News Hit

In yesterday's Sunday Age there was an article about a hardline cleric named Sheikh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, who has placed a fatwa on paper money claiming that Muslims should use dirhams (silver coins) and dinars (gold coins) instead. His call has been heeded in parts of Indonesia, with the number of gold and silver coins in circulation doubling in the past year. Here's the article: Indonesians heed call to scrap paper and go for gold.

But Sheikh Abdalqadir as-Sufi is not your typical cleric: his birth name was Ian Dallas and he was born in Scotland. In the 60s he wrote and directed TV series for the BBC, lived in one of the most fashionable parts of London and was friends with George Harrison and Eric Clapton. Now he's a hardline Islamic cleric based in South Africa who wants Britain controlled by a Muslim council, sees Islam as the world's best hope for overthrowing capitalism and thinks the would-be shoe/underwear bombers were CIA plants. It's a strange life trajectory, as this article, The bohemian who leads a crusade against the West, in The Age documents.

He's definitely a unique character, but from the article he comes as having a lot of contradictions. For example, for someone who seems to have nothing but disdain for the West, it's interesting that he's pictured wearing Western business attire rather than more traditional Islamic garb. Also, 'proletariat' is not a term that generally appears in the Islamist lexicon. If anything he comes across as a member of 60s counterculture who came to see Islam as a vessel onto which to project his own politics, just like those who were captivated by other Eastern religions.