September 2007

For those of my readers who don’t read Arabic, the above reads (from right to left) “Ramadaan Mubaarak”, which is more commonly transliterated “Ramadan Mubarak”. I won’t offer you a pronunciation guide here, and it takes practice anyway.

What it means is “blessings of Ramadan”.

رمضان is Islam’s holy “month”. Months in Islam are based on the lunar cycle and so the start and end are always shifting relative to the Gregorian calendar we’re used to in the West.

During this month, Muslims who satisfy certain criteria (and are physically able) are to fast from dawn to dusk. At the moment, that means no food, drink or any nutrition or medicine to enter the system? during these hours. It means no vain talk, no swearing, backbiting, fighting, or to be precise, extra vigilance over those things that are not allowed in Islam anyway.

So for this month, I will not be swearing on my blog and I’ll try insha’Allah to be as “good” as possible.

I kept some fasts last year and even more the year before, al-Hamdulillah, but I will not be keeping any this year. As my regulars know, I have Type I diabetes and if it’s not well controlled, I should not fast. In Islam, Allah (SWT) ordains for those of us who are not able to fast a get-out clause; we are to feed a poor person for this month. Practically speaking, this means alms. I won’t get into the technicalities, but again, like much of Islam, it’s all very practical.

Ramadan is the month in which the Qur’an was originally revealed to the Prophet Muhammad (saw). For those of you who think you’ve read the Qur’an and cannot read Arabic, I’m afraid you haven’t actually read the Qur’an. I know - this took me by surprise when I first learned it a few years back, but it’s perfectly reasonable. The nature of the Arabic language (which I spent a year learning, and now class myself as a beginner at) allows for constructs based on a flexible root system that simply could not be mapped to any other language. Thus, we Muslims refer to English “translations” as “renderings of the meaning of the Qur’an”. The Qur’an cannot be translated and needs to be read, and ideally understood in the original Arabic.

I wanted to learn the meaning of the Qur’an. I am a long way from it, but will continue on this path insha’Allah. I am already staggered at the profundity, the depth, the versatility and the majesty of the Arabic language and I shudder to think how peerlessly majestic the language of the Qur’an is.

Recall that the pagans of Arabia had a strong oral tradition and that poetry was a cornerstone of their culture. The Qur’an brought grown men to tears with the almost unbearable elegance and power of the language. It is hard for us to imagine. We listen to Shakespeare and some of us, in fact, most of us, struggle to feel the impact.

It is astonishing to note that with the Qur’an being the first book written in the Arabic language, to this day, over a millennium later, it has not been matched in literary quality, yet alone surpassed. To understand the miracle that was the Qur’an, one must bear in mind that Arabic poetry was the highest art in pre-Islamic Arabia. Poets were feted, they were bigger than movie stars. It was in this environment that the Qur’an made a world-shifting impact, never to be matched. Little wonder that Arabia was transformed and united under the banner of Islam and the leadership of the Unlettered Prophet (saw).

The cure for all ignorance is education. Ignorance breeds misunderstanding and hatred. Education offers a path away from that, which not all of us unfortunately, are walking on all of the time. Myself included. Ramadan offers us Muslims a yearly reminder to be the best that we can be.

May God bless all of you.

My apologies to my regular readers for the dearth of output in recent times.

Some updates are in order:

My health is so-so, but it has been a lot worse.

I am enjoying my job, my working environment is excellent, my boss is supportive and my colleagues truly lovely people. I am enjoying the business again and taking pleasure also in playing video games; my most loyal readers will be surprised at this. My most reason poison has been Super Stardust HD, but I’m looking forward to playing Bioshock too.

Being (a limited) part of PLAYSTATION®3 has been an unexpected joy. When I started this job at Sony back in December 2005, I thought it would be a stop-gap, as it was quite a step down from START! games and even the web consulting, (though a huge step-up from unemployment!) but it has been a source of ever greater satisfaction. That can only be a good thing, can’t it? As my former boss remarked recently - during my illness Sony has been a calm port in a storm.

I am planning on doing some more videos on the Qadianis, but as they are going to be more ambitious, I can’t just knock them out as I did before. The American top brass Qadiani, Dr. Nasim Rehmatullah, has still not replied to any of my queries on why they filed DMCA takedown notices and then chickened out after I counter-filed. I note that certain Qadianis are continuing with either vileness, hatred or libel. I’m leaving them to it. For now. Their disgusting behaviour continues to underline their spiritual bankruptcy.

Summer holidays are almost over and I have scarcely been allowed any time with my kids, and even phone time has been severely restricted. I find this painful, of course, but no longer unbearable. It’s amazing what the human spirit can withstand and I’m fairly certain I could take a hell of a lot more. Let’s hope not though.

In whatever spare time I have had recently, I have been getting to grips with Ruby on Rails, having introduced myself to it a couple of years ago after evangelising the 37signals stuff on this very blog. It took ages to get it working on the server I work with, I had to jump through several hoops to finally get a response. I also managed to get it set up on my Mac, which seems to be the perfect development environment for it. Indeed, the RoR team all use the Mac with TextMate, the latter being my editor of choice too.

I have of course had moral and practical support from a couple of friends, without whom I would have eventually got to where I am now, but without my sanity.

I am rediscovering my zest for life again. I had rather taken computing and my earlier aptitude and ability for it, for granted, letting my talent fizzle away whilst my personal life was going through its Perfect Storm. Now I am excited again. By languages, by hosting, by servers, by the Internet, by Open Source, by programming, by hacking (in the proper sense of the word) and by all things computing. I’m excited by media, by film-making, by editing, by communication, by databases, by photography, by life. It feels good, despite my health not quite keeping up just yet. I feel that this zest and passion, the thing that has been missing for so long, is what will drag my health kicking and screaming into some kind of order, insha’Allah.

I am also not letting myself get too angry at things. Sure, the world is still fucked, but I ignore the papers, I don’t watch the news, I mute the telly when the ads come on and I look at cunts like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin and don’t even get too annoyed. After all, why give them the energy?

Of course, I am still trying to improve as a Muslim. I really tried to drop the ‘c’ word from the above paragraph, but it sits so well and it’s the only swear-word in the whole post, which might just get me a 15 rating.

You know what has helped? Realising that a lot of people, mostly colleagues and some blogmates actually, are wise to propaganda and what the media and the state apparatus is trying to do. Whilst not necessarily getting the whole picture, which is not to suggest that I do, far from it, they do at least know that they are being lied to. And that is always a very good start.

So this shift in attitude might mean a shift in posting style. I am tired about being angry with injustice. It saps my energy and gives it to the problem, rather than defusing it. I am grimly aware that no adult should believe as a child does, that when she covers her face with a pillow, the monster will no longer see her. I’m sure the monsters are still there, that the Bankers, Zionists and Crusaders are still at it with their imperialism and oppression and tyranny and murder and looting and slavery, but in all honesty, as long as I’m aware, why drown myself in it? What good can possibly come from it?I have been using blogging as a tool to spread misery to others. That’s what it boils down to. It wasn’t always this way. I would like to get back to stuff that doesn’t fill people with hurt and anguish and anger. Not all the time anyway. We must stand against oppression, but there are other ways of doing that.

Perhaps I’ll come up with some kind of Web thing that facilitates the viral distribution of happiness.