What Does Islam Teach?

These two videos are part of a "Why I Love Islam" campaign that's going on at Youtube. The campaign is for the purpose of da'wah, trying to teach people about Islam. So far, there have been 33 videos made that are in response to the campaign. Both videos here, "What Does Islam Really Teach?" and "Why I Love Islam: Tawheed - Oneness of God, Most High," are beautifully done. Enjoy.


(Run time: 4:26)


(Run time: 3:01)

Des'ree: You Gotta Be

When "You Gotta Be" first came out, I liked it quite a lot, as most everyone else did. But then the jazz stations started overplaying the song to the point where I became fairly sick of it. The other day, though, I heard "You Gotta Be" for the first time in a number of years, and it was like, "Wow! I'm really glad I heard this song once more because it's so good." :) Enjoy!

Update to "Hijabis of the World, Unite!"

Back in February 2006, I read a comment on Indigo Jo Blogs, written by a woman who had worn a hijab for a week to see how people would react. I reposted that comment on my blog as "Hijabis of the World, Unite!", which has gotten a large number of hits over the past year. Today, I heard from Heather Hopkins, who wrote that original comment and happened to find my blog with her post.

Heather is now a Muslim, alhamdulillah! I am very happy for her, and wish her the best of luck in her life journey as a Muslim. (And if you have any questions on Islam, Heather, please feel free to ask. :) )

How funny that I found this online so long after I wrote it, hahaha. I was searching something else and saw my name on there, very funny. I am glad that you enjoyed my piece of writing :O)

I wanted to do a follow-up on this because an interesting thing has happened to me since I wrote this piece...I have become Muslim myself. What started as a social experiment left me deeply interested in Islam. At first it was just because I found it to be fascinating, but after reading more and more about it, it all began to make sense to me, as though it were a truth I had known all along and was just waiting to discover the words for what was in my heart. Islam has made me feel complete. It has liberated me from the troubles of my past. And though some things have been tough since my conversion (or...reversion) (such as my family and friend's reactions....not as bad as I thought it would be, but still awkward), I have been better equipped to deal with these things because I can hold fast to my faith. Islam has changed my life for the better and I just want to share it with the world.

“I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good”

I recently got back from a short business trip to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. While on the trip, I wrote down a number of thoughts and observations that I thought I’d share.

The train leaves on time – for once! I’m amazed.

At the emigration counters at the Woodlands checkpoint, I’m the first person in my line (and the second guy into the toilets). Traveling by first-class has its privileges. ;)

There’s a beautiful blue-and-white masjid dome on the east side of the tracks north of Johor Bahru.

KTM (the Malaysian inter-city train company) shocks me. The first movie today is “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” (Note: “The Rail Channel,” which is the entertainment KTM provides for first-class customers, is a 6-hour video played on TV sets at both ends of the rail car. It normally features two full-length movies and a couple of short documentaries on a variety of topics. Normally, the Rail Channel plays low budget B-movies for the passengers; in the past, these movies often were about racial issues between black and white Americans. Milady says that those movies were shown in order to help educate Malaysians of all races to learn to deal with racial tensions, to learn tolerance for other races. That may be, but those types of movies haven’t been shown in the past few trips I’ve made on KTM.)

Malaysians love to fly their flags. (I’ve noticed this for years.) Even the poorest hovel with its rusted tin roof will proudly fly the Malaysian flag.

It’s raining in Gemas.

Much of the landscape in southern Malaysia is difficult to see from the train due to the jungle. Sometimes it seems like only just enough of the trees and plant life was cut back to make room for the train passing through. When you can see the terrain in the distance, it’s often low hills covered by ranks of palm trees on the palm oil plantations.

Oh, no! The second movie today is “New York Minute (the Olsen twins). Maybe not “racial,” but definitely a “B-movie.”

In southern Johor state: three masajid, two Hindu temples, and one Buddhist temple that can be seen from the train.

The soil here is often an orangish-brown, not quite a burnt umber. Many of the streams here are muddy. In JB (Johor Bahru), I saw three guys walking down a stream. Fishermen?

Passing through some of the tiny kampongs (villages), where every home is covered by a tin roof in varying degrees of rust, one wonders how much life has changed here over the decades.

“Surf Like a Girl” – The slogan on a passenger’s t-shirt.

Just before sunset, there was a Hindu temple that had both a nice color scheme (white and yellow), and a simplicity in ornamentation. The amount of statuary on a typical Hindu temple is normally enormous. However, this temple had maybe 15-20 idols on its rooftop at the most.

There’s an older white couple four rows ahead of me. They strike me as being first-time tourists to Malaysia: taking videos, (him in particular) looking out the windows to see the view. Perhaps I’m becoming jaded. How many times have I come up this way before?

Oh, no! They’re repeating “New York Minute” again! (Thankfully, the movie was cut short.)

I just saw the KLIA (Kuala Lumpur International Airport) express train pass us by. We must be getting close to KL Sentral.

Ah! The Petronas Towers! We’re almost there.

Is that a plastic 5-ringgit note?

I’ve just finished traveling for eight hours and the first television show I see in Kuala Lumpur is “Phua Chu Kang Pte. Ltd.” (A TV show made in Singapore.)

The smell of boiled corn from 20 meters away.

Surau? There’s no surau here for guests at the hotel! Who do you think stays here? Muslims? In Malaysia? (Note: A “surau” is a prayer hall for Muslims. It is not as big as a masjid in that it can only accommodate a few people at a time. Many facilities in Singapore and Malaysia have a surau available for Muslims - shopping centers, hawker centers, hotels - but apparently not the hotel I'm staying at.)

I am sooo used to the prices of goods including the sales tax (as it is done in Singapore). Spaghetti bolognaises – RM 9.90. I pull out a RM 10 note. “Excuse me, you owe RM 10.40. Diet Coke – RM 2.10. I pull out the exact change. “Hey! That’s RM 2.21!”

“Tortillas?” I ask an employee at a supermarket? Blank stare. “Mexican? Flat bread?” He tries repeating the unfamiliar word, garbling it so badly I can't even begin to write down what he said. “Never mind.”

I try taking photos of Masjid Negara (the National Mosque) and the Petronas Towers at night. They come out terribly.

Less than an hour till my train leaves. I am sooo ready to go home.

“Terima kasih.” “Sama sama.” No one expects the Ang Moh to know even this little Malay.

The train ride home is torture. At 6’, I’m too tall for the sleeping berth. I can’t stretch my legs out like I like to in bed, and my knees are continually bent, which makes them hurt. Moreover, there’s no space for the luggage to be stored, so everything that I’m carrying is in the berth with me. I’m very uncomfortable. Then there are all the train stops. The train moves for about an hour or so, and then stops for 10-20 minutes. Every time the train stops, I wake up. I’m not getting any real sleep, and I’m feeling more and more miserable as this night goes on. Insha’allah, I’ll never take the night train again.

Stupid freakin’ foreigners! Hey, white people! Next time, take your luggage with you when you go through immigration – like you’re supposed to! Don’t delay the remainder of the trip for the rest of us!

Almost all the taxis on Keppel Road are hired already, so I’m taking the bus home. Thank God that the top side of the bus is almost empty, as I smell really ripe. The first thing I’m gonna do when I get home is take a shower. The second is to sleep the sleep of the dead.

I’m home.

Conversions Unveiled

An interesting article from Wednesday in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (JS) Online about the new book, Becoming Muslim: Western Women's Conversions to Islam, by Anna Mansson McGinty. Amazon's book description reads, "While Islam has become a controversial topic in the West, a growing number of Westerners find powerful meaning in Islam. Becoming Muslim is an ethnographic study based on in-depth interviews with Swedish and American women who have converted to Islam. Proceeding from the women’s life-stories, the author explores the appeal of Islam to some Western women and the personal meaning assigned to the religion. While conversion is often perceived as entailing a dramatic change in worldview, the women’s experiences point to an equally important continuity. Notably, the conversion is triggered by particular personal ideas and quests, and within Islam the women can further explore already salient thoughts. The work appeals to students in the fields of anthropology, religious studies, psychology, and women’s studies, interested in identity, conversion, and gender."

In the 1990s, when she first set out to interview women about their conversions to Islam, Anna Mansson McGinty expected to meet the wives of devout Muslims, women whose religion had come from their husbands.

But a more complex picture emerged as McGinty, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, began delving into the women's stories for her 2006 book, "Becoming Muslim: Western Women's Conversions to Islam."

McGinty, 35, interviewed women in her native Sweden and in the United States, and found no typical Muslim convert. Nor did she find conversions that could be reduced to a single act.

"The book's main aim," she said, "is to show that conversion is not, as many scholars have described it, a one-time event. It's a constant process. It's never-ending."

Among the nine women profiled in the book was Mariam, an American-born graduate student in anthropology who went to do field work in an oasis in northern Africa, and while in the field converted to Islam at age 25. Years later, she married a man who also was a Muslim convert.

There was Fatimah, a former Catholic who had abandoned religion in college, then, as a married mother of two, watched a documentary on nuclear holocaust that led her to embark on a spiritual quest. In the course of this quest, she would divorce her husband, convert to Islam and later marry a Muslim man.

"Becoming Muslim" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, $65) sheds light on how women in Islam are perceived, an issue that reflects the rift between the Muslim world and the West.

Yvonne Haddad, a professor who teaches the history of Islam and Christian-Muslim relations at Georgetown University, said a fundamental misconception about Islamic women stems from an old colonialist notion.

"There is a whole history of European colonialism," she said, "that justified the occupation of Muslim lands by saying, 'We have to save Muslim women.' "

Early Crusaders saw Muslim women in their veils and imagined they were abused by their men, hidden under cover, Haddad said.

Today the idea persists, though it is balanced by a view from the opposite side of the cultural divide.

"Muslims look at Western women as being abused by their husbands because they allow strange men to talk and flirt with the women," Haddad explained.

Negative ideas about the treatment of Islamic women, however, are not without some grains of truth.

There have been forced marriages and "honor killings" of women in certain Muslim cultures, said Marcia Hermansen, director of the Islamic World Studies program at Loyola University of Chicago, but such practices are not part of most Muslims' "everyday reality. It's not sanctioned by the religion." [Note: Honor killings are not solely a "Muslim phenomenon," but have been done by members of other religions, including Christians.]

"Under the Taliban, certainly women were hideously oppressed," said Leila Ahmed, a professor at Harvard Divinity School.

At the same time, Ahmed said, "nobody has ever asked me to explain why there have been women heads of state in Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh. How many European and American women heads of state have there been? [Note: To my knowledge, only two, the UK (Margaret Thatcher) and Germany (Chancellor Angela Merkel).]

"The extraordinary achievements and freedoms of Muslim women are simply invisible."

Hermansen pointed out that some of these heads of state were the wives or daughters of leaders, evidence in her view that "family identity trumps gender distinctions for the most part."

...

McGinty's interviews with the nine women were never intended to be a scientific survey. Instead, they offer a window into the journey toward conversion and the consequences of that decision.

One of the Swedish women told McGinty that the decision to wear the veil changed the way fellow Swedes viewed her. The woman said that strangers assumed she was an immigrant and would speak slowly, asking, "Do . . . you . . . speak . . . Swedish?"

The veil has become a powerful symbol of the complexity of Islamic conversion.

McGinty found that converts were eager to wear the veil to identify themselves as Muslim, yet also saw it as something "intimately linked to the stereotypes of Muslim women."

Some women, McGinty said, remove the veil before entering their workplaces.

Women also told McGinty that, since their conversions, people seemed to view them as boring or serious, almost discounting the possibility that they might have a sense of humor.

All of the women, McGinty said, found something in Islam that aligned to a core part of their personality.

Some found that zakat, or alms giving to the poor, which is one of the five pillars of Islam, fit a belief in social justice.

Others found in Islam a faith that spoke to their sense of religious yearning or spiritual quest.

Some of the women, she said, found that Islam allowed them to try out a new kind of femininity, one that emphasized modesty and placed value on who a woman is rather than what she looks like.

"Conversion triggers profound questions to the self," McGinty wrote in her book. "It heightens the awareness and prompts reflections of who one is, who one was, and where one is heading."

Eclectic Videos

Yes, it's eclectic video night. Our first video tonight is Speed Painting with French Fries and Ketchup, featuring our old pal Ronald and Morgan Spurlock (h/t: Crooks & Liars; run time: 3:57)




Our other video tonight is Max Blumenthal's (The Nation) CPAC 2007: The Unauthorized Documentary. Gotta love that one "black" republican. :) (h/t: Cairogal; run time: 7:18)



Both videos are pretty funny. Check 'em out.

Oy Vey!

Stories like these make me wonder just how the nation of Israel vets its potential ambassadors. It sounds like they're not having a whole lot of luck.

JERUSALEM – Israel has recalled its ambassador to El Salvador after he was found bound, drunk and nude, according to Israeli media reports confirmed Monday by a government spokeswoman.

The longtime diplomat, Tsuriel Raphael, has been removed from his post and the Foreign Ministry has begun searching for a replacement, said ministry spokeswoman Zehavit Ben-Hillel.

Two weeks ago, El Salvador police found Raphael naked outside his residence, tied up, gagged and drunk, Israeli media reported. He was wearing several sex toys at the time, the media said. After he was untied, Raphael told police he was the ambassador of Israel, the reports said.

Ben-Hillel said the reports were accurate and that Raphael has been recalled, although he did not break any laws. "We're talking about behavior that is unbecoming of a diplomat," she said.

The ambassador did not file a police complaint in the incident, she said.

Raphael had served for six months as the ambassador in El Salvador and for several years at different missions around the world, she said.

The embarrassing affair was one of several involving Israeli diplomats in recent years. In 2000, Israel's ambassador to France died of cardiac arrest in a Paris hotel under circumstances the Foreign Ministry refused to publicize. Media reports said he was with a woman who was not his wife at the time.

Last year, Israel replaced its ambassador to Australia, Naftali Tamir, after he said Israel and Australia are "like sisters" because both are located in Asia and their peoples don't have the Asian characteristics of "yellow skin and slanted eyes."

In 2005, Israel canceled the appointment of a diplomat to Australia after it was discovered that he published pictures of nude Brazilian women on the Internet while on a mission in Brazil.

SF Book Meme

I came across this meme over at Jim Chappell's blog. He didn't tag me for this, but I'm probably just as much into SF as him, so I thought I'd see how I do against him. :)

Review the following list of books. Boldface the books you’ve read, italicize those you might read, cross out the ones you won’t, and place brackets around the ones you’ve never even heard of.

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
Dune, Frank Herbert
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbur
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
[Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras]
Cities in Flight, James Blish
The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
Gateway, Frederik Pohl
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
[I Am Legend, Richard Matheson]
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
[Little, Big, John Crowley]
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick - ?
Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
On the Beach, Nevil Shute
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
Ringworld, Larry Niven
Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
[Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson]
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock - ?
The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
Timescape, Gregory Benford - ?
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

My totals: 30 read, 14 might read, two won't reads, and 4 never heard of. Jim's totals: 36 read, 10 might read, one won't read, and three never heard of. Of my 14 "might read," I've added question marks after three, meaning, I may very well have read those three books, but I don't remember if I did or not. For example, I've read a lot of Michael Moorcock's fantasies, including a number of the Elric novels, but don't know if I've specifically read Stormbringer. It's certainly a possibility. Likewise for the other two.

One of the problems with trying to read SF in S'pore is that even the best stocked bookstores here (e.g., Kinokuniya) have limited selections available. Especially some of the older authors on this list (e.g., Cordwainer Smith, Algis Budrys, Alfred Bester), trying to find their novels is virtually impossible. About the only realistic way I could get these books would be to buy them through Amazon (and I don't do that very often). Still, some of these older novels have been recently republished. For example, I recently bought and re-read Ringworld; I prolly hadn't read that book in over 20 years. Which made the experience very pleasurable, like meeting an old friend after a long absence.

Richard Jeni, RIP

Sadly, another obituary to report. Richard Jeni, the 49-year-old comedian, shot himself in the face on Saturday. The police are not sure at this time whether the shooting was an accident or a suicide attempt. He was still alive at his West Hollywood home when the police arrived, but died at a nearby hospital.

I hadn't seen Jeni perform in years, but I did like his act, especially "Platypus Man," both the comedy special and TV series on UPN. His "Clamato" joke was classic. (For those who don't know or don't remember, Jeni always wondered who could think up a product like Clamato, which is tomato juice with clam broth and corn syrup. He would pretend to drink a glass of tomato juice, then whistle and say, "Needs fish!" :) )

Cheers, Richard!

Brad Delp, RIP

Boston, Don't Look Back (Live)



ATKINSON, N.H. -- Brad Delp, the lead singer for the band Boston, was found dead Friday in his home in southern New Hampshire. He was 55.

Atkinson police responded to a call for help at 1:20 p.m. and found Delp dead. Lt. William Baldwin said in a news release that there was no indication of foul play.

"There was nothing disrupted in the house. He was a fairly healthy person from what we're able to ascertain," Police Chief Philip Consentino told WMUR-TV.

Delp apparently was alone at the time, Baldwin said.

The cause of death remained under investigation.

Delp sang on Boston's 1976 hits "More than a Feeling" and "Long Time." He also sang on Boston's most recent album, "Corporate America," released in 2002.

He joined the band in the early 1970s after meeting Tom Scholz, an MIT student interested in experimental methods of recording music, according to the group's official Web site. The band enjoyed its greatest success and influence during its first decade.

The band's last appearance was in November 2006 at Boston's Symphony Hall.

On Friday night, the Web site was taken down and replaced with the statement: "We just lost the nicest guy in rock and roll." [Note: This statement is still on the website as of the time of this posting.]

The Hadith of Jibril

In his recent diary, There is no god but God, Abdur Rahman wrote, "In a very important prophetic tradition, Prophet Muhammad (alaihi al-salatu wa al-salam) is reported to have said: 'Then he (the man) said, "Inform me about Ihsan..."'"

I thought this hadith was worth expanding on because it provides a very succinct description of Islamic beliefs. The tradition is known as the "Hadith of Jibril," who is also known as the angel Gabriel, and it makes up part of the first hadith in the first book of the first chapter of the sahih ahadith collection by Muslim.

A narration attributed to Umar reports:

While we were one day sitting with the Messenger of Allah, sallallahu 'alayhi wasallam ["peace be upon him"], there appeared before us a man dressed in extremely white clothes and with very black hair. No traces of journeying were visible on him, and none of us knew him.

He sat down close by the Prophet, sallallahu 'alayhi wasallam, rested his knee against his thighs, and said, "O Muhammad! Inform me about Islam." Said the Messenger of Allah, sallallahu 'alayhi wasallam, "Islam is that you should testify that there is no deity save Allah and that Muhammad is His Messenger, that you should perform salah, pay the zakah, fast during Ramadan, and perform pilgrimage to the House [i.e., the Ka'ba], if you can find a way to it (or find the means for making the journey to it)." Said he (the man), "You have spoken truly."

We were astonished at his thus questioning him and telling him that he was right, but he went on to say, "Inform me about Emaan (faith)." He (the Messenger of Allah) answered, "It is that you believe in Allah and His angels and His Books and His Messengers and in the Last Day, and in fate (qadar), both in its good and in its evil aspects." He said, "You have spoken truly."

Then he (the man) said, "Inform me about Ihsan." He (the Messenger of Allah) answered, "It is that you should serve Allah as though you could see Him, for though you cannot see Him yet He sees you." He said, "Inform me about the Hour." He (the Messenger of Allah) said, "The one questioned knows no more than the questioner." So he said, "Well, inform me about the signs thereof (i.e. of its coming)." Said he, "They are that the slave-girl will give birth to her mistress, that you will see the barefooted ones, the naked, the destitute, the herdsmen of the sheep (competing with each other) in raising lofty buildings." Thereupon the man went off.

I waited a while, and then he (the Messenger of Allah) said, "O 'Umar, do you know who that questioner was?" I replied, "Allah and His Messenger know better." He said, "That was Jibril. He came to teach you your religion."

Ketchup Art: "AUA"

Another link stolen from IZ Reloaded. Ketchup Art invites people to send in photographs of "art" made with ketchup (and a few other materials). Many of the photos are both interesting in the artwork and amusing. I rather like the picture below.


Careful with that axe, Eugene!

Child Abuse in Texas

I'm trying to think of something to say that expresses my intense anger at these two men without being overly offensive to my readers... but I can't. So I won't try anymore (for now).



[Key words: marijuana, pot, Watauga, Texas]

Dual Indonesian Earthquakes Today

There were two earthquakes today underneath the island of Sumatra. The tremors were felt as far away as Singapore (where I live) and peninsular Malaysia (to our north). In Singapore, the tremors were felt primarily in the financial district (where I work) and I've also heard that people on the east side of the island felt them as well. Some of the buildings in this area were evacuated, but ours was not. I myself didn't feel the tremors, but then again, I work on the third floor of the building. If our offices had been higher upstairs, perhaps we would have felt them. So, to make a long story short, I'm perfectly fine; nothing's wrong here. However, please do make dua for the people of Sumatra. From Bloomberg:

Two earthquakes greater than magnitude 6 struck Indonesia's Sumatra island within two hours of each other, killing at least 13 people and destroying some houses and shops.

A magnitude 6.3 quake struck west Sumatra at 10:49 a.m. local time 49 kilometers (30 miles) north-northeast of Padang city and 424 kilometers southwest of Singapore, the U.S. Geological Survey said. A second quake of magnitude 6.1 hit the same area two hours later. There was no tsunami warning issued because the temblors occurred inland.

...

Both earthquakes were felt as far away as Singapore, where downtown office buildings shook.

"I can't recall (this happening) in my so many years in Shenton Way, and it happened twice today already," said Song Seng Wun, regional economist at CIMB-GK Securities in Singapore. Song has worked in the city-state's financial sector since 1990. Shenton Way is the main street running through Sinapore's business district.

[Note: Shenton Way is a two block walk (5 minutes) from where I work.]

Update: I've added the AP map above to help show where the epicenter of the quake was. As mentioned earlier, the quake was also felt in Malaysia; however, now I've read that it was felt in Johor (most likely the city of Johor Bahru). Johor Bahru is the city opposite of Singapore, across the strait that separates Singapore from Malaysia. I'll be more impressed if the quake was felt in Malaka or the Kuala Lumpur area.

The death toll on Sumatra is now at least 70, and is expected to rise as reports come in from rural areas.

The worst-hit area appeared to be in and around Solok, a bustling town close to the epicenter of the quake on Sumatra's western coast, which was spared destruction in the 2004 tsunami disaster.

At least two young children and a teacher were killed when a two-story building crashed onto a playground in Solok, said police spokesman Supriadi, who like many Indonesians goes by only one name. Another woman died at a market.

Town Mayor Samsu Rahim told el-Shinta radio that three others were burned alive when their collapsed home burst into flames.

Hospitals were struggling to cope with a flood of patients, many suffering cuts and broken bones, Supriadi said. At least one hospital was evacuated. (Source)

I'm Irked!

I just discovered last night that the Arizona Diamondbacks MLB team has changed its colors. Since the team's inceptions, the official colors were purple, turquoise and copper. Now, the colors are "Sedona Red," "Sonoran Sand" and black. While the colors are "deserty" enough, I've got two problems with the new color scheme.

First, the red and black (the dominant colors) are too much like too many other MLB team colors, especially the red. With the old color scheme, there was only one other team that had purple (the Colorado Rockies) and no other teams with turquoise (the Florida Marlins and Oakland A's come close with their shades of green). However, with the red, now Arizona's going to look like the Angels, Red Sox, Reds, Cardinals, Phillies, Astros and Twins. Boring! The old color scheme was unique. The alternate home uniform of the purple jersey, purple cap and white pants was beautiful to behold.

The second problem I have is that this is an obvious snub to Jerry Colangelo, the former owner of the Diamondback. Both of his teams, the Phoenix Suns (NBA) and the D-Backs, had purple in the official colors. That was OK by me. It looks good and it's a good Arizona color. But the new ownership is obviously trying to distance themselves away from the old regime. Yeah, that shows a lot of "class," guys.

Animusic: Acoustic Curves

I was feeling like listening to some Animusic before going to bed. Enjoy!



(Run time: 5:35)

Peace Train

What the warmongers don't want you to see. (Run time: 2:09)

Strong vs. Weak Hadith

tina asked: "What makes a weak hadith and what makes a strong hadith?"

The "strength" or "weakness" of any hadith refers to the isnad or chain of transmitters of the hadith. Each hadith has an isnad that tells us who related the hadith from person to person. Each of these persons has had their life reviewed, especially as it pertains to the transmission of ahadith (the plural of hadith). For example, was that person trustworthy, how good was their memory, were they known for having created any spurious ahadith or falsifying in any way any hadith, and so on. The grading of all of the transmitters in each isnad would determine the status of the hadith, whether it is sahih (strong), hasan (fair), daif (weak), munkar (denounced), or maudu (forged).

You might find this article, The Science of Hadith of interest.

Wafa Sultan: Reformist or Opportunist?

By Abdussalam Mohamed
Staff Writer for Southern California InFocus


"Unlikely journey from obscurity to fame, rags to riches."

She has been described as a hero, a reformist, a crusader, and a brave woman who defied the Muslim world and stood up for what she believed in. In 2006, Time Magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people "whose power, talent or moral example is transforming the world." Dr. Wafa Sultan has been honored countless times for her now famous appearance on Al-Jazeera television opposite a Muslim cleric named Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouly on February 21, 2006.

In that memorable clip widely distributed by MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute), Sultan referred to the current conflict between the West and militant Muslims as "a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another that belongs to the 21st century... a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality." The clip spread through the internet like wild fire and landed Sultan in the LA Times, the New York Times and CNN among others. MEMRI estimated that the video was viewed at least one million times.

All of a sudden, and out of obscurity, Sultan found herself the center of both attention and controversy. On the one hand, she became the darling of many right wing media pundits and mainly pro-Israel groups who viewed her as a beacon of reform that stood up to what was wrong with Islam and Muslims. On the other hand, Muslims contended that by making broad, unfounded and ignorant proclamations about their faith, Sultan was nothing more than a pawn playing into the hands of Islamophobes, and an opportunist who intentionally pushed the divide between the Islamic world and the West to further ulterior motives that included fame, fortune and immortality.

Reformist or opportunist, Sultan continues to enjoy the spotlight as she routinely figures prominently as a guest speaker at many functions and fundraisers across the country. As her fame grows, so do her admirers and detractors.

Born in 1958 in the coastal town of Baniyas, Syria, Wafa Sultan grew up in a modest middle class Alawite family. She attended the University of Aleppo where she majored in medical studies (source: wikipedia).

In an interview with the New York Times, Sultan claimed that in 1979, gunmen from the Muslim Brotherhood burst into a classroom at the university and killed her professor before her eyes. It was then that her disillusionment and anger with Islam started. According to the same interview, Sultan, her husband Moufid, who goes by the Americanized name David, and their two children applied for a visa to the United States in 1989 and eventually settled in with friends in Cerritos, Calif.

Post 9/11, Sultan reportedly began writing for an Islamic reform Web site called Annaqed (The Critic) run by a Syrian expatriate in Phoenix. She wrote an angry essay about the Muslim Brotherhood and her writings eventually drew the attention of Al-Jazeera television, which invited her to debate, first an Algerian Islamist in July 2005 and then Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouly, a lecturer at the prestigious Al-Azhar University, in February 2006 (New York Times, March 11, 2006).

It was the second debate, excerpts of which were translated and circulated by MEMRI that garnered her worldwide attention. Sultan went from obscurity to fame in a matter of weeks.

While Sultan’s admirers have nothing but praise for her, detractors charge that many of her public claims do not corroborate with facts. Moreover, they assert that the reasons behind her rise to fame have more to do with her personal life than with her desire to reform Islam.

Adnan Halabi*, a Syrian expatriate who met and got to know the Sultans when they first came to the United States, spoke at length about the Wafa Sultan that very few people know.

According to Halabi, Dr. Wafa Ahmad (her maiden name) arrived in California with her husband Moufid (now changed to David) in the late 80s on a tourist visa. Contrary to what she told the New York Times, they came as a couple, leaving their two children back in Syria.

Another source named Nabil Mustafa, also Syrian, told InFocus that he was introduced to Moufid Sultan through a personal friend who knew the family well, and both ended up having tea at the Sultans’ one-bedroom apartment one evening in 1989. It was then that Moufid told Mustafa the story of how he was reunited with his two children. According to Mustafa, Moufid Sultan told him that a short time after they arrived in the country, his wife, Dr. Wafa Sultan, mailed her passport back to her sister Ilham Ahmad in Syria (while the passport still carried a valid U.S. tourist visa). With Ilham bearing a resemblance to her sister Wafa, the plan was to go to the Mexican Embassy in Damascus and obtain a visa to Mexico, making sure that the airline carrier they would book a flight on would have a layover somewhere in the Continental United States.

With an existing U.S. visa on Wafa Sultan’s passport, Ilham Ahmad had no trouble obtaining an entry permit to Mexico. Shortly after, Ilham and Wafa’s two children landed in Houston, Texas. She and the children then allegedly made their way through customs and were picked up by Moufid and brought to California.

Taking advantage of an amnesty law for farmers, the Sultans applied for permanent residency through a Mexican lady who worked as a farm hand. She helped Moufid with the paperwork by claiming he had worked as a farmer for four years. The application went through and the Sultans obtained their green cards.

As incredible as the story sounds, Mustafa told InFocus that to the best of his recollection, this was the exact account he heard from Moufid Sultan. Halabi, who is not acquainted with Mustafa, corroborated the story, which he heard from Dr. Wafa Sultan herself but with fewer details. Dr. Wafa Sultan declined InFocus’ repeated requests to be interviewed or comment on the allegations. InFocus contacted the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to check on the veracity of the story but an official said that they would look into the allegations, which could take months to investigate.

Halabi alleges that Ilham Ahmad lived as illegal resident with her sister Wafa for years until she met an Arab Christian named Khalid Musa Shihadeh whom she ended up marrying (they were married in Nevada on 12/8/1991 and filed for divorce in 2002). It was during that time that Halabi got to know the Sultans well.

Halabi alleges that the Sultans lived in dire poverty. "Their rent was over $1,000 per month and Moufid was only making $800," he said. Dr. Wafa Sultan was forced to rent out a room in her apartment and work at a pizza parlor in Norwalk, Calif. where a personal friend used to pick her up and drop her off daily. This same friend used to help the Sultans out with groceries and occasionally loaned them money just so they could make it through the month. "It was a serious struggle," Halabi recalled. "The Sultans lived hand to mouth for years on end." Further, Halabi said that at no point during the period he knew the family did Sultan ever discuss religion, politics or any topic relevant to her current activities. "She is a smart woman, articulate and forceful, but she never meddled in religion or politics to the extent she is doing now," Halabi said.

As to the claim that her professor (thought to be Yusef Al-Yusef) was gunned down before her eyes in a faculty classroom at the University of Aleppo, Halabi said the incident never took place. "There was a professor who was killed around 1979, that is true, but it was off-campus and Sultan was not even around when it happened," he added.

InFocus contacted the University of Aleppo and spoke to Dr. Riyad Asfari, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, who confirmed Halabi’s account. "Yes, the assassination took place off-campus," he said. Dr. Asfari was keen to add that no one had ever been killed in a classroom anytime or anywhere at the university.

Syrian expatriate Ghada Moezzin, who attended the University of Aleppo in 1979 as a sophomore, told InFocus that she never heard of the assassination. "We would’ve known about the killing if it had happened," she said. "It would have been big news on campus and I do not recall ever hearing about it." Moezzin, who lives in Glendora, Calif., added that government security was always present around the university given the political climate in Syria at the time.

What are perceived as inconsistencies and half-truths like these convince Sultan’s critics that the motive behind her invectives against Islam and Muslims is other than her alleged desire for reform.

These same critics allege that Islamophobes are most certainly behind the likes of Sultan. They argue that the clip that made her famous was distributed by MEMRI, a media group that purports to independently translate and distribute news from the Middle East when in reality it is promoting a pro-Israeli slant. In an article titled, "Selective Memri," published on August 12, 2002 by the British newspaper The Guardian, investigative reporter Brian Whitaker wrote: "The stories selected by MEMRI for translation follow a familiar pattern: either they reflect badly on the character of Arabs or they in some way further the political agenda of Israel."

According to Whitaker, the founder of MEMRI is an Israeli named Yigal Carmon. "Mr - or rather, Colonel - Carmon spent 22 years in Israeli military intelligence and later served as counter-terrorism adviser to two Israeli prime ministers, Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin... of the six people named (as MEMRI’s staff), three - including Col. Carmon - are described as having worked for Israeli intelligence." (The entire article can be obtained at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,773258,00.html

Another feature of deliberate bias and media myopia, critics say, is the fact that the Al-Jazeera clip was edited intentionally "out of context" to reflect one single point of view and promote Sultan’s arguments through American-style media sound bites, reducing the other debater to a mere punching bag.

InFocus was able to obtain a translated transcript of the Al-Jazeera debate. An example of this bias critics allege is Sultan’s much-rehashed quote, "It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality."

In the transcript, Shaikh Ibrahim Al-Khouli responded by saying, "…here we must ask a question, who facilitated the conflict and indeed initiated it; is it the Muslims? Muslims now are in a defensive position fighting off an aggressor... who said Muslims were backward? They may be backward in terms of technological advances, but who said that such are the criteria for humanity? Muslims are more advanced on a human level, in terms of the values and principles they endorse." (Entire transcript can be viewed at: http://www.aqoul.com/archives/2006/03/aljazeera_trans.php

InFocus also found out that the web site called Annaqed (www.annaqed.com) she supposedly wrote for before being noticed by Al-Jazeera Television is not an "Islamic reform Web Site" as was reported in the New York Times article, but rather an Arab nationalist blog run by a Syrian Christian who defines it as being "in line with Christian morality and principles." The site is also replete with anti-Muslim writings.

Sultan’s detractors include not only Muslims but members of the Jewish community as well. In an op-ed piece published in the Los Angeles Times (June 25, 2006) and titled "Islam’s Ann Coulter," Rabbi Stephen Julius Stein at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, who attended a fundraiser for a local Jewish organization where Sultan was a speaker, wrote, "The more Sultan talked, the more evident it became that progress in the Muslim world was not her interest.... She never alluded to any healthy, peaceful Islamic alternative."

The rabbi mentioned that Judea Pearl, father of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, "was one of the few voices of restraint and nuance heard that afternoon. In response to Sultan’s assertion that the Koran contains only verses of evil and domination, Pearl said he understood the book also included ‘verses of peace’ that proponents of Islam uphold as the religion’s true intent. The Koran’s verses on war and brutality, Pearl contended, were ‘cultural baggage,’ as are similar verses in the Torah."

He added, "Sultan’s over-the-top, indefensible remarks at the fundraiser, along with her failure to mention the important, continuing efforts of the Islamic Center (of Southern California), insulted all Muslims and Jews in L.A. and throughout the nation who are trying to bridge the cultural gap between the two groups. And that’s one reason why I eventually walked out of the event."

In the end, Dr. Wafa Sultan will remain a conflicting figure. Loved by some, reviled by others, she does not seem to be afraid to voice her opinions. She once said, "I don’t believe you can reform Islam," and claimed that the Qur’an was riddled with violence, misogyny and extremist ideas. Her Muslims detractors believe Sultan does not even qualify as a Muslim reformer since she has publicly rejected Islam and declared herself an atheist.

As for the Sultans’ financial troubles, Halabi told InFocus that ever since Dr. Sultan gained notoriety those troubles are a thing of the past. "She bought a house for herself and bought another for her son," Halabi said. "She also bought two smog-check stations, one for her husband and another for her son," he added. When asked about the source of her material well-being, Halabi was unsure.

As to the reasons that may have pushed Sultan to be so outspoken and vocal against Islam in a post-9/11 world, Halabi sympathetically remarked, "Poverty. It drives people to sell their soul."


* Adnan Halabi (not his real name) agreed to speak to InFocus on condition of anonymity. To this day, he maintains that he and the Sultans are still friends.

Which is More Important...

...to the cowardly right? The medical treatment of soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital?


[Method: Google search on the last three months for term, "Walter Reed" minus term "Code Pink." Results were hand searched to find posts about neglect at Walter Reed.]

Or the fact that the cowardly right can't get it up any more?


You decide.

(h/t: Patriotboy)

Burn Carefully

A sticker on the wall of a shower in a Chinese hotel (from Stomp's "English as it is Broken").

The Accounting of Love

So I'm teaching one of my accounting classes, and I get an SMS from Milady.

Milady: I love you. :)

JDsg: I love you, too! :)

JDsg, speaking to his students: "Even in the accounting of love, we must make sure our debits equal our credits." :)

Juan Cole on Global Warming, Oil and American Politics/Militarism

Juan Cole, who's at his best when he writes analysis, has done a very good piece on the intersection of global warming, oil, and American politics and militarism. The second sentence of the second paragraph is incorrect, IMO, but otherwise an excellent discussion on these various, interrelated topics.

Only by a Manhattan Project-scale government effort to develop green energy can we hope to avert the worst consequences of global warming, which is likely to raise sea levels at least a foot, and possibly 7 feet over the next century or century and a half. (That would put a lot of cities on both coasts under water). The arctic and antarctic ice shelfs are already falling into the ocean at rates that have astonished climate scientists. The arctic alone lost perennial ice cover the size of Texas in 2004-2005! Warm water takes up more space than cold water and the loss of white ice cover is bad because it radiates a lot of sunlight back out to space. So it is a double whammy.

But the other problem with petroleum and gas as sources of energy is that they are getting scarcer. No big new fields have been found for some time. And in one recent year China generated 40% of new demand for petroleum. If a billion Chinese and a billion Indians adopt the American lifestyle and all want 1.5 automobiles and superhighways to crawl along on, the existing stocks of oil will become objects of fierce competition. This process has already begun, and there is a sea change from the mid-1990s, when oil was still cheap and competition for it limited.

Iraq is an Oil War in the mind of politicians like Dick Cheney. It was necessary to deny it to China and other rivals thirty to fifty years in the future. It was necessary to open its vast petroleum fields up for exploration and cast aside anti-American Baath socialism.

Likewise, the religious rigidity of the Pushtun peoples of Helmand province is not the real reason for the US insistence on occupying Afghanistan. It is the vast Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan gas fields that Cheney has his eye on. It was the US hope to use a pipeline from Turkmenistan to supply Pakistan and India, and so forestall a deal by those two countries with Iran. The inability of the Bush administration to calm things down in Afghanistan sufficiently for anyone to dream of putting in such a pipeline and having it avoid routine sabotage has made it likely that Iran will break out of the Bush boycott toward the East.

Hunger for future rights to petroleum and positioning the US to remain a superpower in a world of hydrocarbon scarcity is also driving the campaign to get up a war against Iran. Why can Pakistan have a nuclear weapon, and that is all right, but Iran cannot? Pakistan has very little petroleum. Iran has a lot, and maybe 750 trillion cubic feet of gas in the southwest. If it gets a bomb, regime change becomes impossible, and if Iran wants to tie its supplies up in proprietary contracts with China and India, locking out the United States, it will be able to do so.

Continued heavy dependence on gas and oil therefore not only turns the world into a hothouse, with rising seas, ever more destructive hurricanes, and possibly disastrous shifts in the ocean currents, but it also drives the United States to more and more wars.

And, note that the wars are not even successful in allowing a practical oil grab of the sort Cheney and Lee Raymond dreamed of.

Indeed, you could now, in retrospect, turn their whole argument around on them. US militarism cannot secure petroleum and gas supplies from places such as Iraq, because the pipelines are so easily sabotaged and local nationalisms and religious activism make it impossible for people to accept that kind of US hegemony.

Since the Pentagon cannot practically speaking hope to safeguard US petroleum supplies from the Gulf, national security requires a massive and rapid research and development program of green energy. A lot of green technology, especially solar, would come down in price rapidly if enough government money were thrown at it. We need to press Congress on this, and maybe Californians can craft some of their famous referendum items. That would be one way to promote a new generation of electric cars.

Green energy -- wind, thermal, solar, maybe ultimately fusion, etc. -- is what would allow the US to retain its autonomy and independence into the next century, and what would allow it to avoid losing more cities the way Bush and Cheney lost New Orleans. Oil and War will, in contrast, ruin us all.

The Beautiful Religion

I occasionally post on other forums about Islam (although not nearly as much as I used to). Yesterday, I wrote the below comment regarding the so-called "hijacking" of Islam by terrorists, and I thought that this analogy was decent (although by no means perfect).

I've had mixed feelings about addressing your post. Much of it is based on a misperception, and some of it doesn't make any sense. (What, for instance, is a "Koran Killer?") But I just saw a headline that gives me an analogy to try to explain what I think about this topic. The headline addressed the violence associated with soccer (e.g., the recent death of a policeman in Sicily after a Serie A match). The point of the article was that, if there is all this violence associated with soccer, why is it still called "the beautiful game?"

Soccer as a sport is played by thousands, if not millions of people around the world. Likewise, it is watched and supported by hundreds of millions of people. (FIFA has more member countries than the UN!) Yes, there is violence and racism associated with the game worldwide, and that is truly unfortunate (and the various leagues and FIFA are trying to eliminate this as best they can), but do we say that soccer is being "hijacked" by the hooligans and racists? No. For the vast majority of soccer fans around the world, soccer is and remains "the beautiful game."

The misperception so commonly held today is that Islam has been or is being "hijacked." This isn't true. Islam is practiced correctly by well over a billion people around the world. Yes, Islam does have its "hooligans," all the more dangerous because of their access to weapons. However, Islam itself is not the problem. The problem is, in part, the deviant interpretations of Islam with respect to certain topics. This is why, IMO, questions like, "Should all the major scholars and activists of all the Muslim factions and sects and schools get together in a great reform council for the Ummah?" are irrelevant. A "great reform council?" For what? This assumes that Islam is the problem and is need of reformation. I completely disagree. The key to solving this problem is largely one of education. Two countries that I'm aware of (Yemen and Singapore) have used this approach to help rehabilitate Muslim radicals who have been jailed. Imams have gone into prisons to discuss the Qur'an and Sunnah with these men, trying to educate them, show them their errors of thinking, bring them back to a proper way of thinking about Islam. "Islam is perfect, Muslims are not." Call it, "the beautiful religion." We know there are people who do not act as good Muslims should, just as we see people of other religions not living up to their creeds. We try very strongly to educate our own about our religion and, for the vast majority, we have been successful.

The Myth of Muslim Support for Terror

Those who think that Muslim countries and pro-terrorist attitudes go hand-in-hand might be shocked by new polling research: Americans are more approving of terrorist attacks against civilians than any major Muslim country except for Nigeria.

The survey, conducted in December 2006 by the University of Maryland's prestigious Program on International Public Attitudes, shows that only 46 percent of Americans think that "bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians" are "never justified," while 24 percent believe these attacks are "often or sometimes justified."

Contrast those numbers with 2006 polling results from the world's most-populous Muslim countries – Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria. Terror Free Tomorrow, the organization I lead, found that 74 percent of respondents in Indonesia agreed that terrorist attacks are "never justified"; in Pakistan, that figure was 86 percent; in Bangladesh, 81 percent.

Do these findings mean that Americans are closet terrorist sympathizers?

Hardly. Yet, far too often, Americans and other Westerners seem willing to draw that conclusion about Muslims. Public opinion surveys in the United States and Europe show that nearly half of Westerners associate Islam with violence and Muslims with terrorists. ... But these stereotypes, affirmed by simplistic media coverage and many radicals themselves, are not supported by the facts – and they are detrimental to the war on terror. When the West wrongly attributes radical views to all of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims, it perpetuates a myth that has the very real effect of marginalizing critical allies in the war on terror.

...

Even among the minority who indicated support for terrorist attacks and Osama bin Laden, most overwhelmingly approved of specific American actions in their own countries. For example, 71 percent of bin Laden supporters in Indonesia and 79 percent in Pakistan said they thought more favorably of the United States as a result of American humanitarian assistance in their countries – not exactly the profile of hard-core terrorist sympathizers. For most people, their professed support of terrorism/bin Laden can be more accurately characterized as a kind of "protest vote" against current US foreign policies, not as a deeply held religious conviction or even an inherently anti- American or anti-Western view.

...

Our surveys show that not only do Muslims reject terrorism as much if not more than Americans, but even those who are sympathetic to radical ideology can be won over by positive American actions that promote goodwill and offer real hope.

(Source; ht: Islamophobia Watch)

Geometry Meets Arts in Islamic Tiles

Nice to see this type of article making the news:

Those wondrously intricate tile mosaics that adorn medieval Islamic architecture may cloak a mastery of geometry not matched in the West for hundreds of years.

Historians have long assumed that sheer hard work with the equivalent of a ruler and compass allowed medieval craftsmen to create the ornate star-and-polygon tile patterns that cover mosques, shrines and other buildings that stretch from Turkey through Iran and on to India.

Now a Harvard University researcher argues that more than 500 years ago, math whizzes met up with the artists and began creating far more complex tile patterns that culminated in what mathematicians today call "quasi-crystalline designs."

Quasicrystal patterns weren't demonstrated in the West until the 1970s.

"It shows us a culture that we often don't credit enough was far more advanced than we ever thought," contends Harvard graduate student Peter J. Lu, who studied the question after a vacation in Uzbekistan left him marveling at the tilework.

This isn't run-of-the-mill geometry. Quasi-crystals are made by fitting together a set of shapes, including five- and 10-sided shapes, into patterns that, unlike typical tile floors, don't repeat.

In Friday's edition of the journal Science, Lu and Princeton physicist Paul Steinhardt report finding a set of polygon-shaped tiles — a decagon, pentagon, diamond, bowtie and hexagon — that were arranged into distinctive patterns found on major Islamic buildings from the 12th through 15th centuries.

Examining architectural scrolls that were essentially training manuals for the time period, he found hand-drawn outlines of the five shapes. And when he combed through thousands of photos of medieval Islamic buildings, he found that same set of shapes increasingly used over the years to make ever-more complex patterns, including a seemingly true quasicrystal by 1453.

It's not the first time such a link has been suggested.

But if it's right, "this would be a hitherto undiscovered episode in the spectacular developments of geometry in central Islamic lands ... achieved by artisans probably inspired by theoretical mathematicians," said Islamic art specialist Oleg Grabar.

For more pictures of the tiles, see the original article.

The More Things Change... Hermann Goering

"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
-- Hermann Goering
(1893-1946) Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, President of the Reichstag, Prime Minister of Prussia and, as Hitler's designated successor, the second man in the Third Reich. April 18, 1946

Source: Nuremberg Diary (Farrar, Straus & Co 1947), by Gustave Gilbert (an Allied appointed psychologist), who visited daily with Goering and his cronies in their cells, afterwards making notes and ultimately writing the book about these conversations. (Source)

Sami Yusuf - Supplication

This is wonderful. A couple months ago, Milady and I went to a concert at the Esplanade featuring three choruses from around Asia (one from Singapore, Japan, and the Philippines). One of Milady's comments was that she'd like to be able to perform with such a group, except that many choruses sing a fair amount of Christian music. When I listened to this clip by Sami Yusuf, the proverbial light bulb in my head clicked on. Insha'allah, if we can, perhaps we can form a choral group for S'porean Muslims that focuses on Islamically-oriented music. (If you didn't know, Malays can sing; the first two winners of Singapore Idol are both Malay Muslims. And, if you also didn't know, this wouldn't be the first musical group I've started. ;) ) Run time: 4:04.

Allahumma salli 'ala,
Sayyidina,
Muhammadin an-Nabiyyi al-ummiyyi,
Wa 'ala alihi wa sahbihi wa sallim.

(O Allah, send your peace and blessings upon our Master Muhammad, the Unlettered Prophet, and upon his family and companions.)

Ya Allah

O My Lord,
My sins are like
The highest mountain;
My good deeds
Are very few
They’re like a small pebble.
I turn to You
My heart full of shame,
My eyes full of tears.
Bestow Your
Forgiveness and Mercy
Upon me.
Ya Allah,
Send your peace and blessings
On the Final Prophet,
And his family,
And companions,
And those who follow him.

Japanese Flashmob

Those crazy Japanese! ;) Another hilarious video found at I.Z.'s.



(Interesting how much these streets look like those in Korea.)

Hakim Abudullah Features: Islam in the West

I came across Hakim Abdullah Features: Islam in the West this morning. It's an RSS feed of various Muslim blogs (including this one). Seriously, the feed almost looks like a compilation of my blogroll: Indigo Jo, Tariq Nelson, Sunni Sister, Writeous Sister, and several others (plus a few blogs that I don't normally read, like Eteraz). Unfortunately, there are also a couple of blogs that I do read that don't appear to be on the feed just yet (Izzy Mo, Umar Lee); insha'allah, these are either already there or will be put on soon.

Anyway, this feed looks rather interesting, and I hope to check it out more in the next few days, insha'allah. (The only problem with the feed appears to be that you can't comment directly on the blog from the RSS reader; I'll have to visit the appropriate blog to do that.)

Anyway, check it out!

"Handy" Star Wars Battle Scene

This is soooo stupid, it's hilarious (LOL funny). Some people just have waaaaaaay too much time on their ... uh ... hands.

But Does Cheney Know?

My impression of George Bush has gone up just the tiniest fraction (not that that's saying much):

At a farewell reception at Blair House for the retiring chief of protocol, Don Ensenat, who was President Bush's Yale roommate, the president shook hands with Washington Life Magazine's Soroush Shehabi. "I'm the grandson of one of the late Shah's ministers," said Soroush, "and I simply want to say one U.S. bomb on Iran and the regime we all despise will remain in power for another 20 or 30 years and 70 million Iranians will become radicalized."

"I know," President Bush answered.

"But does Vice President Cheney know?" asked Soroush.

President Bush chuckled and walked away.

(Source; hat tip)

"Stealing" a Few from IZ Reloaded

I've often thought my own blog was fairly eclectic in its own way, but the S'pore blog IZ Reloaded is quite eclectic (and a pleasure to visit). So I'm going to "steal" a few of his posts, so to speak.

First, we have "Frog," a Bollywood midget who dances pretty well, as this Youtube video (run time: 1:26) attests:



Frog, which is the English equivalent of his stage name, Thavakalai, has his own Myspace page, where there are a few other Youtube clips you can watch.

Second was a post on a guy who transforms regular watches into beautiful, wood-face watches. (Click on the link to see an excellent example.) Cool stuff!

Last, IZ linked to an article about a 5000+ year old grave in Italy of a couple who was buried hugging each other. Eternal love.

Canadian Optician Goes Nuts

There's a very strange news story coming out of Toronto, which I first caught on CNN this morning. Apparently an optician, Adam Plimmer, is cheating his customers by selling fake designer glasses. Part of CNN's coverage this morning, which isn't on the Youtube video below, had interviews with two women who had been cheated out of a considerable amount of money ($700 in one woman's case). When a 75-year-old reporter, Peter Silverman, came to discuss the case with the optician, Plimmer became rather violent, hitting, spitting, and throwing snowballs at Silverman and his cameraman. Plimmer now faces charges of assault and assault with a weapon.



A Toronto optician has been charged with assaulting a 75-year-old CityTV reporter in Toronto, Canada, according to CityTV.

The reporter was attacked by the optician on Wednesday while investigating allegations that the optician sold fake designer glasses.

The confrontation at the doorway of King West Optical, captured by CityTV television cameras, occurred during what was to be the latest installment of Peter Silverman's 'Silverman Helps' segment on the store.

According to the Canadian television station, Silverman went to question optician Adam Plimmer about his alleged fraudulent business practices after several consumers complained to him that they had paid for glasses but never received them.

The CityTV video shows Plimmer yelling profanities, hitting, and spitting at Silverman outside his store. It also shows Plimmer throwing snowballs at the reporter.

CityTV said that Silverman was not injured in the attack.

The news station said the reporter only put up his fists in self-defense.

Police arrived to the scene but Plimmer allegedly barricaded himself in the store, which led the emergency task force to come and get him out.

CityTV reported that Plimmer was later arrested by the police, and now faces one charge of assault and one charge of assault with a weapon.

The optician is now out on bail.

(Source)

Little Mosque on the Prairie, Episode 4: Swimming Upstream

The latest "Little Mosque" episode, dealing with the issues of Halloween (should Muslim kids participate in Halloween activities or not?) and male/female swimming (two of the women try to get segregated swimming exercises when a male swim instructor has to take over for the regular female instructor). Of the four episodes, I'd have to rate this one the best so far. There are still some goofs with regard to Islam here and there (e.g., no one "salaaming" the imam as they enter his office), and the idea of "Halaloween" is a bit...well, goofy. And there's quite a bit of female flesh walking around that pool that's rather gratuitous. On the plus side, Baber's scaring the trick-or-treating kids (at the 3:05 mark in the third segment) with "Beware the bad terrorist!" and "Osama's going to get you!" is rather funny.

On a related note, there's a new blog, Little Experiences..., that's trying to discuss the various issues the show brings up. I discovered tonight that the guys who left the comments on my post for the third episode have been commenting at that blog as well.

Comet McNaught on Australia Day

APOD has a beautiful photograph, taken in Perth, Australia last month. On the left you have a fireworks display in celebration of Australia Day, which is Australia's National Day. On the right you have lightning flashing over the Indian Ocean in the distance. And in the center, small and just showing underneath the clouds is Comet McNaught, which recently passed around the sun.

The Economist: Dark Secrets

Although I haven't had much time for reading others' blogs recently (or writing on my own), I've come across several posts elsewhere (Umar Lee, Indigo Jo) about Ayaan Hirsi Ali's new book, Infidel. The latest issue of the Economist (February 10-16, 2007) has come out and they have reviewed the book. Interestingly enough, they have panned the book. (The Economist continues to surprise me by both reporting on a considerable number of Muslim issues and providing amazingly fair coverage.) Their review of the book is below. I have highlighted some segments of the review in blue that I think are fairly important.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali blames Islam for the miseries of the Muslim world. Her new autobiography shows that life is too complex for that

Say what you will about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she fascinates. The Dutch-Somali politician, who has lived under armed guard ever since a fatwa was issued against her in 2004, is a chameleon of a woman. Just 11 years after she arrived in the Netherlands from Africa, she rode into parliament on a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, only to leave again last year, this time for America, after an uproar over lies she had told to obtain asylum.

Even the title of her new autobiography reflects her talent for reinvention. In the Netherlands, where Ms Hirsi Ali got her start campaigning against the oppression of Muslim women, the book has been published under the title “My Freedom”. But in Britain and in America, where she now has a fellowship at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, it is called “Infidel”. In it, she recounts how she and her family made the cultural odyssey from nomadic to urban life in Africa and how she eventually made the jump to Europe and international celebrity as the world's most famous critic of Islam.

Read as a modern coming-of-age story set in Africa, the book has a certain charm. Read as a key to the thinking of a woman who aspires to be the Muslim Voltaire, it is more problematic. The facts as Ms Hirsi Ali tells them here do not fit well either with some of the stories she has told in the past or with her tendency in her political writing to ascribe most of the troubles of the Muslim world to Islam.

Ms Hirsi Ali's father, Hirsi Magan Isse, was one of the first Somalis to study overseas in Italy and America. He met his future wife, Asha, when she signed up for a literacy class he taught during Somalia's springtime of independence in the 1960s. The family's troubles began in 1969, the year Ms Hirsi Ali was born. That was also the year that Mohammed Siad Barre, a Somali army commander, seized power in a military coup. Hirsi Magan was descended from the traditional rulers of the Darod, Somalia's second biggest clan. Siad Barre, who hailed from a lesser Darod family, feared and resented Ms Hirsi Ali's father's family, she says. In 1972, Siad Barre had Hirsi Magan put in prison from which he escaped three years later and fled the country. Not until 1978 was the family reunited with him.

As a young woman, Ms Hirsi Ali's mother, Asha, does not seem to have inhabited “the virgin's cage” that the author claims imprisons Muslim women around the world. At the age of 15, she travelled by herself to Aden where she got a job cleaning house for a British woman. Despite her adventurous spirit, in Yemen and later in the Gulf she found herself drawn to the stern Wahhabi version of Islam that would later clash with the more relaxed interpretation of Islam favoured by Ms Hirsi Ali's father and many other Somalis. She and Hirsi Magan fell out not long after the family moved to Kenya in 1980. Hirsi Magan left to join a group of Somali opposition politicians in exile in Ethiopia and did not return to his family for ten years.

Ms Hirsi Ali says her mother had no idea how to raise her children in a foreign city. She frequently beat Ayaan and her sister, Haweya. Although they and their brother, Mahad, attended some of Nairobi's best schools, Haweya and Mahad dropped out early on. Ms Hirsi Ali herself meanwhile fell under the sway of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Some of the best passages in the book concern this part of her life. As a teenager, Ms Hirsi Ali chose to wear the all-encompassing black Arab veil, which was unusual in cosmopolitan Nairobi. “Weirdly, it made me feel like an individual. It sent out a message of superiority,” she writes. Even as she wore it, Ms Hirsi Ali was drawn in other directions. She read English novels and flirted with a boy. Young immigrants of any religion growing up with traditional parents in a modern society will recognise her confusion: “I was living on several levels in my brain. There was kissing Kennedy; there was clan honour; and there was Sister Aziza and God.”

Ms Hirsi Ali sounds less frank when she tells the convoluted story of how and why she came to seek asylum at the age of 22 in the Netherlands. She has admitted in the past to changing her name and her age, and to concocting a story for the Dutch authorities about running away from Somalia's civil war. (In fact she left from Kenya, where she had had refugee status for ten years.) She has since justified those lies by saying that she feared another kind of persecution: the vengeance of her clan after she ran away from an arranged marriage.

However, last May a Dutch television documentary suggested that while Ms Hirsi Ali did run away from a marriage, her life was in no danger. The subsequent uproar nearly cost Ms Hirsi Ali her Dutch citizenship, which may be the reason why she is careful here to re-state how much she feared her family when she first arrived in the Netherlands. But the facts as she tells them about the many chances she passed up to get out of the marriage—how her father and his clan disapproved of violence against women; how relatives already in the Netherlands helped her to gain asylum; and how her ex-husband peaceably agreed to a divorce—hardly seem to bear her out.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not the first person to use false pretences to try to find a better life in the West, nor will she be the last. But the muddy account given in this book of her so-called forced marriage becomes more troubling when one considers that Ms Hirsi Ali has built a career out of portraying herself as the lifelong victim of fanatical Muslims.

Another, even more disturbing story concerns her sister Haweya's sojourn in the Netherlands. In her earlier book, “The Caged Virgin”, which came out last year, Ms Hirsi Ali wrote that her sister came to the Netherlands to avoid being “married off”. In “Infidel”, however, she says Haweya came to recover from an illicit affair with a married man that ended in abortion. Ms Hirsi Ali helped Haweya make up another fabricated story that gained her refugee status, but the Netherlands offered her little respite. After another affair and a further abortion, Haweya was put into a psychiatric hospital. Back in Nairobi, she died from a miscarriage brought on by an episode of religious frenzy. “It was the worst news of my life,” Ms Hirsi Ali writes.

Mental illness, abortion, failed marriages, illicit affairs and differing interpretations of religion: much as she tries, the kind of problems that Ms Hirsi Ali describes in “Infidel” are all too human to be blamed entirely on Islam. Her book shows that her life, like those of other Muslims, is more complex than many people in the West may have realised. But the West's tendency to seek simplistic explanations is a weakness that Ms Hirsi Ali also shows she has been happy to exploit.

Winning Hearts & Minds

The following is a video and post over at Crooks & Liars that I thought was very interesting:



Keith Olbermann featured this video on his Friday broadcast and it has haunted me since.

There is so much about this that bothers me. First, the very reality that the reason the Humvee driver is driving this way is because they are afraid of an attack if they slow down. Listen at the end of the video to the disdain one troop member expresses towards a pedestrian: "...as if he hasn't got a care in the world." Because these guys are aware that every day–every assignment–could be their last. Can you imagine what the constant state of stress like that has done to our troops, especially after two, three, four tours? And now with Bush's escalation, the likelihood that their tours will be extended again. PTSD doesn't begin to cover it. And yet, the Bush Administration has made it harder to get a diagnosis of PTSD and reduced vet benefits on top of that.

And then my thoughts go to the Iraqis. Can you imagine having your country occupied by another nation and be subjected to this kind of bullying behavior every day? Watch as the Humvee runs into car after car to force them to pull to the side and narrowly misses pedestrians. Is this the liberation we promised them? Are our actions in Iraq winning their hearts and minds to the benefits of a democracy?

As Adam said in the email with the link to this clip, "Is there a clearer indication that our presence in Iraq is hurting us?"

Little Mosque on the Prairie, Episode 3: The Open House

Until I can find a video that's not broken into segments, this will have to do.