http://muslimlawprof.orgQuick Blogcasthttp://muslimlawprof.org/2013/03/04/rumi-reason-and-shiism.aspx#comment-19091161<span>Thanks for the comment and the kind words.&nbsp; I never found it difficult actually to learn.&nbsp; Dialect and basic grammar at home, four years in university, three in law school, two living in Iraq and working exclusively in the legal field among those who don't know anything else and at the end of all of that, Fusha was sort of second nature.&nbsp; Ironically, Adil Imam and Egyptian cinema is not, I have a much harder time with that than I do with Rumi!&nbsp; <br /> <br /> Your thoughts on speaking I share, though I don't notice it in Arabic, mainly because I spoke it from before I knew how to read in Arabic or English.&nbsp; However, I see it in the other languages I know to far less proficiency--Indonesian and German in particular.&nbsp; If I get an email from a friend in Germany, it's not hard to write back.&nbsp; I might need a dictionary, I&nbsp;might not, but I can write back.&nbsp;&nbsp;If Germans are talking I can&nbsp;barely follow.&nbsp; I think it&nbsp;might depend on how one learns it,&nbsp;if from childhood speaking is easy.&nbsp; If not, perhaps harder than reading and writing.&nbsp; Thanks again for the comment.&nbsp; </span>Haider Ala Hamoudi2013-03-08T12:31:12Zhttp://muslimlawprof.org/2013/03/04/rumi-reason-and-shiism.aspx#comment-19089347Been following your blog for a while. I remember reading somewhere that you grew up in the US. Yet you seem to be fluent in Modern Standard Arabic (Fusha) and, I presume, Iraqi dialect. Most Iraqi Arabs I know growing up outside of Iraq don't have a very good command of Fusha or even dialect. Did you study Fusha in school or university? You must be able to read and write very well if you understand Rumi in Arabic. Just wondering, do you also write in Arabic (Fusha) to a good standard or is it just reading? I've an interest in language acquisition and was wondering as writing is often more of a skill learned through practise and education but reading in many cases easier to acquire. I know a number of people of Iraqi origin here in the UK who, for instance, have been schooled in Fusha for a number of years and can: read and write to a satisfactory standard - perhaps early high school level - but not really speak. Some even struggle to understand the news on channels like Al Jazeera.Sima2013-03-08T05:09:32Zhttp://muslimlawprof.org/2013/02/26/qaradawi-on-economics-and-politics.aspx#comment-19046530What, I would add to your questions, would Qaradawi believe if the American capitalists, instead of throwing the seeds into the ocean, planted them instead, harvested the wheat, and sold it at or below cost into the Egyptian marketplace, thus depressing the market price of wheat for the Egyptian farmers, thus depriving them of their livelihood? This is not a purely academic question either, as there are quite a lot of results that come up in a Google search for 'WTO wheat anti-dumping'.Blake2013-02-26T17:20:52Zhttp://muslimlawprof.org/2012/11/23/a-problem-of-overselling-realistic-expectations-and-islamic-finance.aspx#comment-18439228Thanks very much Arshad, and my apologies for not posting this sooner, as I should have.&nbsp; I've been in the midst of the end of semester crunch. . . .Haider Ala Hamoudi2012-12-21T19:27:16Zhttp://muslimlawprof.org/2012/11/23/a-problem-of-overselling-realistic-expectations-and-islamic-finance.aspx#comment-18259427Love the comparison between US voters and Islamic finance consumers -- makes the point well.<br />I'm wondering whether there have been any serious studies comparing the "fairness" (based on the metrics you cited) of an equity-based model versus an interest-based model. Silicon Valley (SV) comes to mind, with its geographic area that's a mere subset of the SF Bay Area as a whole. SV is where, between 2001 and 2011, approx. $600 billion of new value (equity) was created by venture-backed companies going public, while all of continental Europe in an apples-to-apples comparison created approx. $60 billion over the same period. SV is the epicenter of an equity-based (i.e., non-interest based) economy that really, truly works in supporting new job and wealth creation.<br />Although SV venture capital (VC) has been unfairly criticized as "vulture capital" the truth of the methodology is that VC's do business by partnering with entrepreneurs and management in true partnerships, they take shares and they take real risk. SV has been called a "culture of failure" because realistically it's expected that most businesses will fail -- and that's fine, because that's the nature of high-risk entrepreneurial start-up activity. When VC-backed start-ups fail, each of the VCs, managers, founders, etc., walk away with only their respective share, if any, and they don't go grabbing the other's shares. For business owners, that's better much better than being saddled with loans they'd need to beg banks to forgive.<br />Lenders manage risk by shifting the risk over to the borrower in the form of the guarantee implicit in a loan, and recourse and security interests where the law allows it. In contrast, VCs manage risk at the macro-level by distributing, pooling and counting on the law of large numbers: that a small handful of portfolio companies will do so well that they will make up for the losses resultant from failed investments.<br />It can be said in this way VCs are concerned with the community (SV being "the community" par excellence), with certain qualities of morality and distributive justice. Believe it or not, VCs are willing to give up on incremental profit for the sake of generating or maintaining good-will. SV success has been predicated on a partnership model, one that seems more amenable for the (re)emergence of a Homo Islamicus, as Prof. Asutay and Prof. Waleed El-Ansary would say.Arshad Ahmed2012-11-24T00:22:42Zhttp://muslimlawprof.org/2012/04/24/the-iraq-federal-supreme-court-avoids-interpreting-sharia--again.aspx#comment-17824317Good point thanks for raising and sorry for my delay in replying.<br /> <br /> I agree they definitely don't want to get involved in reviewing Kurdish legislation under Article 93(4) of their constitutional jurisdictional grant, despite overruling recently provincial legislation under the same section.&nbsp; Clearly if they have authority to review provincial legislation under Article 93(4), they can review regional legislation.&nbsp; But they won't, because they know the KRG will ignore it, and that will undermine their legitimacy.&nbsp; Again, thanks for raising.Haider Ala Hamoudi2012-09-20T17:35:17Zhttp://muslimlawprof.org/2012/04/24/the-iraq-federal-supreme-court-avoids-interpreting-sharia--again.aspx#comment-17814378Professor Hamoudi,<br />What is your take on why the Court is not involved in federal relations disputes? The reason seems to be same. The Court keeps low profile when it comes to delicate issues. Several statues have been passed by the Kurdish parliaments that beg for the Court's interference...Alex2012-09-19T12:31:22Zhttp://muslimlawprof.org/2012/09/13/enough-already--on-the-innocence-of-muslims.aspx#comment-17766104I think what we should do as Muslims, is to share a link to the 1976 movie "The Message" which gives the true story of Islam, <a href="http://youtu.be/iiHQ3XuGSyg">http://youtu.be/iiHQ3XuGSyg</a> .<br />Then, we should hand copies of the Quran to our non-Muslim friends in their respective languages, or even small books about Islam if they were keen to read and understand cultures other than their own. <br />We should also deal through legal channels with the issue, and do a good deal of lobbying and PR. Muslim countries are the World's richest, however, they don't come together when it concerns major issues such as the image of the Religion.Zahir Altayi2012-09-13T16:45:35Zhttp://muslimlawprof.org/2012/08/23/similar-horizons-unified-horizons-and-other-transcendental-nonsense.aspx#comment-17656500<span>Sorry Basil I get so much spam and hate mail it took me a while to find this good comment.<br /> <br /> Well, let me say first of all that so far as I can tell astronomical horizon doesn't seem to work, because there isn't really a specific distance that one can ascribe to an astronomical horizon. It depends on a variety of factors, including humidity, air quality, altitude, time of day, temperature, etc.&nbsp; So I can see much further if its a mountain silhouetted against a setting sun in a clear cool sky than I can if I'm looking flat across a desert at midday with all the refraction from the air.&nbsp;&nbsp; That's what got me thinking about all of this in the first place, because I assumed "same horizon" meant literally that, how far a human eye could see on a clear day, and yet that's sort of like asking how far a person could run in an hour.&nbsp; Which person and where are they running would be the questions.&nbsp; In any event, I think it would be hard to argue that one could see much further than 250 miles except perhaps in very unusual conditions, which would render me and you not in the same horizon right now even though we share a time zone and live in two different US cities a few hours apart by car. An odd result.<br /> <br /> But you ask about "same community" and that I suppose could work.&nbsp; And one of the factors you'd need to determine similarity of communities would have to be geographical proximity, which I presume is where you are trying to go with astronomical horizon, and even if you're not, I would think it would be a factor.&nbsp; As would, I gather from your comment, cultural and linguistic differences.&nbsp; So yes, it will work, quite fine, if that were the test.&nbsp; I think the date line would still pop its way in (no same community would be found to straddle it after all or it won't work), but other than that, it should work.<br /> <br /> It's not the test Sistani articulates, however, and I think I know why. Najaf is even more formalist in its law talking ways than Cairo and Baghdad, among the most formalist legal cultures on earth.&nbsp; And what the above standard is, at its core, is what in the US we would refer to as a "balancing test."&nbsp; It's more or less admitting to some level of uncertainty in result, taking a bunch of factors and figuratively weighing them to reach a particular conclusion.&nbsp; The subjectivity is inescapable, no person applying such a test could sensibly deny the high level of discretion the interpreter would be employing to reach a conclusion, and Najaf claims it is doing no such thing, it is merely reaching conclusions from sacred revelatory text using the same logical and deductive rigor that one employs in a mathematical proof.&nbsp; <br /> <br /> The "same community" standard I think explodes that. I realize sometimes use of the word "watan" in juristic texts reveals something of a geographic place with borders independent of political borders (even as the term very much means a nation with political borders in common modern parlance) but there the borders are more clearly circumscribed.&nbsp; You're talking about a town's borders or a city's borders which once left shorten prayers and break fasts and while of course I could play with the fuzziness there too, demonstrating it ain't math, still one could pretend more easily that the definition provided something close to certainty except at the hypercontrived margins where law professors love to tread.&nbsp; I think "same community" in a manner that covers, say, Najaf and Bahrain but not Najaf and Teheran is going to be subject to considerably more debate and discussion and the discretion all too obvious.<br /> <br /> HAH<br /> </span>Haider Ala Hamoudi2012-08-27T13:16:25Zhttp://muslimlawprof.org/2012/08/23/similar-horizons-unified-horizons-and-other-transcendental-nonsense.aspx#comment-17629588<span> </span>Obviously a lay argument here...<br /> <br /> What if you combine community with astronomical horizon? Does Sistani's interpretation work then? For example, Bahrain and Nejaf are the same Shia community, even if separated by "artificial" political borders. So if it's seen in Bahrain, it works for Nejaf, name any two cities in Iran - same community; Two cities in the US - same community; Name a city in Iran and Iraq, two different communities so you need separate sightings. Brazil, also different from Nejaf even if they take their guidance from Nejaf - so you need separate sightings.Basil2012-08-23T16:02:09Z