Islam

The top ten thinkers in the world today are Muslims!

In a poll conducted by Prospect, a British magazine, of a hundred of the world’s top thinkers, the top ten were Muslims. Alhamdulillah! This is especially surprising considering the poll was jointly hosted by Foreign Policy, a US publication. Of course, the value of such a poll is dubious when proven intellectual frauds like Ayaan Hirsi Ali make the top 20 ahead of he likes of Vaclav Havel, Niall Ferguson and even the spineless apostate Salman Rushdie.

Still, it’s great to see Muslims on top, ousting rabid right-wing wannabes like Christopher Hitchens - who once was left-wing, but having never outlived or outclassed Gore Vidal, resorted to the journalism of convenience and dipped his nib in the vitriolic ink of hypocrisy and hatred that represents the majority of the West’s Islamophobic media machinery today.

So here we have it, the top ten, led by a guy I’ve never heard of…

1. Fethullah Gulen
2. Muhammad Yunus
3. Yusuf al-Qaradawi
4. Orhan Pamuk
5. Aitzaz Ahsan
6. Amr Khaled
7. Abdolkarim Soroush
8. Tariq Ramadan
9. Mahmood Mamdani
10. Shirin Ebadi

Nice especially to see two of my favourite Islamic writers in that list. (I won’t tell you who they are). Two of that list are also Nobel laureates. Interesting things happening in Turkey these days and I don’t just mean their football team reaching the semi-finals of Euro 2008, though I must confess to having cheered loudly when they equalised against the prematurely euphoric Croatia.

Oh by the way, no Qadianis in the top 100. Funny that. I tried to think of a solitary Qadiani thinker. I failed. You see, they don’t think. Because if they did, they wouldn’t be Qadiani anymore now, would they?

I can’t remember the last time I saw something on television that was so breathtakingly beautiful, so sensitively written and scored so poignantly that it often brought tears to my eyes through its sheer power and shocking juxtapositions.

In one scene, the 11-year-old white girl, the subject of the programme, walks in on her mother being banged by her errant, no-good father. Her mother sees her, but drunk, continues. The girl, Leia, betrayed, picks up a toy and goes to the bathroom to make wudu, then prays in her mother’s bedroom. The mother returns, walks across her praying daughter and slumps to the bed in a stupour, crushing the toy.

It’s on BBC2 and worth the whole year’s licence fee alone.

I don’t think I’ve seen anything this powerful in years and not just because it’s about Muslims, because really, it’s not. It’s about child abuse and the way a child seeks refuge in the most unpredictable things. For all of these reasons and more, it’s quite possibly one of the most powerful pieces of British television I’ve ever seen.

I have been trying to return my phone to T-Mobile for some time. It’s one of those MDA Vario II things with the slidey-outy-keyboard. Since last January, it’s made it possible for me to type out SMS without having to discard my quarter-century worth of typing experience in favour of a stupid teenager-oriented system. It also makes multi-part SMS and email a whole lot easier.

I’m not writing a commercial for this expensive toy, I’m writing about why I can’t return it. It has faults. The phone is awful. I fail to get signal in Oxford Circus and Bond Street. Can you imagine my facial expression right now? Ugly, isn’t it?

I can’t get 3G signal, or any kind of data connection sitting still in Grosvenor Square. You might ask why a Suspect Paki would be doing trying to get a 3G signal near the American Embassy. I was actually trying to work out the quickest walking route to the nearest mosque (the one in Mayfair) using Google Maps Mobile Edition. (I’m not really making this sound less incriminating, am I?)

The scroll-wheel jumps in the opposite direction randomly, intermittently and in varying amounts, which makes it about as useful as a heart surgeon with delirium tremens. The vibration feature sometimes takes a holiday without letting the boss know (I’m the boss) - and the latest joy, the keyboard doesn’t always listen to me, which is really rather insulting. I can understand why people don’t listen to me, but when devices play dumb (hold on…they are dumb) I get really cross.

These problems have been mounting and recently finally came to a head today, when I bit the bullet and decided to call the OTT cheery-by-script people at T-Mobile, who practically insist on calling you by your first name, even when they can’t pronounce it.

Having done absolutely nothing other than verify my number (it’s the one I’m calling from, the one you see on your screen, the one with the account allocated against it active for 14 years, shit-for-brains), they finally take two minutes to say goodbye, wishing you a wonderful life, a Happy New Year, a successful marriage and bon voyage. Just hang up the bloody phone already!

So I want to return the device.

Only I can’t. I made the rather dumb decision of insisting on synchronisation of my Windows Pocket PC phone with my Mac. Apple say it’s possible, pointing me to Mark/Space who sold me the software to do it. Only, it doesn’t sync everything. Most importantly, it doesn’t sync my SMS messages.

At this point, people around the world are losing their connection with me and falling asleep through a complete lack of empathy. That’s because most people don’t keep their texts. Not the way I do any way. You might be wondering why I don’t save the important ones to my SIM card? I do, but with around 6000+ of them, a lot of them multi-part, I run out of SIM space rather quickly.

6000+ text messages. Why? Well I love to keep all the texts my eldest sends. There are thousands. Even her missed call texts I keep. My kids are my life. Older readers know what I’m talking about. Let’s leave it at that for now.

Mark/Space promised that their Missing Sync software would do the job for me with version 4. I upgraded and paid them what they wanted for the second time

It didn’t work. I tried maybe half a dozen or more beta versions of their software after upgrading to version 4, simply for this single feature. I wasted my money and my time. It has never worked and I doubt it will ever work. I finally ran out of patience. Many ran out of patience far sooner than me.

If you have a Mac, please do yourself a favour and avoid using a Windows Pocket PC or Smartphone device if you’re going to let the Missing Sync software anywhere near it. It freezes a lot, can’t be bothered to sync half the time and most annoyingly, doesn’t do SMS properly. When it works, it does a good job of the contacts, address book, diary and other such simple stuff. It pretended to to music and photo, but never was reliable enough or flexible enough.

Having finally lost my patience, I also lost my integrity. I sold myself to the dark side. Opening a quarantined browser window, just in case, the hunt for PC backup software began. (Cue Psycho violin stabs)

I came across Sprite Backup and for once, the demo version of some seemingly useful software appeared not to be crippled. I read everything I could on it and even dropped the guys at Sprite an email. (They had been attempting to steer my down a web-based contact form, which employed a pet hate of mine - the insistence on user account creation before you are allowed to even contact them. There is nothing about this crime in shari`ah, but I would propose the same punishment as for theft.)

I took the chance and made a couple of backups. It appeared to make a full backup of the phone’s memory. The next step was to restore. This seemed to freeze half way through. I panicked because my phone was now empty, everything had gone and I was already imagining the type of swearing I would employ in my email to Sprite. I calmed down and realised that it hadn’t crashed, it was just taking its sweet time.

On the third attempt (I cancelled the first two), I let it continue. Three hours later, there was a perfectly restored phone.

Tomorrow, my phone goes back to T-Mobile. Thanks to the people at Sprite in New Zealand, I will be able to get my phone fixed, safe in the knowledge that on the replacement, I will still have the messages my beloved daughters sent me.

Friday the 12th of October is عيد الفطر (`Eid al Fitr)

So to all my readers, of all religions, I would like to extend my greetings of عيد مبارك (`Eid Mubaarak)

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.