Tales of a Solitary Soul

Another late night date with the assignments. I think we need to take a break from each other but they just don't listen. They show up uninvited and seeking answers.

Our 'song' use to be Desert Rose every time we'd meet this late but it's starting to lose the charm. I propose a new candidate:

Chaley they saath

The curse of being the oldest in the family is that somehow everything is related to you. No matter how disconnected the situation seems at the moment, sooner or later, I know it'll come back to haunt me.

On second thought, I shouldn't be so pessimistic. If Allah (swt) gives much responsibility, it's only because He knows you have the ability to carry it out because it doesn't make sense that He would set us up to fail.

But there are times and then there are times.........

"O Allah, I take refuge in You from anxiety and sorrow, weakness and laziness, miserliness and cowardice, the burden of debts and from being over powered by men."

Time to rejoin the battle.

Topic of what 'love' is always a complicated one so reading through the exaggerated simplifications presented in the National Geographic article, I couldn't help but feel a bit of skepticism. Naturally, it also dealt with the concept of arranged vs love marriages.

Perhaps the greatest myth in the minds of non-Muslims and even some Muslims is that arranged marriage is a part of Islam. In essence, there is nothing wrong with it until they begin to turn in to forced marriages.

While I'm not advocating one side or the other, here are some excerpts from the article:

"To be madly in love could be exactly that -- madness. The term lovesick is surprisingly accurate for people experiencing romantic love, it turns out, have a chemical profile in their brains similar to that of people who suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder. Love blurs the line between mental health and psychopathology."

Ouch! My heartfelt sympathies goes out to anyone in love right now.

"Science can explain how love affects the brain -- but not the mystery of how it affects the heart."

" Anthropologists used to think that romance was a Western construct, a bourgeois by-product of the Middle Ages.......It was assumed that non-Westerners, with their broad familial and social obligations were spread too think for particular passions.
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Scientists now believe that romance is panhuman, embedded in our brains since Pleistocene times. In a study of 166 cultures, anthropologists observed evidence of passionate love in 147 of them."

That's one point for all the hopeless romantics.

"Love lights up the caudate nucleus because it is home to a dense spread of receptors for a neurotransmitter called dopamine, also known as the love potion. In the right proportions, dopamine creates intense energy, exhilaration, focused attention, and motivation to win rewards. Love makes you bold, makes you bright, makes you run real risks, which you somtimes survive, and sometimes you don't."

Good luck explaining that to your loved one!

On a different yet similar note, National Geographic has started a new section in their magazines called Your Shot. It's a chance for amateur photographers to send in their pics every month and possibly be selected for publication on their website or better yet, the magazine.

The process is very simple and is done online with digital pictures.

When I listen to recitation as beautiful as this, all my worries and concerns just disappear.

Canadian men's hockey team lost and exited the tournament without gold; not even a medal!

Suddenly, the olympics have meangingless. I couldn't believe it and still have a hard time admitting it. I didn't even have the courage to watch the last minute of the game as the seconds ticked down and the faces that only four years ago were singing the national anthem with gold around their necks, now hung in despair.

I changed channels because CBC news began to show the game highlights and player reactions.

Too many questions, too long a wait. Another four years.

A film about the mass rapes of Bosnian Muslim women during the ethnic conflict in 1992 has won the top prize at the Berlin film festival. According to some estimates, some 20,000 women were raped by Serb militant forces in an attempt to shame the victims to death.

What's even worse is that such atrocities will only receive world wide attention when movies and documentaries are made. The 'art' of publicizing genocide has really become an exact 'science' of sorts. No more does it make a difference on how brutal the acts were or the sheer numbers that disappeared.

Take the Holocaust for example. Yes, it was truly horrible that millions of people were slaughtered like cattle but how many such acts had taken place before or since. Ever hear of the Armenian massacre of 1918 when 1.5 milion people vanished? Or are we going to claim that because the Holocaust had a casualty ratio that was 4 times higher, that somehow it justifies the world ignoring Armenia's cries.

Or how about the man-made famine of Ukraine during which millions died of starvation? Or the thirty million in China?

Perhaps the answer lies in our educational system. We grow up reading books by Elie Weisel, Nobel Prize winner and a holocaust survivor, history courses that repeatedly cover World War II and its atrocities. So no wonder that after years of reading and hearing about World War II (and thus the holocaust), a generation rises that is fully aware of one tragedy while completely ignorant about the others.

How often would you read books in school on the India/Pakistan partition that had as many moving stories as any other conflict?

The Jewish survivors of the holocaust were not only literate but highly educated; books were written to no end of their experiences, movies such as Shindlers List and The Pianist further drove home the point, and countless documentaries were filmed.

We claim the world doesn't understand the Palestinian suffering or the hardships of people in Chechnya. But what have we done to tell the stories? We all became engineers and doctors. Writing became a pasttime and very soon a generation emerged that was incapable of expressing themselves.

We often complain about the world not paying enough attention to other disasters. It's because we haven't yet learnt the art of teaching it to them. Where are our poets, our writers, our artists.........the Mohammad Iqbals and the Ghazalis, people who could inspire a revolution through a few strokes of their pen.

The insightfulness of slaves is not trustworthy enough, for only the eye of free people is capable of seeing clearly.

Mohammad Iqbal

I am still a slave, searching for someone to set me free.

The advent of reading week finally brings a sense of normality back to my schedule or whatever is left of it. A stack of mail has found an unwanted home on top of the drawer along with this and last month's National Geographic, which I haven't touched in weeks.

Hmm, lets see what the main stories are:

January
-cover story on grand canyon (I'll glimpse it)
-genocide unearthed (this will end up in a post sooner or later insha Allah)
-Maya Gods and Kings (now this I have to read!)
-mighty Mantid (I have no idea what it is either)

February
-cover story on 'love' (Mom had a raised eyebrow when she this title but surprisingly managed to keep her silence)
-a feature on orthodox jews
-dispatches from Iraq
-Heartbreak on the Serengeti (about an African tribe's fight for survival -- I like these types of stories)

Every month, my computer's wallpaper finds itself a new 'tenant' courtesy of the wonderful photographers at National Geographic. This month's picture really moved me so I decided to share it. There's something un-nerving about the pic -- it's beautifully dangerous like life.

"I have prepared for My Pious slaves things which have never been seen by an eye, or heard by an ear, or imagined by a human being."


Two pieces of advice I leave you all with:

1. Leaving Isha'a till 4 am in the morning is not the best of ideas as I found out last night.
2. Cracking marriage jokes in front of a Sheikh who has a matrimonial service can get you married before you even realize what has happened. Fortunately, I made it out in one piece.....for now.

Walking home from the bus stop tonight, it felt oddly different. The stars sparkled like diamonds placed carefully in the sky, the air had the lovely 'dewy' feeling, the kind that permeates all round after a rainy day, and the chilly winter cold became an afterthought.

Perhaps if I wasn't carrying a 2-ton bag, a walk around the neighbourhood might have ensued but a loooong day does take its toll. Some other night, I promised myself.

One battle has ended but this war is long. I had fought my Stalingrad only to buy a moment of piece. Tomorrow, it starts all over.

Much work, little rest -- life of a believer.

It hit me recently that I'd be 22 in a few months. But that can't be right.....I that old? But I'm still a kid who gets excited over the silliest of things.

Time certainly does fly by. My days in Abu Dhabi seem like eons ago and scratchy memories of Pakistan do manage to surface now and then. Many a tales, such little time.

Everyone's got stories to tell only if someone was willing to listen. I often go through my collection of World War II books staring at the black & white pictures of people that are probably long dead by now. Makes me wonder what each person's dreams and aspirations were? What tales accompanied them to their graves?

I'll be lucky if just one person remembers me twenty years after I'm dead.

Death. Ironically, it's usually the last thought on our minds considering there is no other certainty in the world. Many of you probably think I'm depressed because I happen to mention the D-word for that's the usual response I get everytime the topic comes up.

I'm not depressed by any stretch of the imagination. My time will come, perhaps sooner rather than later but there is no denying it. Hopefully, it doesn't include getting crushed under a 20-wheel truck. Or perhaps it wil be as simple as me going to sleep after blogging this and not waking up.

Lets see how long the angel of death has to wait before he gets his hands on me. Poor fellow visits me five times a day only to return empty handed but he'll certainly get his due.

The cartoon controversy has spread so wide that yesterday as I turned on CBC to watch the Olympic opening ceremonies, I found the commentators talking about its effect on the Danish team.

I was sickened, though not surprised, to see Muslims burn Danish embassies in Lebanon and Syria. Harming foreign diplomats of a country can literally lead to war as was the case when Muslim ambassadors to the Roman empire were murdered leading to an all out battle (Battle of Muta'h).

Secondly, was there really a need to turn violent? Make no mistakes, the apologies of the Danish government and newspaper was due to the widespread economic boycott that had started rather than a response to the violent protests. The boycott was a very legitimate response from the Muslims because if the Danes can claim to a freedom of the press to incite hatred, Muslims had every right to a 'freedom of boycott.' But burning embassies was unacceptable and uncalled for.

Maybe the scholars of hadith missed the part where the Muslims of Mecca joined together to throw the garbage right back at the persons trying to harm the Prophet (peace be upon him). For those unfamiliar with the story, certain people in Mecca would throw garbage and harmful objects in the way of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) and he would just remove them. One day he found no garbage in his path and enquired as to the reason why, only to discover that the person responsible had fallen ill. Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) decided to pay a visit to enquire about his health. The man was so moved by this gesture that he converted to Islam.

This incident made me think about freedom of speech on my blog. Even though this is a personal blog, often I deal with sensitive political and religious issues but unlike other bloggers, I've decided to let others comment/criticize and that too while being anonymous. But obviously such previlige comes with certain restraints.

In over a 16 months of blogging, I have only deleted one comment but in hindsight, even that could have been avoided. So, let's try to be civilized and use the 'anonymous' previlige for meaningful dialogues. I probably won't censor anyone but any degrading remarks devoid of facts and based purely on emotion while ignoring all etiquettes of 'adab' only reflect the person's bias and how low he/she has sank in an effort to make their point.

Scientific explorers have discovered a land so pristine that it is estimated that humans have never set foot on it. A 'lost world' of sorts, untouched and pure.

Two long-beaked echidnas, primitive egg-laying mammals, even allowed scientists to pick them up and bring them back to their camp to be studied.....

Dark matter has long been a source of mystery for the scientific community. It is a name given to the 'unknown' force that seems to shape the universe as we know it; except that it cannot be measured or quanitified.

Its presence, though, can be inferred from the way galaxies rotate: their stars move so fast they would fly apart if they were not being held together by the gravitational attraction of some unseen material.

This article provides a good overview and the recent discoveries that have been made.

The last time Hiba Mahmoud saw her 15-year-old son was when they clambered onto a wooden raft that was heavily battered by waves after the ferry sank in the shark-infested Red Sea off the Egyptian coast.

The last words she heard from him were, "Mom, save me."

"To Allah we belong and to Him we shall return."

I want to cry but the tears seem to have run dry.

To CBC:

Hello,
As a Muslim who was greatly distraught by the blashphemous caricatures of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) in the Danish newspapers, I greatly appreciated the decision of CBC to not air the cartoons while covering the story during its 'National News' program.

Not only does this show the great respect and understanding that CBC has for the Canadian minorities, it goes to re-affirm my faith in the tolerant multi-culturism of Canada, of which CBC is a shining example.

Keep up the good job CBC for showing that great journalism can be done without infringing on the rights of others.

AUTOMATED RESPONSE: All e-mails are read and your comments, complaints, and concerns are added to our Audience Reaction Report. Each week, the report is distributed to our senior producers, programmers and the President and CEO, Robert Rabinovitch.

To the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA):

Dear Sir/Madam:

As someone who takes a great interest in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict and wants to see a lasting peace that ensures safety for both states, CIDA's decision to re-consider the grants to the Palestinians has become a source of concern for myself.

The Palestinians have a crumbling economy due to the volatile nature of the region and the various restrictions that have been imposed upon them. The grants that flow in from the various wealthy countries is a crucial source of aid that allows the Palestinians to setup social and welfare programs. The infrastructure is already failing with years of neglect and it pains me to think what the result might be if the mich needed aid is cut-off.

I understand the hesistancy to fund a government run by Hamas, but it has to be kept in mind that the people of Palestine chose them in a fair and free election because Hamas promised reforms on domestic issues such as unemployment, infrastructure, basic services, etc. Thus, in order to keep these promises, the Palestinian Authority will require all the help that it can get from the international community.

Let's not forget that a decision to cut off aid will only result in further detoriation of an already broken down social order and lead to further instability in the region due to a lack of the most basic necessities. I hope that CIDA keeps the present and the future of the poverty stricken Palestinian people in mind, for any decision to punish the Palestinian Authority will only inevitably lead to further suffering of innocent people.

Thank you for your time.

Faraz Ahmed
A concerned citizen

Qatra qatra baney samandar........
('Water droplets join to form an ocean.' It sounds better in urdu)

Much has been said over the incident of Danish newspapers printing the blasphemous editorial cartoons of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) with bombs wrapped around him. To make matters worse, several European newspapers decided to follow suit. Wikipedia has a good summary on the what transpired over the last few days.

Firstly, let me state how happy I am that no one has murdered the editors of the Danish newspapers nor there have been any fireband fatwas issued like in the case of Salman Rushdie. Protest in the Muslim world were marked by the usual flag and tire burning, masked men firing AK-47s in the air....you know, the whole nine yards.

Muslim governemnts have gotten involved with recall of ambassadors and a general economic boycott of Danish goods, while the OIC works to present a bill in the UN preventing attacks on religions under the guise of 'freedom of speech.'

What makes me sad is a recent poll in Denmark indicated that 79% of the people believed the newspaper should not apologize. I wonder what the percentages would be if the cartoon was mocking the Holocaust victims?

It seems like certain issues are off limits while it's open season on others. Living in Canada, we tend to forget how well protected we are as minorities and religious groups but the Europeans seem to have a totally different standard.

Not just Islam, no religion should be attacked or ridiculed in such a mass fashion. Mutual respect and tolerance should not be abandoned just to sell a few more papers.