Who Fused Mankind�s 2nd Chromosome?
Benson C Saili
THIS EARTH, MY BROTHER
One of molecular biology’s most staggering puzzles has Enki’s fingerprints all over it
Zechariah Sitchin’s insistence that modern-day “scientific discoveries” simply affirm knowledge that was commonplace in antiquity is no empty rhetoric.
Consider the matter of mankind being “made from clay”. In GENESIS 1:19, the Bible tells us man’s eventual fate is six-feet-under for “thou at dust and unto dust shall thou return”. The Koran categorically states that God “started the creation of the human from clay”.
We have previously made the point that the Anunnaki, who fashioned mankind, characterised us as clay material simply as a sneer. “You are nothing but a lump of soul-less clay,” they seemed to say. Man may not be the product of clay but clay did play a part in his creation and vitally at that.
Do you know what Enki decided to do after repeated failures to come up with the perfect model of Adam? He combined the genes not in a vessel made of Nibiru crystals but in a vessel made of Earth’s clay.
This course of action did not pay off immediately but the improvement was a quantum leap and at long last led to a flawless Adam, forcing Enki’s half-sister Ninmah, who did the mixing under Enki’s supervision, to ecstatically screech, “Mine hands have made it!” Enki, the foremost scientist of his day both on Earth and Nibiru, came to realise that had he not used a test tube made of clay, he would not have succeeded in fashioning Adam. Why was clay central to the process?
In his memoirs, Enki does not explain the centrality of clay but science does! In fact, it was not until the turn of the century that science had an answer to the clay question. On October 23, 2003, the US news network MNBC featured an article headlined “MAYBE WE CAME FROM CLAY AFTER ALL”.
The gist of the story read thus: “A team at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston said they had shown that materials in clay supported processes similar to those that may have given rise to life. Specifically, a clay mixture called montmorillonite not only helps form little bags of fat and liquid but helps cells use genetic material called RNA. That, in turn, is one of the key processes of life.”
It was another feather in Sitchin’s cap, who had highlighted the instrumentality of clay in the creation of Adam in his first book published in 1976. Sitchin’s source was not the Bible but clay tablets inscribed 6000 years ago by the Sumerians, the world’s best known civilisation of old. It were these same clay tablets the Genesis scribes based their creation story on, tablets they had access to whilst in exile in Babylonia (which arose in the same area as the antecedent Sumeria) in the 6th century BC.
BIOMEDICAL SCIENCE VALIDATES ADAM’S TRIPLE PARENTHOOD
Did you know that Adam had not two but three parents? That’s exactly what the Sumerian tablets tell us folks. Adam, we will soon establish, was the first viable test tube baby. Adam was made from a mixture of a male Anunnaki’s sperm and Ape-Woman’s egg in a procedure known today as in vitro fertilisation, or IVF. But he was not carried in Ape-Woman’s womb: he was carried in Ninmah’s. Thus technically, Adam had three parents.
IVF, which is simply fertilisation of an egg by a sperm outside the body, has been common knowledge since 1978, when the first successful test tube baby Louise Brown was born. But Louise was the offspring of only two parents: she was the product of her father’s and mother’s sex cells and was carried in her own mother’s womb. It was not until the dawn of the new millennium that IVF went a step further.
On October 18th, 2003, New Science carried a story titled “IVF CREATES FOETUSES WITH THREE PARENTS”. The breakthrough was accomplished by a team of American scientists at a Chinese medical university. It concerned a woman who had failed to conceive because her embryos ceased to develop after two days.
The woman’s egg was removed and fertilised by her husband’s sperm in a Petri dish as usual (note that the chemical composition of Petri dish or test tube glass used in the process has a significant clay component) but the new twist was the involvement of a third party, a woman (called a donor or surrogate mother).
The egg of the donor had its nucleus sucked out and discarded; then the fertilised material in the Petri dish was injected into the donor’s void egg, which in turn was implanted into the donor’s womb.
The resulting baby therefore technically had three parents – the father who provided the sperm; the mother who provided the egg; and the surrogate mother who provided the womb and something else besides.
Besides providing a uterine incubator for the developing baby, the donor contributed something else at a cellular level that made it possible for the embryo of the barren woman to grow to term this time around. This was what is termed Mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA. This is DNA which converts the chemical energy from food into a form that cells can use.
In humans, although mtDNA is present in both males and females, it is passed on only by the female. Although mtDNA resides inside the cell, this is outside the nucleus. Hence, although the nucleus that was removed from the donor’s egg cell did carry the DNA with it, mtDNA remained. It is mtDNA which enabled the embryo to grow fully in the donor’s womb. In other words, the donor’s mtDNA was more efficient than the barren woman’s: it was the barren woman’s inefficient mtDNA that was causing the embryos to abort after two days.
In 1987, scientists were able to establish that mankind shared a common ancestor they called Mitochondrial Eve. They also reckoned that Mitochondrial Eve arose in East Africa over 200,000 years ago, which was within close range of what Zechariah Sitchin had been saying all along. The scientists called our common woman ancestor Mitochondrial Eve because they studied mtDNA in the post-natal placentas of women from different races to help them estimate how long mankind had been in existence.
AN ECHO OF ENKI’S “SEVEN AND SEVEN”
Another remarkable case of the replication (whether wittingly or unwittingly we cannot say for sure) of Anunnaki bio-medical techniques came to light in 2004 through the internationally acclaimed magazine Newsweek in its January 26 edition.
In a ten-page cover story titled “THE NEW SCIENCE OF SEX SELECTION”, the magazine lauded the wonders of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosys, or PGD, whereby the sex of a unborn baby could be determined using IVF. PGD entails creating a number of embryos outside the womb, that is, in a test tube, examining them for their gender, selecting a number having the desired sex, and then implanting these into the womb.
What stirred a familiar echo was the number of embryos that were created in the case featured in Newsweek. The story said, “Last November, Sharla’s eggs and Shane’s sperm were mixed in a lab dish, producing 14 healthy embryos, seven male and seven female… The lab transferred three of the female embryos into Sharla’s uterus, where two implanted successfully. If all goes well, the run of the Miller boys will end in July with the arrival of twin baby girls.”
Indeed, the couple, who hitherto only had boys, was blessed with twin baby girls as per deliberate design nine months later. The interesting aspect about the process was that it was exactly what Enki had done 300,000 years ago in his attempt to create mankind.
Enki at first used 14 volunteer “Birth Goddesses” suggested by Ninmah to become pregnant with 7 males and 7 females using a combination of cloning and IVF. It was only when he decided this process was burdensome on the part of the Birth Goddesses that he decided to fashion Adam and Eve, finally getting the couple to procreate after a bone marrow transplant operation. Details of the creation of Adam and Eve will be engaged in the next few weeks: just watch this space.
THE MECHANICS OF CHROMOSOMAL FUSION
Let’s at this juncture learn something about chromosomes.
If you took the DNA from all the cells in your body and lined it up, end to end, it would form a strand 6000 million miles long, albeit a very thin microscopic line. To efficiently and usefully store this important material, DNA is packed into compact structures called chromosomes.
A normal human cell should contain exactly 46 chromosomes, made up of 23 pairs. Pairs 1 through 22 (called autosomes) are numbered in descending order of size and are the same in males and females. The largest chromosome, Chromosome 1, contains about 8000 genes. The smallest chromosome, Chromosome 21, contains about 300 genes (Chromosome 22 should be the smallest, but the scientists made a mistake when they first numbered them!).
The 23rd pair is referred to as the sex chromosome because it is the one that determines whether the baby will be male or female. Whereas other cells in the human body contain a full set of 23 pairs of chromosomes to make a total of 46, the gametes (eggs and spermatozoa) contain only 23 single chromosomes apiece so that at fertilisation when the egg and spermatozoon fuse, the full complement of 46 is restored.
Typically, females have 2 X chromosomes, while males have an X and a Y. Thus the sex chromosomes determine whether you are a boy (XY) or a girl (XX). The X chromosome is significantly longer than the Y chromosome and contains hundreds more genes. The Y chromosome carries only 26 genes.
During fertilisation, the sex of a baby will be determined by the spermatozoon. If the spermatozoon that attaches to the egg on-passes a X chromosome only, the baby will be female; if it on-passes a Y chromosome only, the baby will be male. On very rare occasion, “anomalies” occur when the spermatozoon on-passes an X and Y chromosome at once. When that happens, the baby is both male and female (with two sexual organs) called a hermaphrodite. The person is then sexually identified by the organ that expresses itself more in terms of size.
Exactly how do gametes reproduce themselves? They do so by a process known as meiosis – dividing by halving. At puberty, the first sperm cell a male produces is called a sperm mother cell, whereas the first ovum a female produces is called an ovum mother cell. Each of these mother cells has 46 chromosomes. When a sperm mother cell divides, it will first become four separate but identical gametes or spermatozoa. Each of these four cells will contain 23 chromosomes each. The division process continues until there are about 500 million spermatozoa in one ejaculation.
When a ovum mother cell divides, it too becomes four separate cells initially. However, unlike the case of a mother sperm cell, only one of these four resulting cells matures to be a gamete; the other three die out.
The surviving gamete contains not 46 chromosomes but 23 as per the dividing and halving rules of meiosis. This sole surviving gamete is not produced in millions through repeated division all the time as is the case with male gametes: it is produced only once in 28 days , so that at ovulation time, all 500 million sperm cells will be gunning for only one egg after ejaculation.
Only in very rare cases are more than one egg produced in a month, the result of which could be fraternal twins or additional sets of twins. In still rare cases, one fertilised egg divides into two, three or four copies and the result are identical twins, triplets, etc.
A VERY UNSEEMLY CHROMOSOME
The one puzzle that has plagued scientists since days immemorial is, who tampered with mankind’s DNA? There are just too many things about our DNA and genetic structure that just do not seem to add up. One riddle is that of all living organisms, we have the longest DNA molecule. Yet we only use about 2 percent of it: the rest, a whopping 98 percent, is what is called junk DNA, a mere waste. It has no use whatsoever. All other living things use far much more of their DNA than we do; some animal species use up to 98 percent.
If God is the one who physically created us, why would he pack us with a surfeit of DNA which we hardly use? Obviously somebody must have deliberately switched off the greater part of our DNA and that somebody was not God. No wonder we use less than 10 percent of our brain capacity.
Another mystery is that as complex as we are, we have a smaller gene aggregate than organisms that are less complex than us. A chimpanzee, for instance, has more genes than the much smaller species such as the mouse, chicken, zebra fish, and fruit fly. Yet curiously, we have fewer genes than our closest cousin, the chimpanzee. As if that is not embarrassing enough, we have fewer genes than a chicken and a mouse and are practically level with a roundworm. This, of course, was a deliberate intervention by some superior intellect: we were genetically engineered as such.
Perhaps the most bamboozling aspect about human genetics is the structure of our genome. We have underscored the fact that mankind has 46 chromosomes made up of 23 pairs. Apes have 48 chromosomes made up of 24 pairs. Since the line that led to mankind and the line that led to chimpanzees share a common ancestor from which they diverged 6 million years ago, logic dictates that man and apes should have the same number of chromosomes – 24 pairs.
But hear this: Chromosome 2 in mankind is not a single chromosome: it is made of two chromosomes, 2A and 2B, which were fused to form a composite Chromosome 2! Put differently, the second chromosome has another entire chromosome "tacked" on to it to carry 24 chromosomes in the space of 23. The world’s most respected science magazine, Nature, says Chromosome 2 “arose from the fusion of two ancestral ape chromosomes”. In other words, Chromosome 2 did not naturally arise; it was a manipulation. Who was behind this manipulation?
“The only way that this could have happened,” says one scientist “is that at one point a mother (primate) with 24 chromosomes had to have an egg removed from her body, and the 2nd-3rd chromosomes fused. And this is the important part: the father had to have a natural 23 chromosome-half to contribute.” Who was the “father”? How did the 24 chromosome – half from the mother primate – fit into the space of 23 while still carrying the 24th chromosome?
Answer: the “father” was Enki, the great Anunnaki who genetically engineered mankind from the biological essences of Ape-Woman and the Anunnaki’s. It was Enki who, like the scientific genius he was, slotted 24 chromosomes in the space of only 23 so that mankind could resemble the Anunnaki, who were born with 23 chromosomes!
How I love Lord Enki folks!
NEXT WEEK: ANUNNAKI PARTICLES IN MAN
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GONE FISHING
In recent years, using personal devices in working environments has become so commonplace it now has its own acronym, BOYD (Bring Your Own Device). But as employees skip between corporate tools and personal applications on their own devices, their actions introduce a number of possible risks that should be managed and mitigated with careful consideration. Consider these examples:
Si-lwli, a small family-run business in Wales, is arguably as niche a company as you could find, producing talking toys used to promote the Welsh language. Their potential market is small, with only some 300,000 Welsh language speakers in the world and in reality the business is really more of a hobby for the husband-and-wife team, who both still have day jobs. Yet, despite still managing to be successful in terms of sales, the business is now fighting for survival after recently falling prey to cybercriminals. Emails between Si-Iwli and their Chinese suppliers were intercepted by hackers who altered the banking details in the correspondence, causing Si-Iwli to hand over £18,000 (around P ¼ m) to the thieves. That might not sound much to a large enterprise, but to a small or medium business it can be devastating.
Another recent SMB hacking story which appeared in the Wall Street Journal concerned Innovative Higher Ed Consulting (IHED) Inc, a small New York start-up with a handful of employees. IHED didn’t even have a website, but fraudsters were able to run stolen credit card numbers through the company’s payment system and reverse the charges to the tune of $27,000, around the same loss faced by Si-Iwli. As the WSJ put it, the hackers completely destroyed the company, forcing its owners to fold.
And in May 2019, the city of Baltimore’s computer system was hit by a ransomware attack, with hackers using a variant called RobinHood. The hack, which has lasted more than a month, paralysed the computer system for city employees, with the hackers demanding a payment in Bitcoin to give access back to the city.
Of course, hackers target governments or business giants but small and medium businesses are certainly not immune. In fact, 67% of SMBs reported that they had experienced a cyber attack across a period of 12 months, according to a 2018 survey carried out by security research firm Ponemon Institute. Additionally, Verizon issued a report in May 2019 that small businesses accounted for 43% of its reported data breaches. Once seen as less vulnerable than PCs, smartphone attacks are on the rise, with movements like the Dark Caracal spyware campaign underlining the allure of mobile devices to hackers. Last year, the US Federal Trade Commission released a statement calling for greater education on mobile security, coming at a time when around 42% of all Android devices are believed to not carry the latest security updates.
This is an era when employees increasingly use their smartphones for work-related purposes so is your business doing enough to protect against data breaches on their employees’ phones? The SME Cyber Crime Survey 2018 carried out for risk management specialists AON showed that more than 80% of small businesses did not view this as a threat yet if as shown, 67% of SMBs were said to have been victims of hacking, either the stats are wrong or business owners are underestimating their vulnerability. A 2019 report by PricewaterhouseCoopers suggests the latter, stating that the majority of global businesses are unprepared for cyber attacks.
Consider that a workstation no longer means a desk in an office: It can be a phone in the back of a taxi or Uber; a laptop in a coffee shop, or a tablet in an airport lounge. Wherever the device is used, employees can potentially install applications that could be harmful to your business, even from something as seemingly insignificant as clicking on an accidental download or opening a link on a phishing email. Out of the physical workplace, your employees’ activities might not have the same protections as they would on a company-monitored PC.
Yet many businesses not only encourage their employees to work remotely, but assume working from coffee shops, bookstores, and airports can boost employees’ productivity. Unfortunately, many remote hot spots do not provide secure Wi-Fi so if your employee is accessing their work account on unsecured public Wi-Fi, sensitive business data could be at risk. Furthermore, even if your employee uses a company smartphone or has access to company data through a personal mobile device, there is always a chance data could be in jeopardy with a lost or stolen device, even information as basic as clients’ addresses and phone numbers.
BOYDs are also at risk from malware designed to harm and infect the host system, transmittable to smartphones when downloading malicious third-party apps. Then there is ransomware, a type of malware used by hackers to specifically take control of a system’s data, blocking access or threatening to release sensitive information unless a ransom is paid such as the one which affected Baltimore. Ransomware attacks are on the increase, predicted to occur every 14 seconds, potentially costing billions of dollars per year.
Lastly there is phishing – the cyber equivalent of the metaphorical fishing exercise – whereby cybercriminals attempt to obtain sensitive data –usernames, passwords, credit card details –usually through a phoney email designed to look legitimate which directs the user to a fraudulent website or requests the data be emailed back directly. Most of us like to think we could recognize a phishing email when we see it, but these emails have become more sophisticated and can come through other forms of communication such as messaging apps.
Bottom line is to be aware of the potential problems with BOYDs and if in doubt, consult your IT security consultants. You can’t put the own-device genie back in the bottle but you can make data protection one of your three wishes!
Columns
“I Propose to Diana Tonight”
About five days before Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed landed in Paris, General Atiku, a certain Edward Williams was taking a walk in a woods in the Welsh town of Mountain Ash. Williams, then 73, was a psychic of some renown. He had in the past foretold assassination attempts on US President Ronald Reagan, which occurred on March 30, 1981, and Pope John Paul II, which came to pass on May 13, 1981.
As he trudged the woods, Williams had a sudden premonition that pointed to Diana’s imminent fate as per Christopher Andersen’s book The Day Diana Died. “When the vision struck me, it was as if everything around me was obscured and replaced by shadowy figures,” Williams was later to reminisce. “In the middle was the face of Princess Diana. Her expression was sad and full of pathos. She was wearing what looked like a floral dress with a short dark cardigan. But it was vague. I went cold with fear and knew it was a sign that she was in danger.”
Williams hastily beat a retreat to his home, which he shared with his wife Mary, and related to her his presentiment, trembling like an aspen leaf as he did so. “I have never seen him so upset,” Mary recounted. “He felt he was given a sign and when he came back from his walk he was deeply shaken.”
The following day, Williams frantically sauntered into a police station to inform the police of his premonition. The officer who attended to him would have dismissed him as no more than a crackpot but he treated him seriously in view of the accuracy of his past predictions. He took a statement and immediately passed it on to the Special Branch Investigative Unit.
The report read as follows:
“On 27 August, at 14:12 hrs, a man by the name of Edward Williams came to Mountain Ash police station. He said he was a psychic and predicted that Princess Diana was going to die. In previous years, he has predicted that the Pope and Ronald Reagan were going to be the victims of assassination attempts. On both occasions he was proved to be correct. Mr Williams appeared to be quite normal.”
Williams, General, was spot-on as usual: four days later, the princess was no more.
Meanwhile, General, even as Dodi and Diana were making their way to the Fayed-owned Ritz Hotel in central Paris, British newspapers were awash with headlines that suggested Diana was kind of deranged. Writes Andrew Morton in Diana in Pursuit of Love: “In The Independent Diana was described as ‘a woman with fundamentally nothing to say about anything’. She was ‘suffering from a form of arrested development’. ‘Isn’t it time she started using her head?’ asked The Mail on Sunday. The Sunday Mirror printed a special supplement entitled ‘A Story of Love’; The News of the World claimed that William had demanded that Diana should split from Dodi: ‘William can’t help it, he just doesn’t like the man.’ William was reportedly ‘horrified’ and ‘doesn’t think Mr Fayed is good for his mother’ – or was that just the press projecting their own prejudices? The upmarket Sunday Times newspaper, which had first serialised my biography of the princess, now put her in the psychiatrist’s chair for daring to be wooed by a Muslim. The pop-psychologist Oliver James put Diana ‘On the Couch’, asking why she was so ‘depressed’ and desperate for love. Other tabloids piled in with dire prognostications – about Prince Philip’s hostility to the relationship, Diana’s prospect of exile, and the social ostracism she would face if she married Dodi.”
DIANA AND DODI AT THE RITZ
Before Diana and Dodi departed the Villa Windsor sometime after 16 hrs, General, one of Dodi’s bodyguards Trevor Rees-Jones furtively asked Diana as to what the programme for the evening was. This Trevor did out of sheer desperation as Dodi had ceased and desisted from telling members of his security detail, let alone anyone else for that matter, what his onward destination was for fear that that piece of information would be passed on to the paparazzi. Diana kindly obliged Trevor though her response was terse and scarcely revealing. “Well, eventually we will be going out to a restaurant”, that was all Diana said. Without advance knowledge of exactly what restaurant that was, Trevor and his colleagues’ hands were tied: they could not do a recce on it as was standard practice for the security team of a VIP principal. Dodi certainly, General, was being recklessly by throwing such caution to the winds.
At about 16:30, Diana and Dodi drew up at the Ritz Hotel, where they were received by acting hotel manager Claude Roulet. The front entrance of the hotel was already crawling with paparazzi, as a result of which the couple took the precaution of using the rear entrance, where hopefully they would make their entry unperturbed and unmolested. The first thing they did when they were ensconced in the now $10,000 a night Imperial Suite was to spend some time on their mobiles and set about touching base with friends, relations, and associates. Diana called at least two people, her clairvoyant friend Rita Rogers and her favourite journalist Richard Kay of The Daily Mail.
Rita, General, was alarmed that Diana had proceeded to venture to Paris notwithstanding the warning she had given Dodi and herself in relation to what she had seen of him in the crystal ball when the couple had consulted her. When quizzed as to what the hell she indeed was doing in Paris at that juncture, Diana replied that she and Dodi had simply come to do some shopping, which though partially true was not the material reason they were there. “But Diana, remember what I told Dodi,” Rita said somewhat reprovingly. Diana a bit apprehensively replied, “Yes I remember. I will be careful. I promise.” Well, she did not live up to her promise as we shall soon unpack General.
As for Richard Kay, Diana made known to him that, “I have decided I am going to radically change my life. I am going to complete my obligations to charities and to the anti-personnel land mines cause, but in November I want to completely withdraw from formal public life.”
Once she was done with her round of calls, Diana went down to the hair saloon by the hotel swimming pool to have her hair washed and blow-dried ahead of the scheduled evening dinner.
THE “TELL ME YES” RING IS DELIVERED
Since the main object of their Paris trip was to pick up the “Tell Me Yes” engagement ring Dodi had ordered in Monte Carlo a week earlier, Dodi decided to check on Repossi Jewellery, which was right within the Ritz prencincts, known as the Place Vendome. It could have taken less than a minute for Dodi to get to the store on foot but he decided to use a car to outsmart the paparazzi invasion. He was driven there by Trevor Rees-Jones, with Alexander Kez Wingfield and Claude Roulet following on foot, though he entered the shop alone.
The Repossi store had closed for the holiday season but Alberto Repossi, accompanied by his wife and brother-in-law, had decided to travel all the way from his home in Monaco and momentarily open it for the sake of the potentially highly lucrative Dodi transaction. Alberto, however, disappointed Dodi as the ring he had chosen was not the one he produced. The one he showed Dodi was pricier and perhaps more exquisite but Dodi was adamant that he wanted the exact one he had ordered as that was what Diana herself had picked. It was a ploy on the part of Repossi to make a real killing on the sale, his excuse to that effect being that Diana deserved a ring tha was well worthy of her social pedigree. With Dodi having expressed disaffection, Repossi rendered his apologies and assured Dodi he would make the right ring available shortly, whereupon Dodi repaired back to the hotel to await its delivery. But Dodi did insist nonetheless that the pricier ring be delivered too in case it appealed to Diana anyway.
Repossi delivered the two rings an hour later. They were collected by Roulet. On inspecting them, Dodi chose the very one he had seen in Monte Carlo, apparently at the insistence of Diana. There is a possibility that Diana, who was very much aware of her public image and was not comfortable with ostentatious displays of wealth, may have deliberately shown an interest in a less expensive engagement ring. It may have been a purely romantic as opposed to a prestigious choice for her.
The value of the ring, which was found on a wardrobe shelf in Dodi’s apartment after the crash, has been estimated to be between $20,000 and $250,000 as Repossi has always refused to be drawn into revealing how much Dodi paid for it. The sum, which enjoyed a 25 percent discount, was in truth paid for not by Dodi himself but by his father as was the usual practice.
Dodi was also shown Repossi’s sketches for a bracelet, a watch, and earrings which he proposed to create if Diana approved of them.
DIANA AND DODI GUSH OVER IMMINENT NUPTIALS
At about 7 pm, Dodi and Diana left the Ritz and headed for Dodi’s apartment at a place known as the Arc de Trompe. They went there to properly tog themselves out for the scheduled evening dinner. They spent two hours at the luxurious apartment. As usual, the ubiquitous paparazzi were patiently waiting for them there.
As they lingered in the apartment, Dodi beckoned over to his butler Rene Delorm and showed him the engagement ring. “Dodi came into my kitchen,” Delorm relates. “He looked into the hallway to check that Diana couldn’t hear and reached into his pocket and pulled out the box … He said, ‘Rene, I’m going to propose to the princess tonight. Make sure that we have champagne on ice when we come back from dinner’.” Rene described the ring as “a spectacular diamond encrusted ring, a massive emerald surrounded by a cluster of diamonds, set on a yellow and white gold band sitting in a small light-grey velvet box”.
Just before 9 pm, Dodi called the brother of his step-father, Hassan Yassen, who also was staying at the Ritz that night, and told him that he hoped to get married to Diana by the end of the year.
Later that same evening, both Dodi and Diana would talk to Mohamed Al Fayed, Dodi’s dad, and make known to him their pre-nuptial intentions. “They called me and said we’re coming back (to London) on Sunday (August 31) and on Monday (September 1) they are
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RAMADAN – The Blessed Month of Fasting
Ramadan is the fasting month for Muslims, where over one billion Muslims throughout the world fast from dawn to sunset, and pray additional prayers at night. It is a time for inner reflection, devotion to Allah, and self-control. It is the ninth month in the Islamic calendar. As you read this Muslims the world over have already begun fasting as the month of Ramadan has commenced (depending on the sighting of the new moon).
‘The month of Ramadan is that in which the Qur’an was revealed as guidance for people, in it are clear signs of guidance and Criterion, therefore whoever of you who witnesses this month, it is obligatory on him to fast it. But whoever is ill or traveling let him fast the same number of other days, God desires ease for you and not hardship, and He desires that you complete the ordained period and glorify God for His guidance to you, that you may be grateful”. Holy Qur’an (2 : 185)
Fasting during Ramadan is one of the five pillars upon which the structure of Islam is built. The other four are: the declaration of one’s belief in Allah’s oneness and in the message of Muhammad (PBUH); regular attendance to prayer; payment of zakaat (obligatory charity); and the pilgrimage to Mecca.
As explained in an earlier article, fasting includes total abstinence from eating, drinking, smoking, refraining from obscenity, avoiding getting into arguments and including abstaining from marital relations, from sunrise to sunset. While fasting may appear to some as difficult Muslims see it as an opportunity to get closer to their Lord, a chance to develop spiritually and at the same time the act of fasting builds character, discipline and self-restraint.
Just as our cars require servicing at regular intervals, so do Muslims consider Ramadan as a month in which the body and spirit undergoes as it were a ‘full service’. This ‘service’ includes heightened spiritual awareness both the mental and physical aspects and also the body undergoing a process of detoxification and some of the organs get to ‘rest’ through fasting.
Because of the intensive devotional activity fasting, Ramadan has a particularly high importance, derived from its very personal nature as an act of worship but there is nothing to stop anyone from privately violating Allah’s commandment of fasting if one chooses to do so by claiming to be fasting yet eating on the sly. This means that although fasting is obligatory, its observance is purely voluntary. If a person claims to be a Muslim, he is expected to fast in Ramadan.
The reward Allah gives for proper fasting is very generous. Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) quotes Allah as saying: “All actions done by a human being are his own except fasting, which belongs to Me and I will reward it accordingly.” We are also told by the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) that the reward for proper fasting is admittance into heaven.
Fasting earns great reward when it is done in a ‘proper’ manner. This is because every Muslim is required to make his worship perfect. For example perfection of fasting can be achieved through restraint of one’s feelings and emotions. Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) said that when fasting, a person should not allow himself to be drawn into a quarrel or a slanging match. He teaches us: “On a day of fasting, let no one of you indulge in any obscenity, or enter into a slanging match. Should someone abuse or fight him, let him respond by saying: ‘I am fasting!’”
This high standard of self-restraint fits in well with fasting, which is considered as an act of self-discipline. Islam requires us to couple patience with voluntary abstention from indulgence in our physical desires. The purpose of fasting helps man to attain a high degree of sublimity, discipline and self-restraint. In other words, this standard CAN BE achieved by every Muslim who knows the purpose of fasting and strives to fulfill it.
Fasting has another special aspect. It makes all people share in the feelings of hunger and thirst. In normal circumstances, people with decent income may go from one year’s end to another without experiencing the pangs of hunger which a poor person may feel every day of his life. Such an experience helps to draw the rich one’s conscience nearer to needs of the poor. A Muslim is encouraged to be more charitable and learns to give generously for a good cause.
Fasting also has a universal or communal aspect to it. As Muslims throughout the world share in this blessed act of worship, their sense of unity is enhanced by the fact that every Muslim individual joins willingly in the fulfillment of this divine commandment. This is a unity of action and purpose, since they all fast in order to be better human beings. As a person restrains himself from the things he desires most, in the hope that he will earn Allah’s pleasure, self-discipline and sacrifice become part of his nature.
The month of Ramadan can aptly be described as a “season of worship.” Fasting is the main aspect of worship in this month, because people are more attentive to their prayers, read the Qur’an more frequently and also strive to improve on their inner and outer character. Thus, their devotion is more complete and they feel much happier in Ramadan because they feel themselves to be closer to their Creator.