Eid Mubarak, One Hundred Percent Sure–Inshallah

Our local radio station was saying Eid was supposed to happen yesterday, so I clicked on my favorite mosque website to find out. They were unequivocal. Sort of. Posted on their home page was the following message:

Eid Al-Fitr is on Sat Oct 13, 2007, inshaAllah. 100% Confirmed.

Determining Eid halfway around the world from Mecca has always been a bit of a problem. Add to that the political implications of depending on the Saudi government for your own country’s religious observances, and things get even trickier. Most Middle Eastern countries now have their own Islamic ministry for those questions.

So here it is: The Fiqh Council of North America, after considering the position of the their European counterpart, the European Council for Fatwa and Research, has determined that the official north American Eid is today, Saturday October 13, 2007.

The position of ECFR is very similar to the position of FCNA adopted last year on June 10, 2006, with a minor difference. FCNA adopted the position that the conjunction should occur before noon at Greenwich time. ECFR has adopted Makkah al-Mukarram as a conventional point and took the position that the conjunction must take place before sunset in Makkah and moon must set after sunset in Makkah.

FCNA after careful discussion has revised its position and has adopted the Fatwa of ECFR. This revised position will change only a few dates in the Fiqh Council’s Five year calendar; but it will bring greater harmony and unity among the Muslims communities in the West.

 

so therefore:

Eid ul-Fitr 1428 AH:
The astronomical New Moon is on Thursday, October 11, 2007, at 5:00 Universal Time (8:00 am Makkah time). Sunset at Makkah on October 11 is 6:00 pm local time, while moonset at Makkah is at 5:59 pm local time (1 minute before sunset). This does not meet the new criteria adopted by FCNA and ECFR. On Friday, October 12, 2007, sunset at Makkah is 5:59 pm local time, while moonset is at 6:32 pm local time. Therefore, first day of Shawwal, i.e., Eid ul-Fitr is Saturday, October 13, insha’Allah.

So, Eid Mubarak!

Inshallah.

May you be blessed for the entire year.

Ramadan Kareem: a Ramadan Dua

I’ve been looking for a little Ramadan Kareem symbol to put in my widgets for the month of Ramadan, but I’m having some sort of problem opening my widgets. The best I can gather from the blogosphere is that that latest version of Firefox 2.0.0.7 is doing something to Javascript, whatever that is.

So until I can figure out what that is, or more likely until they can figure it out, here is something called a Ramadan Dua. I’m not quite sure what a dua is, but this one seems to be a sort of prayer. I kind of like it, both for the Arabic and for the sentiments expressed.

Transcript

Dua is the following: Allah hooma inee auldubika

il hami, wa il hahden

wal agitee, wa kasal

wal toopamee, wa joobnahl

wal broohal, ghalabit il daimee al rijel

(repeat it)

Allah, by you from all the ways

from all sadness, from laziness

from being helpless, from being coward

from fear, from being stingy,

from the overwhelming of the national debt, and from the oppression of men

I know I don’t have the Arabic exactly right, but if your Arabic is good enough to tell that, you probably know what it says already.

Ramadan Kareem.

Iranian Barbershops closed by religious police: Can the unibrow be far behind?

Religious police have closed some 20 barbershops in Iran as a part of a crackdown on “bad hijab” or unIslamic clothing. On the forbidden list are makeup, tattoos, hairstyles with gel where the hair stands up, and plucking eyebrows for men.

Plucking eyebrows?

I saw a barber who knew how to do this in the north of Jordan. A friend of mine had a rather wolfish look–widow’s peak, eyebrows growing close together and a huge Arab mustache. I walked around with his sister while he went in for maintenance. The eyebrow plucking he was adamant must be done with a string. The string is held between the barbers two hands and dragged across the skin. As it is dragged across the skin the thread twists. The hairs get caught in the string and are plucked. After my friend emerged from the barber, I realized he had a unibrow and needed frequent attention to keep from looking Neanderthal.

The hair-plucking trick with the string is common and women do it too. One day I went with my Iraqi neighbor to find a beauty salon with reasonably priced haircuts. We ended up paying around four dollars each. I didn’t know what I wanted, so the stylist said “I will give you a Versace cut” and it was pretty good too. My friend knew in detail what she wanted layered and so forth and her haircut was more of a process. At the end, the stylist pointed out some courser facial hair on her temples, a new price was negotiated, and out came the string, deftly rolled across her forehead. I couldn’t see a difference but she was enormously satisfied with her appearance.

After my friends’ experience with plucking hair, I started becoming more aware of the appearance of Arab men on the street. A surprising number of them look like they might have unibrows that are kept separated into distinct eyebrows only by a barber’s frequent attention.

I am picturing the new Iran, without barbered eyebrows. A chorus line of Iranian men comes on stage in the Monty Python tradition looking like they might be ready to burst into a chorus of Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! As they turn, you can see they each have a unibrow and look exactly like Bert as in Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street.

Of course there is only one song that goes with Bert’s unibrow. The line of husky Iranian men bursts into a chorus of “Rubber ducky, you’re the one…”

Banned in Turkey: religious extremist demonstrates control of Turkish courts by banning WordPress.com

Hot diggety dog. I’m banned in Turkey.

Okay, everyone else with a wordpress.com blog is banned in Turkey too.

Apparently this is all the doing of a Moslem creationist and holocaust-denier named Adnan Oktar who is the author of the books written under the pen name Harun Yahya. As far as I can tell, Oktar has been accused in the Turkish courts of sodomy, sex with minors, blackmail, bribing public officials, carrying on defamation campaigns against a political rival and a movie star who refused to have sex with him, and oh yeah, illegal possession of guns. He is the named author of a huge array of books that one would think impossible for only one person to write, including a very expensive-looking anti-Darwin tome filled with glossy photos that infringe an a number of copyrights. The books are being given away in European countries.

Somehow Adnan Oktar (or Harun Yahya) also has enough hidden clout to get a Turkish court to issue an order banning all WordPress.com blogs from the country.

No one seems to be able to trace Oktar’s financial backing.

Iran’s Dress Code Police Freak Out Over Mannequin Cleavage

Every summer as the weather gets warmer the Iranian government admonishes women about proper dress. But this year the police are arresting women and impounding their vehicles in the current dress code crackdown. Some clothing boutiques have even been sealed by the police, and others have been ordered to saw the breasts off their mannequins. This is just too weird.

But why would this be considered Islamic? Where are these injunctions in the Koran?

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Related posts:
Ahmadinejad’s Creepy Kiss
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Terror Has No Religion-some interesting images

Some interesting images:

This one says “Terror has no religion”.

The next one says “No to violence”.

These are all from the website noterror.info. The website also has a series of startling black and white posters with an eerie film noir flavour to them.

The website appears to be still under construction, for example, no information is given on sponsorship, although it appears to be written by people who identify themselves as Moslem. It should be interesting to see how it develops.

Saudi Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice plagued by magic spells thrown in the Red Sea

From tomorrow’s edition of the Saudi publication Arab News comes the tantalizing bit of information that magic spells thrown into the Red Sea are the concern of a Saudi agency called the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.

The commission is one of Saudi’s largest law enforcement bodies, with 486 centers and 10,000 members through out the kingdom. Their job is to “randomly enter malls, restaurants and local and private establishments to enforce proper moral conduct”, which includes enforcing shop closures during prayer times, prayer attendance, gender segregation and confiscation of pornography.

And now their members are hitting the beach:

Q: What is the commission doing to catch sorcerers in Saudi cities. And what is their fate after they are caught? Could you tell us how many of them were caught this year and their locations? And what about the magic spells that are thrown into the Red Sea? How are these spells broken?A: The commission plays a large role in capturing people who practice sorcery or delusions since these are vices which affect the faith of Muslims and cause harm to both nationals and expatriates. The commission has assigned centers in every city and town to be on the lookout for these men. As for their fate, they are arrested and then transferred to concerned authorities. The commission also has a role in breaking magic spells, which are found in the sea. We cooperate with divers in this aspect. After the spells are found, they are then broken using recitations of the Holy Qur’an. We do not use magic to break magic spells, as this is against the teachings of Islam as mentioned by the Supreme Ulema. But we use the Qur’an as did the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).

This raises more questions than it answers. First of all, what are these spells found in the sea? What are they for, what do they look like, and who throws them in the sea? Why are the spells in the sea and not on the beach or somewhere else? How do you use Koran to break the spell? Do you have to recite a particular aya?

One possible hint comes from The Catalan Atlas from 1375 that shows the “world and the people who inhabit it”.

Navigational information is also recorded: “From the mouth of the river of Baghdad, the Indian and Persian Oceans open out. Here they fish for pearls, which are supplied to the town of Baghdad.” We learn that “before they dive to the bottom of the sea, pearl fishers recite magic spells with which they frighten away the fish” a piece of information that comes straight from Marco Polo, who mentions that the pearl fishers on the Malabar coast are protected by the magic and spells of the Brahmins. Various trading stations are indicated on the shore of the Indian Ocean from Hormus, “where India begins,” to Quilon in Kerala. There, pearl fishers are mentioned again with reference to magic spells.

If anyone is thinking that we in the west don’t do anything like that, think again about our practice of throwing coins in a fountain for luck, for health, or just to to make a wish. The practice goes back a long way–Roman coins have been excavated from very old fountains. But we don’t try to suppress the practice with anti-vice police. In fact, the person throwing the coins may be doing so in the knowledge that the coins will be fished out and donated to a particular charity.

I only know two magical uses of the Koran–one for sleep and one that uses a visitor’s empty tea glass to get them to return–and both use the “Corsi Aya.” And oh, yeah, getting rid of a Djinn in the desert by saying the word “Bismallah” (In the name of Allah). There must be more.

Al-Qaeda: Our New Ally Against Iranian Radicalism?

Remember when the answer to radical Islam used to be moderate Islam? Well, that’s changing. The new answer to radical Shiite Islam may be radical Sunni Islam. That’s right, al-Qaeda. We’ve come full circle since the CIA first created Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan all those years ago.

In a piece in this month’s The New Yorker, Seymour Hirsch describes the Iraqi conflict in terms of regional conflict involving not just the Sunnis and Shiites of Iraq, but of neighboring countries as well: Sunnis in Saudi Arabia and Jordan and the Iranian-backed Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria. Sunni countries fear runaway Iranian power in the region, now about to be backed by nuclear weapons. The only organization capable of withstanding the Iranians, the Iraqi army, has been disbanded by the U.S.

What’s more, the Bush administration policy towards Iran is changing as well.

In recent months, the former intelligence official told me, a special planning group has been established in the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged with creating a contingency bombing plan for Iran that can be implemented, upon orders from the President, within twenty-four hours.

In the past month, I was told by an Air Force adviser on targeting and the Pentagon consultant on terrorism, the Iran planning group has been handed a new assignment: to identify targets in Iran that may be involved in supplying or aiding militants in Iraq. Previously, the focus had been on the destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities and possible regime change.

Now imagine all of the power and money now being used for war in the region being used instead for peaceful purposes: schools, hospitals, cultural festivals, dancing the dubka and eating mansaf.

Imagine.

What to do with the sludge at the bottom of Turkish coffee

My phone rang. It was six in the morning in Chicago. Who would call at that hour? As my answering machine picked up the call I struggled to wake up, figure out where I was, place the voice. It was Hussein. Just as I was able to open my eyes, Hussein’s message ended and the link with the other side of the world was broken.

I first met Hussein in a restaurant off of Abdali bus station where he was playing violin. An Arab woman can’t talk to strange men, only her brothers and her fiance, but as a westerner I didn’t care about that. I was curious and I talked to everyone. The important thing is not to be alone with a strange man because it looks bad and people will talk. So Hussein and I met in public–at an artists’ gallery where he drew portraits and gave lessons on the oud (an Arab lute), at coffeeshops where he played violin, at the remains of a Byzantine church on the same hill where I lived. All of these places had Turkish coffee, and Hussein was very much in demand to read the coffee grounds because he had a reputation for being close to Allah.

Once, my friend from Tafila, another American, was in town. Since I had a chaperone to make things proper, I could invite Hussein to my apartment. In the first photo Hussein is in my living room in my apartment at the southern tip of Jebel al-Webdeh. Note the plush decor. He is showing us how to make the coffee.

First, water goes into a special little long-handled pot for boiling coffee. Then, a large spoon of coffee powder and an equally large spoon of sugar are stirred into the water. It is brought to a boil, then heated over the flame for 3 or 4 minutes, stirring constantly and occasionally removing it from the flame to keep it from boiling over . (My propane ghaz was a really fancy one. Besides the ususal two large burners, it had an extra tiny burner for heating coffee.) Then the coffee is brought to where it will be consumed and allowed to sit until it is cool enough to drink. Most of the sludge also settles to the bottom. The coffee goes into a finjon (small coffee cup). Pour carefully, so as not to disturb the sludge, then enjoy.

My last week in the Middle East was spend saying goodby to friends. I found Hussein playing violin at another coffeeshop. It was Ramadan, so we couldn’t eat or drink anything until after the evening call to prayer sounded, so he helped me with pronunciation of the “corsi aya” verse in the Koran he had given me. Later, after sunset, we had coffee as usual. I wanted him to read my coffee grounds, but because of Ramadan he was reluctant. The Koran forbids idolotry, but he couldn’t explain in English. He peered into his cup, enthralled, the artist seeing patterns that I couldn’t see. Then remembering Ramadan he reminded me it was only “art, art”. I sulked. I looked into my cup and saw only coffee grounds. “There is money,” I said tentatively. The small dots of coffee around the top indicate money. “Small, small, money,” I added morosely. “Is there a bird?” I spoke to my coffee cup listlessly. “No bird”, continuing the conversation with myself. Hussein couldn’t resist. He peeked at my cup. Then he got excited. He struggled to find the word in English. “Safe,” he said. Written in the grounds was an Arabic word from the Koran meaning “safe”. I would reach America safely. When you get on the plane, he said, you must say the words “bismallah”–in the name of Allah. And I did.

And if Hussein ever sees this–Hussein, I am thinking of you.

Is Allah merciful and compassionate? Elif Shafak on love-based religion, fear-based religion, and the color orange

It was another “driveway moment,” a term coined by a National Public Radio listener to describe the moment when your commute is over, but you sit in your driveway with the radio on, listening to the end of an NPR news item.

The interview was with author Elif Shafak who was promoting her new book The Bastard of Istanbul. A Turkish lawsuit against Shafak based on her new book was recently dismissed. A lawsuit because?…Among other things Shafak discusses the mass movement of Armenians out of Turkey in 1921, accompanied by what many have labeled “genocide,” a taboo subject in Turkey.

Both of Shafak’s grandmothers were Moslem, she relates, but she received a different religious legacy from each of them. To one, religion was based on “jallal” or fear. God was someone who sat up in heaven writing down all your sins. To the other grandmother, religion was joyful and everything could be negotiated.

Mystics of all religions fascinate Shafak, especially the Islamic Sufis. To her, mystics go beyond words and touch the essence of religion. When you approach religion through mysticism, she says, the differences between religions start to dissolve.

And Shafak is a rebel because of the color orange? Another taboo subject that Shafak is not afraid to tackle is the “turkification” of the language. When the Turkish language was purged of words derived from Arabic and Persian in 1923, the meanings of the words were also lost, along with much subtlety of thought, ponders Shafak. For example, many Persian words describing degrees of color were purged from the language. So without Persian, Turks can no longer describe the shades of color between yellow and red.