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Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them — if you want to. Just as some day, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.

— The Catcher in the Rye

The Strongest of the Strange
By Charles Bukowski

and from the best of the strange ones, perhaps, nothing.
they are their own paintings
their own books
their own music
their own work.

— Charles Bukowski

Today’s Muslims have a special way of vocalizing the Qur’an called qira’ut*. It’s a sound quite unlike any other made by the human voice. It’s musical, but it isn’t singing. It’s incantatory, but it isn’t chanting. It invokes emotion even in someone who doesn’t understand the words. Every person who performs qira’ut does so differently, but every recitation feels like an imitation or intimation or interpretation of some powerful original. When Mohammed delivered the Qur’an, he must have done so in this penetrating and emotional voice. When people heard the Qur’an from Mohammed, they were not just listening to words but experiencing an emotional force. Perhaps this is why Muslims insist that no translation of the Qur’an is the Qur’an. The true Qur’an is the whole package, indivisible: the words and their meanings, yes, but also the very sounds, even the look of the lettering when the Qur’an is in written form.

*الكاتب هنا يقصد "ترتيل القرآن."

Omar’s calendar (التقويم الهجري) enshrined the conviction that Islam was not just a plan for individual salvation, but a plan for how the world should run. Many religions say to their followers, “The world is corrupt, but you can escape it.” Islam said to its followers, “The world is corrupt, but you can change it.” Perhaps this was inherent from the earliest days of Mohammed’s preaching, but Omar confirmed this course for Islam and set it on tracks of iron.

Disbelief in the 'monumentum aere perennius'* – The attention of the individual [becomes] too firmly fixed on his own brief span of life and receives no stronger impulse to work at the construction of enduring institutions intended to last for centuries; he wants to pluck the fruit himself from the tree he plants, and he is therefore no longer interested in planting those trees which demand constant tending for a century and are intended to provide shade for long successions of generations.

*A memorial lasting longer than bronze

— Human All Too Human

Max Weber provided the most famous and widely accepted definition of the state, identifying it with the “monopoly of legitimate violence” in society. Without such a monopoly and the degree of centralization that it entails, the state cannot play its role as enforcer of law and order, let alone provide public services and encourage and regulate economic activity. When the state fails to achieve almost any political centralization, society sooner or later descends into chaos, as did Somalia.

— Why Nations Fail

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السلطة المركزية هي أساس قيام أيِّ دولة ناجحة، وأساس قيام سلطة مركزية هو احتكار العنف. فالدولة هي "المؤسسة التي تحتكر العنف ولا تطبقه إلا بشكل مبرر" وفقًا لماكس ويبر. من أجل احتكار العنف، على الدولة أنْ تمتلك ما يكفي من القوة (بمعناها البسيط، مثل الجيش والسلاح) لفرض قوانينها على المجتمع والإقتصاد.

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Against the trusting. – People who give us their complete trust believe they have acquired a right to ours. This is a false conclusion; gifts procure no rights.