Freedom Is Like Light, The Higher Up The Source, the Wider Its Scope

[Nur]

Ramadan Kareem Nomads

 

Here are my thoughts on Freedom

 

 

We often hear this buzzword on a daily basis, from ancient times to the present, freedom remains to be a concept that people are willing to pay for with all they've got, including their very lives, just like Patrick Henry said in the 1700s: " Give me liberty or give me death " as down payment to guarantee freedom for future generations.

 

The Great pyramids, one of the oldest shrines built for false Gods, were built by the labor of Jewish slaves of Pharaoh, they were built to immortalize the Kings of Egypt, Khufu, Khafrac and Manqarac, indeed if these edifices immortalized anything, it was the oppression of the Israelites and the robbing of an entire nation's dignity as human beings. Pharaoh, in his right mind believed that he was superior to the lowly Jews, that their suffering was justified as long as they served a purpose to the masters of Egypt who in turn faced their Gods with their offerings of the blood and toil of the captive slaves of the children of Israel.

 

In the story of Pharaoh and his subjugated Jewish slaves, we read in the Quraan how Moses led his people out of bondage, how he risked his life for seeking freedom for his people and how Pharaoh fearing the imminent rise of a great leader of the Jews, ordered the killing of all new born Jewish males, only to raise the very Jewish leader he was afraid of in his own palace to his demise.

 

Six thousand years later, the Children of Israel are returning the favor by doing it to the Palestinians, killing their children, demolishing their dwellings, and confining them like animals behind a wall of " security ". The Palestinians are learning what it was like being a Jew in Pharaoh's Egypt, or in Hitler's Germany, when man inflicts pain and agony on fellow man without mercy.

 

Freedom is a conservative entity, it is an integral part of a wholesome balanced and a just universal system, a system that guarantees equal rights, assigns equal responsibilities and opens doors to equal opportunities for all equally qualified stakeholders. As such, for a human to lose her/ his freedom, it takes another to claim to be more deserving of that lost right due to supremacy of sorts, moral such as a claim of Devine mandate like the case of the Zionist Movement of Israel, and/or sheer might, over his fellow man, by wrongfully claiming that which was reserved for his fellow man to be only his. The false claimant of superiority begins to limit the freedom of the inferior, usually by using a convincingly stronger force to subjugate his fellow human being into submission and in the most primitive sense we have the infamous and abominable institution known as slavery, an institution that was well established back home in Somalia as well as the United States for some four centuries.

 

Freedom in its absolute meaning is not restricted, to time, space or physical barrier, absolutely nothing could limit this type of freedom, that Absolute freedom belongs to Allah SWT alone, Allah SWT describes Himself in the Quraan, " Facaalun lima Yuriid" He executes (all of) His wishes" , and there we have a big wisdom, no one else can claim that trait, and every other form of freedom, lesser than the absolute Freedom of Allah SWT is gradually compromised to make room for or yield to that absolute freedom. So in that regard, the higher up the ladder one gets, through worship of Allah alone, the freer one feels, and the lower one gets down the same ladder by denying Allah SWT or disobeying him, the more enslaved one experiences to fellow mankind who he must serve as a slave . in effect , being the slave of a slave is not a good idea.

 

Allah SWT is the light of the heavens and the earth, His light is like that of a lamp, and that lamp represents all that is good of life and eternal happiness. If we indeed seek that light with all of our hearts and soul, we rise above it all; we became true servants of Allah SWT, thus bypassing the service of other slaves of Allah all together in order to serve Allah SWT directly. As slaves of Allah SWT, we become free of all that hinders our good character. Being certain that Allah SWT is the master sustainer who replenishes our bank accounts, we become more generous to our fellow human being, likewise, being sure of His control of our life as the originator and as the terminator of life, we learn to live free of fear, and so we become free to live a fuller meaningful life while it lasts.

 

During the Islamic conquest of Persia, a companion named Rubciyun Ibn Caamir, had these words to describe the reason for the invasion of the Muslim armies to conquer the Persian Empire " Allah has risen us so we can free mankind from the bondage of other men to the service of Allah, from the injustice of the systems that govern them to the Justice of Islam, and from the mental confinement to a physical world, to the vastness of the eternal life in heaven"

 

In our faith, Allah SWT stresses the term "CABD" or the slaves of Allah, Allah SWT refers to all of His Prophets as slaves, because the term slave specially when it is for Allah alone, is the highest rank a man can reach in the kingdom of Allah SWT.

 

Ironically today, 14 Centuries later, Muslims find themselves being lectured on a concept that they themselves pioneered and taught Medieval Europe, the concept of Liberty, justice and fairness, but because the driver of the new conquerors is not to please Allah SWT, Freedom as presented back to Muslims today does not have the original flavors of the awareness of Allah, it became a hollow terminology that does not stand for anything meaningful, worst yet, all the freedoms that we read or hear about are meant for the protection of the individuals right to disobey his Maker. But because these faithless individuals who buy this idea care less about God, they are often very serious in the service of the institutions that grant them these phony freedoms; suddenly they find themselves having human deities in the form of lawmakers to obey instead of their maker.

 

Freedom as presented today is secular; it does not explain what happens after death, after we decompose, and after we are reassembled back to our forms for an eternal life of happiness and freedom, or an eternal life of suffering and confinement.

 

So, in that above sense, Freedom is like a light above our heads ( Allah is The Light Of Heavens and Earth ), showing us the way below, we can see far if we are way up, taking Allah's light to see, as we descend down, and seek light from other than Allah SWT, we see less, thus we feel confined and less free. To put in a different way, If we seek to take the light of our freedoms from Allah, the highest source, all of our wishes are realized by Allah SWT, if on the other hand we seek to take freedom from those who deny Allah SWT, then the scope of the freedom will be much narrower, and we will end up becoming slaves for other than Allah SWT, so in order to be as free as you can, seek Allah alone in worship, obey Him and enjoy real freedom.

 

Nur

 

 

2004 eNuri Contemporary Concepts

Simplifying Modern Jargon

[Mutakalim]

In spades redoubled, I could not have said it any better myself, Good Nur.

 

The notion of Freedom is a multi-facted conception, which requires a meticulous examination. Many variables have the potentiality to thwart freedom (i.e. people, oneself, etc), but there is no enemy more formidable than oneself. If one conquers the enemy within, then Allah will guarantee one the conquest of the enemy without.

 

If the unruly desires of Man steers the besieged boat of Being, then one is not free; nay, one is but a slave to one's baseborn desires. To be free, indeed, is not the ability to do anything but the ability to do only certain things. Should the state-of-affairs be different from the account so described, lo! ,Good Nomads, true freedom is not attained; assuredely, one will have forsaken the offer of love that Allah, exalted be He, so offered. Freedom is only attained when one controls, as it were, the ever-adamant appetite of the carnal desires. Needs must we obtain freedom, else the light of Freedom, to utilize Nur's extended metaphor, will be forever dim.

 

With Salaams

PK

 

P.S. I have to say that this is the most beatific Ramadan yet; never have I felt a genuine and colossal content in the Lord. O Allah! prolong the proximity that we "appercieve" during the month of Ramadan.

[Baashi]

^Absorbing! As always brother Nur your thoughts are deep and valuable. I've read this post twice and probably will read it a third time to absorb the gist of it. Different prespective it was too, one that we pay little attention to understand and digest its monumental implication.

 

Here is the highlight for me

 

Freedom in its absolute meaning is not restricted, to time, space or physical barrier, absolutely nothing could limit this type of freedom, that Absolute freedom belongs to Allah SWT alone, Allah SWT describes Himself in the Quraan, " Facaalun lima Yuriid" He executes (all of) His wishes" , and there we have a big wisdom, no one else can claim that trait, and every other form of freedom, lesser than the absolute Freedom of Allah SWT is gradually compromised to make room for or yield to that absolute freedom. So in that regard, the higher up the ladder one gets, through worship of Allah alone, the freer one feels, and the lower one gets down the same ladder by denying Allah SWT or disobeying him, the more enslaved one experiences to fellow mankind who he must serve as a slave . in effect , being the slave of a slave is not a good idea.

Readers plz share your thoughts on this piece.

[Nur]

Baashi Bro

 

Indeed a good selection, to further support that statement may i remind you the Hadeeth Al Qudsi in which Allah SWT says: " And there is nothing I love more that my slave can do than getting closer to me through volunary worship ( Nawaafil), when he/she does that, I become his very sight with which he sees, his very hearing with which he hears his hand ...etc)

 

The main idea in your selected passage is that the more we seek Allah SWT through sincere worship, the more we become free so that our souls soars higher up, we become empowered by by Allah to the point that Allah SWT becomes our perception of things and concepts. In contrast when we neglect our worship or obedience to Allah SWT, we become slaves to the lowly earthily desires and cling to the dirt to become lost like the pious scholar from the Israelites who was a follower of Moses but later became a worldly man: Allah says about him in the Quraan " كالدي آتيناه آياتنا Ùانسلخ منهاÙكان من الغاوين Ùˆ لو شئنا لرÙعناه بها ولكنه أخلد الي اللارض"

 

Like the one whom we have granted a perception of our signs and empowered him with it, but opted to disobey and became one of the lost folk, But we could have honorored him by virtue of his knowledge if he did not cling to the (lowly life on) earth"

 

The moral of the passage is that by seeking Allah SWT through good deeds we become free eternally drawing our strength from the powers of Allah SWT of sight and hearning etc. On the other hand, if we ignore Allah SWT and seek worldly pleasures, we sink lower, and become slaves of our own desires, thereby guaranteeing our eternal sorrow.

 

 

Nur

[Viking]

Freedom as presented today is secular; it does not explain what happens after death, after we decompose, and after we are reassembled back to our forms for an eternal life of happiness and freedom, or an eternal life of suffering and confinement.

Very true! Alas, we have forgotten the quest for the ultimate freedom, an elevation of the self from wrongdoings to attainment of the ultimate reward, awareness and conscience of the Maker. Allah SWT says that everything that is bad comes from within ourselves; without seeking to attain inward perfection (freedom within, that gives us guidance), how then can we build a society that is just?

 

 

Peace and Ramadan Kariim.

[Nur]

Mutakallim bro writes:

 

" Freedom is only attained when one controls, as it were, the ever-adamant appetite of the carnal desires ".

 

 

A welll put statement underscoring the spirit of Ramadan, a month to park our carnal yearnings for Sweneson's ice cream at day time, a month to train our hearts to the heavens to recieve signals of guidance.

 

 

Viking writes:

 

" Allah SWT says that everything that is bad comes from within ourselves; without seeking to attain inward perfection (freedom within, that gives us guidance), how then can we build a society that is just ? "

 

 

Does it ever occur to most Nomads that in Ramadan we are freeing ourselves from desires, evil, hate, contempt of others, as we seek Allah, we become inert to the material world around us and focus our energy within our souls to rebuild our moral high ground to rebuild a society that is just.

 

 

Nur

[Mutakalim]

If one attains actual freedom (i.e. control of the nafs ), then one will be forever satisfied. Ramadan, indeed, is a soul exercise (riyaadah ar-ruuh)that is meant to teach one how to control one's soul. Firstly, the soul is restrained by putting on hold the natural appetite (i.e. food, intercourse etc.). Secondly, the soul is cultivated by a qualitative and quantitative increase in worship. Afterwards, one will put to work, in subsequent months, what one has learned through the soul training of Ramadan.

 

As a result of fasting(fasting is two: fasting from material things such as food and fasting from immaterial things such as backbitting, insulting etc., the latter being "macnawi"), one will hopefully be, better able, to worship Allah by abstaining from that which is unlawful ( the fasting of Ramadan teaches and trains one to "abstain" from that which is proscribed). In addition, one will worship Allah more, because during Ramadan one has also learned to "force" the nafs to improve and increase the Cibaadah.

 

ياايهاالذين ءامنوا كتب عليكم الصيام كما كتب على الذين من قبلكم لعلكم تتقون

 

 

Ideally, one will be beaming with spirtual light as the month of Ramadan comes to a conclusion. However, this beaming light will inevitably grow dim as time goes on. Light bulbs must needs be changed every once in a while, and the energy of the soul like a light bulb grows dim. If one is fortunate enough, then one will live to witness another Ramadan; in other words, one will be granted another chance to change the light bulb.

 

O Allah! do not deprive us of the chance of recharging our spiritual light.

 

With Salaams

PK

 

P.S. When this blessed month comes to an end, one should ask Allah repeatedly for another Ramadan. Allaahumma balliqnaa Ramadan.

[Nur]

Nomads

 

The following topic is an intellectual mindteaser, I read it twice, it is deep, the writer , Terry Eagleton's insights are about freedom, please share your thoughts on this article.

 

Nur

 

 

Suicide Bombers Die to Attain Justice for Others

Terry Eagleton, The Guardian

 

 

 

 

LONDON, 27 January 2005 — While have been blowing themselves apart in Israel and Iraq, a silence has prevailed about what suicide bombing actually involves. Like hunger strikers, suicide bombers are not necessarily in love with death. They kill themselves because they can see no other way of attaining justice; and the fact that they have to do so is part of the injustice. It is possible to act in a way that makes your death inevitable without actually desiring it. Those who leapt from the World Trade Centre to avoid being incinerated were not seeking death, even though there was no way they could have avoided it.

 

Ordinary, nonpolitical suicides are those whose lives have come to feel worthless to them, and who accordingly need a quick way out. Martyrs are more or less the opposite. People like Rosa Luxemburg or Steve Biko give up what they see as precious (their lives) for an even more valuable cause. They die not because they see death as desirable in itself, but in the name of a more abundant life all round. Suicide bombers also die in the name of a better life for others; it is just that, unlike martyrs, they take others with them in the process. Both believe that a life is only worth living if it contains something worth dying for. On this theory, what makes existence meaningful is what you are prepared to relinquish it for.

 

Blowing yourself up for political reasons is a complex symbolic act, one that mixes despair and defiance. It proclaims that even death is preferable to your wretched way of life. The act of self-dispossession writes dramatically large the self-dispossession that is your routine existence. Laying violent hands on yourself is a more graphic image of what your enemy does to you anyway. At the same time, the bomber forces a contrast between the extreme kind of self-determination involved in taking his own life and the lack of such self-determination in his everyday existence. If he could live in the way he dies, he would not need to die. At least his death can be his death, and thus a taste of freedom. The only form of sovereignty left to you is the power to dispose of your own death.

 

Suicide bombers and hunger strikers are out to transform weakness into power. Because they are ready to die while their enemies are not, they score a spiritual victory over them. The ultimate freedom is not to fear death. If you no longer fear it, political power can have no hold over you. Those with nothing to lose are deeply dangerous. But suicide bombers also cheat their antagonists of the only aspect of themselves that they can control: Their bodies. By depriving their masters of this manipulable part of themselves, they become invulnerable. Nothing is less masterable than nothing. By slipping through the fingers of power, leaving it grasping at thin air, they force it to betray its own vacuousness. It is, to be sure, a pyrrhic victory. But it proclaims that what your adversary cannot annihilate is the will to annihilation. Like the traditional tragic hero, the suicide bomber rises above his own destruction by the very resolution with which he embraces it.

 

Blowing himself to pieces in a packed marketplace is likely to prove by far the most historic event of the bomber’s life. Nothing in his life, to quote Macbeth, becomes him like the leaving of it. This is both his triumph and his defeat. However miserable or impoverished, most men and women have one formidable power at their disposal: The power to die as devastatingly as possible. And not only devastatingly, but surreally. There is a smack of avant-garde theater about this horrific act. In a social order that seems progressively more depthless, transparent, rationalized and instantly communicable, the brutal slaughter of the innocent warps the mind as well as the body. It is an assault on meaning as well as on the flesh — an ultimate act of defamiliarization, which transforms the everyday into the monstrously unrecognizable.

 

— Terry Eagleton is professor of cultural theory at Manchester University, UK

[Nur]

Nomads

 

This thread may have passed your observation, as a result some Nomads missed to respond to this topic, I know its long, I guess you can add your thoughts about freedom to this thread, at least from the perspective of current events.

 

 

Nur

[S.O.S]

Brother Nur, a/c.

 

You write:

 

"Freedom as presented today is secular; it does not explain what happens after death, after we decompose, and after we are reassembled back to our forms for an eternal life of happiness and freedom, or an eternal life of suffering and confinement.

 

So, in that above sense, Freedom is like a light above our heads showing us the way below, we can see far if we are way up, taking Allah's light to see, as we descend down, and seek light from other than Allah SWT, we see less, thus we feel confined and less free. To put in a different way, If we seek to take the light of our freedoms from Allah, the highest source, all of our wishes are realized by Allah SWT, if on the other hand we seek to take freedom from those who deny Allah SWT, then the scope of the freedom will be much narrower, and we will end up becoming slaves for other than Allah SWT, so in order to be as free as you can, seek Allah alone in worship, obey Him and enjoy real freedom."

 

True freedom is to be free from the fire and because ultimate freedom can only be experienced in Heaven, freedom in this world means the struggle upon the path of FREEDOM (in other words ISLAM). "The cause of the freedom is the cause of God" as Samuel Bowles put it ones, however, what interests me is your reference to freedom as light, since the opposite of light is dark, darkness becomes the opposite of freedom!

 

 

Commentary on the Verse of Light

 

By Imam Ibn ul Qayyim al Jawziyyah

 

God strikes a parable about His light within the heart of His servant, which only the learned understand:

‘God is the light of the heavens and the earth. The similitude of His light is a niche in which there is a lamp. The lamp is in a Glass, the Glass, like a glistening star, kindled from a blessed olive tree, neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil well nigh glows though no fire has touched it: light upon light. God guides to His light whom He wills, and God strikes parables for human beings, and God knows all things.’

[Qur’an 24:35]

 

Ubayy ibn Ka`b said,

'the similitude of His light

[takes place in] the Muslim's heart.' [ibn Kathir, 3:464] This light, which He has placed in the heart, comes from gnosis, love, faith and the remembrance of God. It is the light that He has sent down to His servants, by which He gives them life, and by which they walk among people. Its origin is in their hearts, but then He strengthens and increases it until it appears upon their faces, limbs, bodies, even their clothes and dwellings. People of this nature perceive it, while others deny it. On the Day of Judgement, however, it will come forth by their faith, and hasten before them in the darkness of the Bridge, that they might cross it. They will proceed in proportion to either its strength or its weakness in their hearts during their life in the world.

 

For one person, it will be like the sun, for another like the moon, the stars or a lamp. For yet another, this light will be only at the tips of his toes; it will shine, then go out [then shine, then go out]. For just as his light had been in this world, so he shall be given when crossing the Bridge. In fact, it is the selfsame light that had appeared to him before. However, just as the hypocrite has no real light in this world, or has only an outward light but none within, so shall he be given [on that Day] an outward light which will vanish in the darkness and be lost.

link

[Nur]

SOS bro.

 

Magnificent description of light! mashAllah, Sheikh Ibnul Qayyim is a heavyweight, no writer has striired my imagination like he did, may Allah bestow upon him blessings equal to those who benefited from his writings.

 

One of his most valuable book in this category is called : Madaarijul Saalikiin, beyna Manaazil Iyyaaka nacbudu wa iyyaka nastaciin" ( Tahdheeb Edition)

 

 

Nur

[Haneefah]

Absolutely brilliant! I just love your eloquent way of relating the two concepts. Indeed freedom is like nuur, the more nuur one attains, the freer he becomes from any of the sources that make him susceptible to worldly enslavement.

 

Again, Sheikh Nur, I've enjoyed this piece like none other. Beautiful and thought provoking Masha'Allah!

[Nur]

Haneefah sis

 

Jazzakellahu kheiran for your comments, you see, when I wrote this piece, my intention was to draw parallels from common objects like light to explain freedom, which is not tangible. The idea of freedom is intersting speciall if we look at current events in Somalia.

 

The problem in our country stems from two competing versions of freedom:

 

1. First Version: a version that claims to be endorsed by Allah, known as the UIC faction that was defeated by the USA equipped and financed sponsored Ethiopian army, and the TFG, a client of a client of a client of the Neocons.

 

2. Second Version: TFG Vesrion, whos is the client servant of Ethiopia, Ethiopia itself has no freedom, and is ruled by Tigres minority,

-Ethiopia is the client Servant of USA

-Current USA admisnistration is a client Serve of the NEOCONS, The American people themselves are as much a victim as Somalis and Iraqis, they are routinely lied to, tax money stolen by big corporations who benefit from these artificial wars, and manipulated by a criminal group making wars all over the world, killing thousands, in the name of war against terrorism which is exactly what they have done to the helpless civilian peoples in Asia and Somalia.

 

Its more honorable to live and die as a slave of Allah alone, which is true freedom than to live as a slave of a slave of a slave. Which was the original meaning of the thread.

 

 

Nur

[Fabregas]

Excerpt from Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance

 

Sons and Daughters of Baghdad

Sons and Daughters of Baghdad:

The hour of your liberation draws near

Stand in shock and awe

At the strength of our much-burdened shoulders.

 

Sons and Daughters of Baghdad:

The hour of your liberation draws near

Watch as your homes and buildings burn

Cower as the earth around you shakes

Cry as your windows smash and shatter

Run and flee as our armored forces gather

 

Sons and Daughters of Baghdad:

The hour of your liberation draws near

Watch the skies for the first signs of your freedom:

Cruise missiles

Electricity fizzles

Microwave bombs

21,000 pound

Laser-guided

Radar-guided

And God-guided munitions

To bring your democracy to fruition.

 

Sons and Daughters of Baghdad:

The hour of your liberation draws near

We extend towards you our white hand

Once embraced by many in vain:

Indian, African, Vietnamese,

And washed clean of their colored red stain.

 

Sons and Daughters of Baghdad:

The hour of your liberation draws near

Spread the good news to the hospitals

To the cancer wards

To the 500,000

Lying quietly in their tiny coffins

And to those among you

Who will soon join them.

 

Sons and Daughters of Baghdad:

The hour of your liberation draws near

Rest assured--your fate is secured

Prepared by the Messianic and the Chosen

Inspired by the liberators of Palestine:

By tanks, settlers, bulldozers,

By starvation, torture, curfews

By occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing

By 1948

And 1492.

 

Sons and Daughters of Baghdad:

Shock and Awe is here

Prepare your eulogies, your epitaphs

For the hour of your liberation draws near.

 

M. Junaid Alam, Northeastern University, Political Science Undergrad, Member of Northeastern University Campus Against War and Racism, alam.m@neu.edu

[Nur]

Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

 

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all

 

By Naomi Wolf

 

04/24/07 "The Guardian" -- -- Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

 

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

 

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.

 

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

 

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

 

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

 

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."

 

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.

 

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

 

2. Create a gulag

 

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.

 

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.

 

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

 

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

 

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.

 

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

 

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

 

3. Develop a thug caste

 

When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

 

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution

 

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

 

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".

 

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

 

In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

 

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

 

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

 

5. Harass citizens' groups

 

The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

 

Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.

 

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

 

This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

 

In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

 

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".

 

"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.

 

"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."

 

"That'll do it," the man said.

 

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

 

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

 

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

 

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.

 

7. Target key individuals

 

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

 

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

 

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

 

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

 

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

 

8. Control the press

 

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

 

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

 

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.

 

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.

 

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

 

You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

 

9. Dissent equals treason

 

Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

 

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.

 

In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".

 

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

 

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

 

We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

 

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

 

10. Suspend the rule of law

 

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.

 

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."

 

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

 

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

 

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

 

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."

 

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

 

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".

 

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

 

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

 

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

 

We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.

 

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry