This is my first Post on this Forum.

I am impressed with the generosity and the extended kindness displayed by the Forum. I will try to be as mannered as they seem to be.

I also look around and I see a wide assortment of Moslem personas which even though they are electronic sparks seem to be both elegant and sincere.

I am an American. I am an old man. I am a Professional soldier. I lived in the Middle East when I was younger and I have a wife from a distinguished family in the Sultanate of Oman. I have a son and a daughter by my wife and I also have two adopted daughters who are married, both were foundlings that I took as my responsibility during war. One I found in a bombed out train. The other was born clean of a Leper family. The father was an educated man and he was my friend. I raised his child as my own from her birth. Both married and I have five grandchildren. Their husbands are fine men. One is a body guard in the American Secret Service. He does work as a Marshall. My other daughter married a man who enlisted in our forces in Kuwait to fight beside us there. He was given American citizenship. He is a Senior Security Officer at a National Airport in the United States.

I am familiar with Islam. Like any religion it has good and bad people. Human nature is disappointing most of the time.

I may disappoint people here. I will try not to do so. I live in Islamabad and have a server with a National company in the United States who have a Sys Admin who is my son. I can post from anywhere on Earth and he will take my post and forward it to anyplace else on Earth. My son is half Omani, six five and weighs 230 pounds. he served in the US Rangers. I would have preferred that he serve in the US Marines but it was his choice and they offered him a very fine scholarship at Georgia Tech.

My daughter , also half Omani, is a Contemplative Dominican Nun in Rome.

I am working with the Embassy in Islamabad and I help facilitate the relief work for the Earthquake refugees up in the Azar. I am also a few other things.
But get to know me if you like. I wont lie to you. I will be honest and you will probably not like a man who is homest. Few people do. I was with Fourth Mech Recon and was in the advance when we took Baghdad. I went into Iraq four times on long range recon before the war even started. I was into Baghdad twice before the city fell. I was with the unit that went in the night the city came apart. We took Saddam City( now Sadr City) and stayed in the big Tobacco Factory there. My unit took Saddams Intelligence Archive and 58 prisoners.

welcome to the forum...hope you have an enjoyable and benefitial stay!!

Greetings,



Welcome to the forums.........

Hope u enjoy ur stay here

salam alaikum
welcome to the forum and thanks for the detailed introduction.

We hope you will enjoy your stay here and find the forum both productive and a means for learning.

We the Muslims more than anything love the truth and love for all people to be honest with themselves as well as others.

Looking forward to your posts.

Bro Aku

welcum here..hope u have a beneficial stay..

welcome to the forums! hope u have a good time here!

Welcome to the forum

Seems like you will have a lot to offer the forum. Enjoy your stay!!

Rabi'ya:rose:

Welcome!

Personally, I think you sound super cool. I've never talked to somebody who fought in the Gulf.

What is your favorite Book after the Scriptures?

I am contented by your hospitality. All of you who greet me accept my thanks.

HUMAN BEINGS ARE ENDOWED with a unique capacity: the gift of speech. By means of language, we give expression to our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. Language enables us to communicate with each other in simple and complex ways and to contribute to the formation of life and world. We could say that the word-our participation in language-is the condition for a truly human world. What would we know of "world" and our presence in it without the instrumentality of language?

Alongside the distinctively human capacity for verbal expression, we have an equally potent endowment for silence. Because we speak and express ourselves through language, we can also choose to refrain from speech. We can remain silent. The choice to be Silent is not a merely negative phenomenon. If we believe that in silence "nothing happens," we may conclude that silence is indeed negative, a non-act. In reality, though, silence can be as expressive as the spoken word. When we keep SPEAK out of our inner Silence silence purposefully engages in a positive act: we do something with and by our silence. Understood in this way, silence becomes a communicative act that achieves parity with speech. "Silence speaks," as we say.

Silence and speech are, in fact, profoundly related to each other. Authentic speech depends on silence, for silence enhances the expression of our uniqueness in movement, gesture, and word. True words in turn foster access to the depths of silence from which thoughtful speech flows. If my words are not born of silence, it is a waste of time."\0mallfoÙ\0\0\0»ˆjq\0enter">
<!-- Do not remove this copyright notice -->
Powered by vBulletin Version 3.5.2<br />Copyright ©2000 - 2006, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
LinkBacks Enabled by vBSEO 3.0.0<br /><!--VBSEO_COPYRIGHT--><br />
vBulletin Skin developed by: <a href="http://www.vbstyles.com">vBStyles.com</a><br />
<a href="http://www.automobileinsurancereviews.com">Auto Insurance</a>|<a href="http://www.crazyaboutwireless.com">Wireless Internet</a>|<a href="http://www.transformersnetwork.com/ringtones/">Sprint Ringtones</a>|<a href="http://nba.row12.com/">NBA</a>|<a href="http://www.myvermontinfo.com">Vermont</a> <img src="http://ads.digitalpoint.com/t-78421-26310-84399-21800-88159.gif" width="1" height="1">
<!-- Do not remove this copyright notice -->

</div>

<div class="smallfont" align="center">
<!-- Do not remove or your scheduled tasks will cease to function -->

<!-- Do not remove or your scheduled tasks will cease to function -->

\0\0\0\0!\0\0\0phq\0phq\0ÔXhq\0\0\0\0membØ \0\0P\0\0\0èÈ(Ô;\0\0\0/home/islamicf/public_html/includes/functions_bigthree.php\0p?\0q\0\0\0\0@ªpk\0\ 0\0>
\0\0\0 \0\0\0ÀÓØÔ\0\0\0\0\0\0\0X>¶
\0
\0\0\0\0\0A\0\0\0ãP?p\0\0\0.k\0\0\0\0ˆÔ@! k\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0fetch_quote_title\0kXhq\0\0\0\ 0A\0\0\0Mðô±\0\0\0°4k\0\0\0\0-kHÔ*;i\0\0\0\0fetch_emailchecked\0o\0\0\0¨4k \0\0\0¸õ`\0�ˆ\0\0\0 \0\0\0(Ôˆk\0\0€#&([a-z]+);#i\0<!a\0\0\0

Wow...Nice intro!

You actually fought in the Gulf? Well nice to meet you and hopefully you will like this forum

I am unfamiliar with the mechanisms of this Forum. I posted in Introduction and it dismissed half of the text and put up gibberish. Wanted to do a quote and it stopped doing the text.

I see I can not initiate a thread either. It is not allowed. I suppose one is confined to replies alone until one has made 50 replies and then gets to initiate a thread independently?

The people seem very polite. You may be accustomed to the incivility of other Forums. I am more familiar with the brutal handling of other Forums. This seems a very peaceful place.

You make reference to a "violent wind". Give me the whole quote from the Koran and put it in context for me.

OK, here goes my favourite surah

In the name of God, Most merciful, most kind.

Surah Al-Haaqah (the reality)

"1)the reality (i.e. the day of resurrection)
2)what is the reality?
3)and what will make you know what is the reality?
4)Thamud and Aad denied the Qa'ariah [the striking hour (day of judgement)].
5)As for Thamud, they were destroyed by the awful cry.
6)And as for Aad, they were destroyed by a screaming violent wind.
7)Which Allah(god) imposed on them for 7 nights and 8 days in succession, so then you could see men lying overthrown (destroyed), as if they were hollow trunks of palm trees!
8)Do you see any remenants of them."

Well by this Allah brings back the story of the 2 tribes, Aad and thamud...

Read more of them here:

http://www.islamweb.net/ver2/archive...ang=E&id=53397

You make a reference to a "Violent wind" Folzey. Is your name Sapphire or is that a nickname? I am an old man, as I have said. I am also a gemstone dealer and know a good deal about Sapphires. I particularly like Star Sapphires.

Since you talk of "violent winds" and give me a Koran reference; here is something of mine from a book I did called "The Cauldron of Light"

The valley of the Children( Valle de los Ninos) was named that by the Spanish. But the name is older than that...the Indians called the valley the same thing...but in their language it was called Arinero. It meant “the place of the demons.”
There are two kinds of demons in the Arinero. One is a dust-devil, everyone knows what a dust-devil is. And the other is a sand-demon, which is not so well known.
The Arinero from which the valley got its name, are two very big dust devils. Each arises in the extreme eastern end of the valley as the sun rises. The wind and the air in that end of the valley are heated first because the sun rises over the Granite mountains and exposes the sheer sides of the opposing Crater and Growler mountains around the three sides of the valley to an ascending array of sharp mountain reflective faces.

As these mountain surfaces reflect the sunlight, the valley gradually heats from east to west in a steady march of temperature. The winds of the night’s cooler air rise and flee before the light. And as they flee westward the dust is driven before them, one from the north east and the other to the southeast. These towers of marching dust are three hundred feet high, bright and turning on the edge of the advancing morning sun.

These two small tornadoes every day for thousands and thousands of years are the dust devils of the Arinero. Every day they come like swirling stone-throwing bullies, one down one side of the valley parallel to the Growlers and the other toward the flanks of the Crater mountains.

Each goes to one side or the other of the tower called Okie’s Needle at the dead center of the valley. They can throw stones the size of your fist as they pass. By midday they vanish into the western end of the valley where the atomic bomb crater beckons in the narrow apex of the Granite and the Craters.

The great choker plug called Okie’s Needle in the center of the valley is about 800 feet tall and thin as a needle. It is very dense Verdic Basalt..a silicon volcanic material, but very dense with heavy elements, hard, heavy rock. It is all that is left of the volcano which is no longer there. The volcanic body has long since weathered away, leaving the stone vomit of the needle still rising even though the mound of the ancient volcano has drifted to dust.

There were, at one time, great boulders of verdic basalt in the body of the volcanic cone. But as the magma cone weathered away over the millenia, the boulders were exposed and settled to the blank floor of the arid stone valley. Usually they rested in a substrate of tufa and volcanic gravels...but these were blown around by an eternity of wind, century after century, millenium after millenium.

The great heavy boulders leaned and rocked ever so slowly as the sands and gravels shifted around their bases with the circling winds of time. Over the tens of thousands of years the hard heavy boulders ground down against the bedrock, and with the brilling of the sands to assist ,and the winds to power the process, the great boulders gradually turned and rolled and ground themselves to bits like enormous great drills..until there was little or nothing left of them. And the stone whirlpool result was a series of great cavernous sheer-sided pits near the base of the Needle.

These pits yawn hundreds of feet deep curling and twisting straight down like lairs to the wind. Shadowed leering openings that worm down into darkness and suggest menace and ****ation. Ascending the stairs of the weathered foot of the needle..the pits open on the rock ledges like waiting mouths convoluting straight down into the roaring silences.

The surface rock of the valley is probably hotter than the air above it could ever be. The air at rock level is probably around 125 degrees F. Six feet higher it could be about 106 degrees F. Down in the pits curling back into ledges and windhollowed caverns the air might actually be much cooler, stagnant perhaps, but cooler.

However, the rocks themselves absorb heat in an intense manner, the rocks, after all, are very dense...almost metallic. The sun comes down in this volcanic valley with the suddeness and intensity of a detonating bomb. The rock itself under your boots at midday might be 165 degrees F.

I took shelter in the mouths of the sand demon pits from the heat of midday. It was while I sat in the brooding shadows of the pit that I listened to the silences which spoke just on the edge of hearing deeper down.

Whispers and groans of winds lived down below in the darkness. Shifting temperatures made the air of the pits vary like the bowels of some gigantic stone gut in the belly of hell.
The heat was unbearable..but I sat and bore it. I could get no relief...so I sought none. I endured. I pulled up the hood of my robe and lowered my head and sat in the darkness of the shaded pit..and I recited the psalms to control my waiting, so that my voice argued with the murmurs beneath me...as my will argued with my body commanding it to be still.

My voice alone disturbed the air. The groans and murmurs growled louder as the morning turned to midday and midday turned to afternoon... and I answered the voices of the wind below me with my own voice until there was a booming and a conversation between us. Me reciting the verses in Latin of the Dies Irae...and the groaning and the growls of the shifting air disturbed by the bouncing sound answered me louder and louder...until a breeze arose coming up from below ,dry and stale and full of acrid grit.

The mighty trumpet’s dolorous tone
Shall pierce through each sepulchral stone
and summon men before the throne
Tubamiram spargens sonum
per sepulchra regionem
coget omnes ante thronem
Mors stepubit et natura
Cum resurget creatura
judicanti responsura
Death and nature to amaze
Behold their Lord his creatures raise
to meet the Judges’s awful gaze

And below me, the darkness began to whine.

And suddenly the sand demon awoke below me, broke loose from the silent physics of the rock and heat, and began to come out.

The air at rock level, at the entrance to the pit, was well over a hundred degrees. The lip and the mouth of the pit themselves were incandescent in the direct sun. But just feet back into the pit, deeper by a yard or less, the temperature of the air was perhaps about only a hundred degrees.

Between the rock and the shadows within there may have been as much as a twenty or thirty degree difference. What the temp was down in the deepest bowel of the twisted rock was probably constant even at night. But the fact remains that the temperatures around me in the shadows were radically at variance within inches of one another.

There was a sharp and definite difference in temperature between the depths and the mouth of the pit. Anything that caused a tilting disturbance of this temperature balance would make the air in the pit shift. The heated air of the entrance would create a vacuum just at the entrance and that would be just enough to suck the air from beneath where it was cooler, up just a yard or two. That would be all it would take to awaken the coil of the depths where the air would begin to shake and unwind, its balance disturbed.

Then the motion of the air would accelerate and rise..the heated air probing in forcing the cooler air up...and in their contention..in the echoes of my voice...the shattered balance of the degrees would make the motions of the air become manifest.

And so, the demon in the stygian sand at the bottom of the pit would awaken.

A storm of sound and grit gibbered all around me and blew up from beneath, sending up billows of fine glittering siliconic dust flashing like microscopic sparklers, twinkling shards of infinitesimal glass.

The light of the heated entrance caught this burst of groaning sound and wind and in shafts of brilliant sunlight I was surrounded by a flare of violent hissing whining billows of dust from deep in the pit.

It came up like a snake, glittering and starlike all around me. Driving me out of the pit and into the anvil of sunlight with a blowing shriek and then as I stumbled forth.... the demon sighed and sank again down into the depths, as sudden to return, as he was to rise.

Quid sum miser tunc dicturus
quem patronem rogaturus
cum vix justus sit securus
Ah, how shall I that day endure
what guardian’s aid can make secure
when scarce the just themselves are sure?

Driven forth and having lost the argument with the pit’s master I stood forth on the great stair of the Needle and looked around me at the silent pits rising dark on all sides like curses waiting to be delivered.

I picked up a stone..a large hard dense flat stone and I brought it down so hard against the floor of the ledge beneath my feet that the sides of the cavity of that great stair resounded with the sound, echoing sibilant as a gunshot.

The air all around me bounced with the sound. And the ripples of the sound made the heated layers of the air bend and warp and shiver. The silver mirages danced and shimmered and for a second or two the air all on that stair danced and quivered with my challenge on the surface of the rock.
Every pit responded with a growl and every one sent up a gust of groaning whining sand...small towers of glittering spume dry and eternally waiting...which rose in a wail and then sank down again as the air settled and the waves of sound rolled far away in echoes distant and more distant.
Sand demons.

Then the heat settled around me and the silence too. And I stood exposed and unwelcome in this hell.
Shown the door.
Go, begone. Leave us!
Your voice disturbs us.

As the afternoon lengthened I descended the stair of the Needle heading into the lengthening shadows to the West, I walked the last miles toward the atomic crater in the western distance...the great hole. I walked all night in the cracks of the Valley of the Children, the shattered floor of bare rock, no dust, no soil. And the closer I came to the atomic crater the more the rock became deformed and strange and petrified in liquid agonies now still.

In the moonlight I passed dripping ledges of rock...whole seams had flowed away and the stone beneath my feet was bare and black and not even a single plant grew anywhere in the stark shadows of the atomic blasted narrow valley’s end.

I slept on the rim of the atomic crater awaiting the rising of the sun....then I would rise also... to descend.

With the dawn I would rope my way down into the thirty story deep half mile wide hole left from a quarter kiloton blast of plutonium.
But for now I lay down on the rock of the rim and slept.

Nunc Dimittis...my voice internally delivering me into the hands of my guardians.
Rex tremendae majestatis
qui salvandos salvas gratis
salva me, fons pietatis.
King of tremendous majesty
whose salvation saved me with its freedom
heal me now in the fountain of your grace.

And so, I slept.

Very nice.....I enjoyed that....By the way, if you're wondering what that 'Screaming violent wind' is doing at the bottom of every one of my posts.

Well that's my signature...| really like that story of Sarsain Aathiyah (the wind)....Also, it enchants me, sory that sounded a bit silly....

But anyways...I enjoyed your post....I hope you enjoyed reading the story in the quran