost, vigorously take up the challenge of closely defining the Shari‘ah of tayyib and halal food pertinent to the time and place we live in. This point cannot be overstated. For this charge alone will inevitably shift Muslims into badly needed new food paradigms. I say new, but, truly, they are old. They are Islam’s food paradigms.
With Quran and Sunnah definitions of what is halal and tayyib, any standards we form could very realistically and quickly become the backbone of the sustainable food movement, which needs a community like ours—with the policy-setting latitude we have, whether we know it or not—to blaze the new American food trail. Ours would form the umbrella under which policies could blossom in favor of local farmers and local food infrastructures because such regulations could not be touched by the state and therefore the MNC’s.
This is truly an arena where the Muslim community—by insisting to free itself of the complete hardship that each of us as individuals experience in finding wholesome and undoubtedly halal food—can be among the leaders in an issue that is threatening the well being of so much life on our planet.
In terms of economics, such a move would be far more profitable than what is currently proposed. It will put money not only in the businesses carrying out certification, but with Muslim food sellers and the many workers in our community who would find a tremendous number of new jobs created.
In addition, solidarity will be formed with other Americans—farmers and urbanites—because grassroots relationships will develop, based on mutual justice and righteousness.
We are very fortunate, indeed, that there are many experts in food policy, sustainability, local economies, and related areas. Truth be told, without them we are currently in no position to take on such a mission. It is also fortuitous that these people, the “local food” community, as I have come to call them, will welcome us with open and sincere arms, unlike many of the powerful of America, who we always seem so eager to pursue, but who continue to plague us with hurtful accusations and propaganda.
Here are two short lists to help you help yourself and your community:
What should the community do?
 Prepare comprehensive portfolios of the food industry and issues for Islamic scholars and work with them to establish proper definitions of halal and tayyib within the context of the real food industry
 Scholars, imams, speakers, and teachers should preach these standards in the masajid and schools, propagate the meaning of “true” halal and tayyib food, and encourage people to get involved in implementing the standards
 Conversation should begin between communities and local farmers and food activists (you may contact me at shireen@faithinplace.org to find out how and with whom to make those connections)
 Local businesses should connect with local farmers and local food processors and work out specific agreements according to our standards
 Local distribution networks should be developed—which means jobs—work that ought to go to the people and neighborhoods that need them so coalitions can be formed between our own communities and networks

What should you be doing?
 Familiarize yourself with the food and agriculture-oriented verses of the Quran and the statements of the Prophet, salla Allahu ‘alayhee wa sallam.
 Re-budget, so that you can pay more for organic and local food (food costs are a difficult and complicated topic, but basically, as both supply and demand increase, as long as there are efficient distribution networks, the prices should decrease again)
 Start slowly changing eating habits: Cut out the fast food and junk food. None of these things should have the halal label on them because they are not really ‘food’ and because they are completely unethically produced
 Demand that community leadership make this issue a priority

The prophets of the Quran all focused on the unifying message of One God, while at the same time enjoining right ethical behavior as a demonstration of this belief. This too is our challenge as Muslims in America, and nowhere is it more needed than in our own and the world’s food reform.

GREAT WEBSITE: Islamic Manuscripts

2007-09-26T15:00:00.001-05:00

The following site has a treasure chest full of Islamic Manuscripts in their system. Browse and enjoy!

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/arabic/arabichome.html