Tommy Peters' Bicycles

Cyrus & Tunku was published by Tommy Peters Bicycles on January 24, 2016 “A good design is obvious. A great design is transparent.”  The maxim holds for King Cyrus of Persia and Tunku Abdul Rahman of Malaysia, who promoted a great design in a multicultural fabric working ‘transparently’ in the background.  In 500 B.C. King Cyrus, who wrote the first human rights charter, kept religions private and ethnicities distinct, enabling the ‘racehorse’ and ‘plough-horse’ to co-exist seamlessly. Generally, the Persians represented racehorses and Arabs, the plough-horses working in tandem to better the empire and down the pike; in modern times, they perform similar roles where the former is as an ‘entrepreneur’ and the latter a ‘consumer.’  Cyrus recognised that the pursuit of ethnic integration is the destruction of excellence, in that “for a plough-horse to keep up with a racehorse he would have to cripple the racehorse and conversely, for a racehorse to pull as much as a plou...

Preamble:- The House of Saud, which prides itself as the Rolls of the Middle East, is keenly aware that there is no Step 3 when you face the Twelfth Imam in the public domain.  Debating the merits and demerits of the cabal's house-negro is as awkward as it is irrelevant, but it is not a waste of time, given that it provokes the Django debate.  It is not Washington that 'made the region tremble' but an elite group that holds the violin, that drew lines in the sand, that defined not only the plethora of caged psyches we call The Middle East but resurrected their doctrinal antithesis in the form of a refreshing tech-driven 4000-year-old flicker to flame, tasked with dragging minions, misogynists and dictators of all stripes out of their dark caves, into modernity . On the chessboard, the grandmaster's protected one is Israel. It is a 'prized flame' while the one who trembles in its jubbah is the House of Saud, the DHL of the triangle and the necessary hypocrit...

The apostasy prohibition is the 'hidden' encumbrance to a Muslim leader who places Islam in the public domain.  The Arab psyche is in a cage. On one hand, they are born into a religion that prohibits them from leaving at the risk of death. On the other, they yearn to experiment with democracy, a construct b ased on personal freedom, freedom of religion inclusive. A construct that challenges the underlying prohibition. Morsi installed a Sharia-centric constitution in December 2012 but resisted turning Egypt into a full-blown Islamic state. He experimented with democracy and embraced its institutions. A Muslim leader in a Muslim majority state must choose between placing Islam in the public domain or keeping it private. Keeping it private, as in Azerbaijan and Malaysia, allows for a secular constitution, whereas placing it in the public domain demands a Sharia-centric constitution and its enabling institutions. Otherwise being encumbered with such prohibition himself, a ...