Archive for January, 2014

Pomegranate versus Heroin: Muslims Getting a Wholesome High on Nature with Rhamis Kent – 13 January

January 4, 2014

Pomegranate versus Heroin : Muslims Getting a Wholesome High on Nature with Permaculture consultant Rhamis Kent
8pm Monday 13 January 2014 at Serai, KL Life Centre, Jalan Sultan Ismail – Click Here for Map.

Click here for his article, Restoring Restoring the Amanah Through Earth Repair: Islam, Permaculture, and Ecosystem Restoration Work. An excerpt from his interview on Beyond Halal on Islam & Earth Repair:

Krystina Friedlander: You’ve worked on a number of different Permaculture projects across the Muslim world from Somalia and Yemen to Jordan. Could you tell us what your objectives were, as well as some of the successes and challenges of working in those communities?

Rhamis Kent: What makes working in the Muslim world so interesting is that, by and large, a lot of the places that I’ve found myself working in—and usually I’ve been working pretty closely with Geoff Lawton, director of the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia—is that these are the places that are really the most in need of the kind of work that we do. Typically these are going to be places that are the most water-stressed, and by virtue of being water-stressed they’re going to be challenged in terms of their ability to produce food. …

You’re seeing a lot of similar situations throughout the region. I’m continuing to work on a project in Afghanistan where we hope to encourage the establishment of horticultural systems, tree crop systems, that can provide an income for folks in Afghanistan aside from those things that are used to feed the drug economy. Interestingly enough, they make more money growing pomegranates than they do growing poppies because you’re able to produce more pomegranates in weight per unit area. 

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Ibn Khaldun’s Pleasures of Civilization with Rhamis Kent – 15 January

January 3, 2014

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Ibn Khaldun’s Pleasures of Civilization with Permaculture consultant Rhamis Kent
8pm Wednesday 15 January 2014 at Talent Lounge, Ground Floor, Menara Mustapha Kamal, Damansara Perdana – Near IKEA. Click here for Map.

Click here for his article, Restoring Restoring the Amanah Through Earth Repair: Islam, Permaculture, and Ecosystem Restoration Work. An excerpt from his interview on Beyond Halal on Islam & Earth Repair:

Krystina Friedlander: I want to start by asking you about Ibn Khaldun, a Tunisian historiographer who lived in the 14th century. You wrote that he warned people about the “pleasures of civilization.” What might he say about what we’re seeing now in terms of environmental degradation and industrialization?

Rhamis Kent: Well, I think it’s a proof to what he’s pointing to in his work. The Muqaddimah is a book where he’s examining the causes for the rise and fall of civilizations. As far as what he means by the “pleasures of civilization,” I think the easier things become, the more convenient our day-to-day living becomes, the more distanced we are from really understanding what it is that we need in order to sustain our lives, the more distance we have between ourselves and the natural world. There’s this artificial separation, a misunderstanding of exactly where we are oriented within that order. It creates a type of lethargy where you become very disoriented, and you don’t realize the impact your actions are having on the things you actually need in order to survive. Ibn Khaldun, he called it very accurately, and we’re seeing the advanced stages of some of the types of decline that he’d spoken of in his work.

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