Alcohol in Islam

Any alcohol consumption including alcoholic drinks is formally prohibited by Islam. However any act made by the drunk during his drunkenness is valid and should not be considered as void.

Due to this general prohibition regarding the alcohol or any of its derivative, the big majority of the « Fuquha’a »  estimate that the validity of the drunk acts shall be maintained as a punishment of his behavior, hence, deciding that the acts made by the drunk during his drunkenness do not engage him, will let him using from his mistake and fault as an apology for his acts .

There is obviously a sad confusion between the law and the moral. According strictly to the legal principles, the drunk is unconscious during the period of his inebriation which shall mean logically that any act made during this drunkenness is void accordingly.

Or the drunkeness depends on the drunk himself, because any person drinking alcohol knows that any excess in alcohol will make him drunk.

Consequently, deciding to annul any act made by the drunk during his inebriation  seems sometimes complicated, because the drunkeness is in principle temporary, therefore the proof of the drunkeness will seem difficult to provide once the rate of alcohol in the person’s blood becomes within acceptable/natural limits.

The strong ties between the USA and the KSA: is it love or reason?

The strategical relationship between the United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia goes back to late 1940's, just after the end of world war II, upon the discovery of the oil in the KSA. Oil which is synonymous of energy and which (according to some analysts) was the main startegic reason behind the war of the pacific from 1941 to 1945. Establishing excellent relations with the new royal regime at that time in the KSA was of prime importance for the US.

In fact these bilateral relations grew relatively fast when US companies were commissioned to discover and extract the commodity from the Saudi soil. And for decades, companies like Halliburton, Schlumberger, Aramco and others had the absolute exclusivity to discover new oil fields in the Kingdom and to extract the black gold and to ship it.

With time, those ties evolved between the two nations and became deep enough to "re-invent" the Saudi economy, in fact the Saudi currency (riyal) became strictly tied to the US dollar in a fixed exchange rate; Most of the Saudi's government oil revenues (as well as the royal family's) were being invested in the US markets, experts believe that Saudi money invested in the US represents around 7% of the US market. Until recently, the Saudi armament program was exclusively provided by US firms like: Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Mcdonall Douglas; At last but not least Saudi Arabian Airlines flies Boeing aircrafts almost exclusively.

Politically and diplomatically both States were constantly in perfect harmony and the KSA was one of the major allies of the US. The State visit of a newly elected US president to the KSA became a ritual, while Saudi citizens are usually granted multiple visas to the US for undefinite periods. (unlike all other Arab countries)

The KSA became practically operating according to the american way, as everything was built, designed, commissioned according to US standards. The list is long: the building codes in Saudi are US codes, the design and technical specifications for infrastructure projects are conducted according to the US standards, the heavy and sophisticated equipments (power production, water treatment, new technologies) are designed, built and operated according to the US industry codes.

We also note that the US Universities became the preferential destinations for Saudi students. Most of the new Saudi generation that are highly educated have graduated from US Universities, in a need to discover the technology and know-how of what is being developped in their mother land.

According to such evidences, many analysts and observers argue that the "Americanization" of the Saudi society did not happen naturally as a result of the interaction between two populations sharing the same history or culture or background! Instead, it is the fruit of a strategical pact that ensures safe and continuous flows of oil into the biggest oil consumer in the world at preferential prices (much below markets), in return the biggest oil producer of the OPEC countries enjoys an unconditional support and backup from the US policies makers.

Alcohol in Muslim law (article in French)

L’usage de l’alcool et de toute boisson alcoolique est formellement interdit  par l’islam, pourtant tout acte accompli par un ivrogne durant son ivresse est valable et ne doit pas être considéré comme nul.

En raison de cette réprobation générale visant l’alcool et tout ce qui touche à l’alcool, la grande majorité des « Fuquha’a » estiment que ce serait faire bénéficier l’ivrogne d’une certaine excuse qu’il tirerait précisément de sa propre turpitude ou faute si l’on décidait que les actes accomplis par lui durant son ivresse ne le liaient pas ; d’après eux, la validité de tels actes doit être maintenue ne serait-ce que comme punition des actes de l’ivrogne.

Il y a là évidemment une confusion fâcheuse du droit et de la morale. A s’en tenir strictement aux principes juridiques, l’ivrogne pendant tout le temps que dure son ivresse, est privé de raison ce qui devrait mener logiquement à en déduire la nullité de tout acte fait en état d’ébriété.

Or l’état d’ébriété dépend de l’ivrogne lui-même, parce que toute personne en buvant sait que l’excès dans l’alcool peut la rendre ivre.

En conséquence, vouloir annuler tout acte de l’ivre pendant son état d’ébriété parait parfois chose difficile parce l’état d’ivresse est en principe temporaire et par suite la preuve de cet état d’ivresse serait difficile à rapporter une fois l’alcool ne circule plus dans le sang de la personne.

Would you invest in a fund based only on Twitter?

Twitter has become a social networking phenomenon, with more than 200 million users around the world, and more than 10 million daily users. A European hedge fund is planning to harness the power of Twitter by making investment decisions based on real-time messages, known as tweets. The founder of the fund along with a University professor, claim they can predict market directions based on Twitter trends and the various moods of tweets, which are 140 characters or less.

Using proprietary technology, the fund will monitor tweets and sort them into several categories, such as calm, alert or happy. According to analysts, the idea rather makes sense since markets generally reflect the mood of the investors, and with such large number of daily users on Twitter, the mood inspired from the tweets (which is a considerable representative sample) will provide a good assumption about the actual general mood of the investors and the markets around the world.

The idea is still being debated and the question is whether the fund owners will succeed in convincing investors about their project, and therefore be able to raise sufficient funds to meet the launching threshold of this avant-guardist new hedge fund.

One thing is sure: if only by using Twitter to predict the market movements this hedge fund can perform well, and consequently generate profits for on-board investors, many others will follow this business model and will start using the same tool for their new investments. It will be a new era for Twitter as well which might see its popularity growing further and its company valuation flying high.

Pollution on the internet

Pollution is a major plague confronting the world today. It is mostly witnessed in the atmosphere, or in the streets, but in fact pollution has reached other places in our lives, and one of the most important places is the internet. Sometimes unnoticed, especially to those who don't use the web or use it very little, internet pollution is becoming a daily topic in our lives.

May be the most common form of web pollution is viruses. Tens of thousands of viruses attack on a daily basis sensitive sites and workstations worldwide. In many cases the viruses are hidden in emails, messages or applications, which commonly offer internet users fictious and false services, such as instant rewards or pornographics etc...

Major IT institutions worldwide conduct and finance researches, in continuous attempts to win the race against a generation of viruses, that are becoming more harmful, destructive and more sophisticated day after day.

Another form of pollution on the internet is the huge number of meaningless articles, webpages, applications that are listed on the web, and the large number of such material that is uploaded on a daily basis as well. Some of it is benign and does not present any harm or disturbance to users, and the reason for its release on the net remains not understood, since it does not generate any kind of benefit for its authors or for the public. This certainty has recently pushed Google (the world's largest search engine on the internet) to adopt new measures with regards to web searching, resulting in a massive "cleansing" operation for the worldwide web, which has caused many editors to lose up to 50% of their publications from search engines results.

A serious kind of pollution on the internet is the kind where web surfers attempt to use the web for prohibited or even criminal practises, such as paedophilia, abduction, organ trafficking, drug dealing and terrorism. In Such cases the intervention of public prosecutions from the countries concerned is inevitable, and people who are involved in such crimes are nowadays easily tracked down and caught, thanks to new technologies available to governmental institutions, notably the latest generation of GPS. Needless to mention that very serious punishments await those who are involved in such crimes, as we have seen lately in Belgium and in Germany. 

If the pollution of the atmosphere has prompted the UN to mobilise many major Heads of States to sign the Kyoto Protocol, the pollution on the internet would only require people to have more ethics, in business and in personal life. If ethics were to be observed, many other problems of our modern times would also be resolved.