The Research Forum: Iran nuclear talks: Obama hails 'historic' agreement.

Friday, 3 April 2015

Iran nuclear talks: Obama hails 'historic' agreement.

President Obama has hailed a deal restricting Iran's nuclear programme as a "historic understanding" which, if implemented, will make the world safer.

The framework agreement, struck after intensive talks, aims to prevent Tehran making a nuclear weapon in exchange for phased sanction relief. Iran and the six world powers involved must now finalise the deal.

Iranians have been celebrating in the streets but Israel says the deal threatens its survival.

"This will be a long-term deal, that addresses each path to a potential Iranian nuclear bomb," the US President said in a statement after the deal was announced.

"If Iran cheats, the world will know it," he said, adding that the agreement was based not on trust but on "unprecedented verification". He said that if the deal is finalised, "we will be able to resolve one of the greatest threats to our security, and to do so peacefully".

According to "parameters" of the agreement published by the US state department, Iran must reduce the number of its centrifuges that can be used to enrich uranium into a bomb by more than two-thirds.

It also has to redesign a power plant so it cannot produce weapons-grade plutonium, be subject to regular inspections, and agree not to enrich uranium over 3.67% - far less than is required to make a nuclear bomb - for at least 15 years.

"There's new state of the art technology that will be used," US Secretary of State John Kerry told the BBC. "We will have tracking of their uranium from the cradle to the grave."

There's been celebration through the night across Iran and a hero's welcome for Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. But the deal he's brought home has been dismissed by hardliners who say Iran surrendered too much in exchange for too little.

John Kerry also faces a mix of support and scepticism in the US Congress. The loudest condemnation has come from Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu, who insists this deal doesn't block but helps Iran build a nuclear bomb.

As hard as it was to reach this preliminary agreement, it will be even harder to draft a final deal by the end of June. But, if negotiators do it, it will be a victory for diplomacy which, they believe will make the world a much safer place.

The framework agreement was announced by the European Union and Iran after eight days of intense negotiations in the Swiss city of Lausanne.

Western powers have long distrusted Iran's assertions that its nuclear programme is peaceful.

The talks at Lausanne's Beau-Rivage Palace hotel between Iran and the so-called P5+1 - the US, UK, France, China and Russia plus Germany - continued beyond the original, self-imposed deadline of 31 March.

deal" to limit Iran's nuclear programme

The Iranian foreign minister, Javid Zarif, called it a "win-win outcome", but warned: "We have taken a major step, but are still some way away from where we want to be."

The parties have set a deadline of 30 June to reach a comprehensive pact, but these negotiations are expected to be tougher than those that led to the framework agreement.

Even so, there was jubilation overnight on the streets of Tehran.

Celebrations on the streets of Tehran

If the deal is implemented it should mean the eventual lifting of sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy.

Unusually, the US president's speech was aired live on Iranian state television, with some Iranians taking selfies with Mr Obama as a backdrop.

There was anger though from Israel, whose leader Benjamin Netanyahu has been a vocal critic of Iran and told President Obama the deal threatened the survival of Israel. The Israeli prime minister said it would "increase the risks of nuclear proliferation and the risks of a horrific war".

In the US, the deal has been criticised by members of Congress who want US lawmakers to have the right to review any final agreement. US House Speaker John Boehner said the deal represented an "alarming departure" from Mr Obama's original goals and that Congress should review the deal before sanctions on Iran were lifted. BBC, 3 April 2015.

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About the Forum

The Forum initially started its work in December 1997 with the intention of promoting research culture and activities among doctoral candidates in one of the British universities in London. The Research Forum convened 8 sessions a year on humanities-related topics between 1997 and 2013.

The Forum now focuses on the production of self-taught courses, articles and commentary on some aspects of the news for students as well as the general public. The last meeting of the Forum took place in July 2015.

Mowlānā Jalāloddin Balkhi, known in Persia as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī and in the West simply as Rumi, was born on September 30, 1207 C. E. in Balkh Province, Afghanistan, then on the eastern edge of the Persian Empire. Rumi descended from a long line of Islamic jurists, theologians, and mystics, including his father, who was known by followers of Rumi as “Sultan of the Scholars.” When Rumi was still a young man, his father led their family more than 2,000 miles west to avoid the invasion of Genghis Khan’s armies. They settled in present-day Turkey, where Rumi lived and wrote most of his life.

As a teenager, Rumi was recognized as a great spirit by the poet and teacher Fariduddin Attar, who gave him a copy of his own Ilahinama (The Book of God). When his father died in 1231, Rumi became head of the madrasah, or spiritual learning community. The school reportedly had over ten thousand students, including masons, grocers, weavers, hatmakers, carpenters, tailors, and bookbinders.

Rumi’s oldest son, Sultan Velad, managed to save 147 of Rumi’s intimate letters, which provide insights about the poet and how he lived. Rumi often involved himself in the lives of his community members, solving disputes and facilitating loans between nobles and students. The letters are described as having lines of poetry scattered throughout.

In 1244, Rumi met Shams Tabriz, a dervish “God-man” who had taken a vow of poverty. Their meeting is considered a central event in Rumi’s life. Though accounts of their meeting differ, one story claims that Rumi was teaching by a fountain, and Shams walked up through the crowd of students and pushed Rumi’s books into the water, including his father’s spiritual diary. “You must now live what you have been reading about," Shams told Rumi. Rumi believed both his real life and his real poetry began when he met Shams. “What I had thought of before as God," Rumi said, “I met today in a human being.”

Shams and Rumi were close friends for about four years. Over the course of that time, Shams was repeatedly driven away by Rumi’s jealous disciples, including one of Rumi’s sons, Ala al-Din. In December of 1248, Shams again disappeared; it is believed that he was either driven away or killed. Rumi left the madrasah in search of his friend, travelling to Damascus and elsewhere. Eventually, Rumi made peace with his loss, returning to his home believing Shams to be a part of him: “His essence speaks through me.”

Rumi’s mourning for the loss of his friend led to the outpouring of more than 40,000 lyric verses, including odes, eulogies, quatrains, and other styles of Eastern-Islamic poetry. The resulting collection, Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi or The Works of Shams Tabriz, is considered one of Rumi’s masterpieces and one of the greatest works of Persian literature.

In his introduction to his translation of Rumi’s The Shams, Coleman Barks has written: “Rumi is one of the great souls, and one of the great spiritual teachers. He shows us our glory. He wants us to be more alive, to wake up... He wants us to see our beauty, in the mirror and in each other.”

For the last twelve years of his life, beginning in 1262, Rumi dictated a single, six-volume poem to his scribe, Husam Chelebi. The resulting masterwork, the Masnavi-ye Ma’navi(Spiritual Verses), consists of sixty-four thousand lines, and is considered Rumi’s most personal work of spiritual teaching. Rumi described the Masnavi as “the roots of the roots of the roots of the (Islamic) Religion," and the text has come to be regarded by some Sufis as the Persian-language Koran.

In his introduction to an English edition of Spiritual Verses, translator Alan Williams wrote: “Rumi is both a poet and a mystic, but he is a teacher first, trying to communicate what he knows to his audience. Like all good teachers, he trusts that ultimately, when the means to go any further fail him and his voice falls silent, his students will have learnt to understand on their own.”

Rumi fell ill and died on December 17, 1273 C. E., in Konya, Turkey. His remains were interred adjacent to his father’s, and the Yeşil Türbe (Green Tomb) was erected above their final resting place. Now the Mevlâna museum, the site includes a mosque, dance hall, and dervish living quarters. Thousands of visitors, of all faiths, visit his tomb each month, honoring the poet of legendary spiritual understanding.

Source: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/jalal-al-din-rumi

Your Life Discourse!

It is soooo good when you realize that your life and every road you have taken made and makes sense... Even when you feel that the world will not applaud you for what you are doing, you find you have to do it yourself and clap your own hands. Later everything falls into place. In my doctoral thesis, I studied how the self-discourse is constructed along history. It is a fact that we describe our past like a coherent story. Even though we know that the discourse of our life is a construction, our life is actually built by roads and paths we accept, that come and go, and later make all sense because they are part of our own being. Once in a while we feel that our past is actually part of us.

Marcia Neme Buzalaf
marciabuzalaf@gmail.com.

Scholarship and Academia

Benedit Spinoza is one of the original thinkers among Western philosophers. When he was offered a Professorship of Philosophy at Heidelberg University at age of 31, he turned it down arguing that he wanted to be left alone to do his philosophising “in accordance with his own mind”. He proceeded to live a solitary life, earning his living by grinding and polishing lenses for spectacles, microscopes and telescopes – at the time a new profession.

Being a great philosopher and academic is a rare development: Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Mill or Nietzsche did not teach philosophy. The exceptions are Kant and Hegel.

Nothing much has changed since: academia is still not the right place for real scholars today. Mottos such as ‘publish or perish’ have mainly resulted in the production of shallow, regurgitated or ego-boosting publications. Universities are also no different from other corporate capitalist entities that seek to maximize their profit at the cost of quality service. They neither provide the scholar nor the student with a conducive environment for their development or self-fulfilment.

Thoughtful Sentences

Integrity: When the thoughts we think are the same as the words we speak, others will feel our integrity.

Enthusiasm: Those who are fired with an enthusiastic idea and who allow it to take hold and dominate their thoughts find that new worlds open for them. As long as enthusiasm holds out, so will new opportunities.

No Task Too Difficult: If you do everything with the feeling of happiness, there will be no task too difficult to perform.

A Long And Healthy Life: There are three ingredients for a long and healthy life: live with attention but without worry, use time in a worthwhile way, keep your thoughts pure, positive and filled with strength.

Friday, 3 April 2015

Iran nuclear talks: Obama hails 'historic' agreement.

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