Now I write most of my blogs here: http://fakhriworld.wordpress.com

=================================================

It is my first Eid-ul-Adha outside of India. I look back in reminiscence. In India, a guy adjusts his Topi before going to the masjid, and a girl looks on. I think she likes the necklace.

Thank you Scott Adams.

(There is more gloating here)

Cycling down the meadow show,
As my imaginations flow,
The past seems so here and now,
The heart feels at liberty.

In the past is beautiful even a crow,
The black crow and white snow.
And purple flower the winds blow,
The colorful dots of eternity.

An unknown lass sings and grows,
Blossoming youth,say to freedom hello.
She wants to cross yet her heart says no,
Cherishing her newfound sensuality.

The scented morning and an afterglow,
Inhaling the whole universe as I go,
To me lover nature did bestow,
-an intoxicating shot of cupidity.

————————————————–

Franz Kafka was a german writer who is known to have highlighted,nay, brought to light, no no, epitomised,immortalised a new language to bring about the irony of life. I am not talking about some new script or a new grammar, but the language within the language, a unique style which bears his imprint. I will not go on about Kafka ; there is enough material spread in the internet about his life and works.

I have read just one short story written by him– The Metamorphosis. And it has left a deep impact on my mind. Again I would not review his short story here for goodness sake. You can find it in the net. And it is highly recommended.

Well, that was the preface. Let me come to the real issue. I wanted to describe the grim,dark,punitive,highly demanding IIT[Indian Institute of Technology] system and was not getting the exact word to describe it until ‘Kafkaesque’ flashed into my mind (hence the long preface about Kafka). This is what the system is.And the professors? Well, I have a perfect expression to describe them–”wont to schadenfreude”. I will have to learn German to describe my institute, since it seems that the model for my institute was made keeping german language in view. Now, to all those who do not know IIT- and as a result I am highly offended that you do not know about my almamater, nay a brand, no no , an iconic brand, a name to be reckoned with, a brand that produced such great stalwarts in IT/VC world as Vinod Khosla[co-founder of Sun microsystem], Rajat Gupta[former MD of McKinsey & Co. worldwide],Neeraj Kayal[Godel Prize winner],Narendra Karmakar[who revolutionised computational LP], RaghuramRajan[Chief Economist IMF], Nandan Nilekani[co-founder of Infosys Technologies] and many many more, the list goes endless.

Since, they all come from the same institute[MY institute] first guess would be that it is the institute which will have something to contribute. Actually it does have something to contribute, but in a more convoluted way than you can imagine. First thing– even to enter IIT you need to pass a gruelling and highly competitive test,aka ‘survival of the fittest’.Hence when you enter here you are already hardened up and by sheer effort[some call it talent] you have become creme de la creme of the country. Two– they put you under so much pressure, so much pressure that you either fool yourself into a delusion that you are having so much fun here(thats what most of the IITians boast of to others) or just get into a spiral of metaphysical pain(first option is better).And when you finally pass out( I do not mean ‘faint) you feel SO liberated and so confident after surviving such oppressive concentration camp that you think that the world is your oyester- you can survive anything, you can make anything work. And more often than not it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Add to that the load of expectation that you carry on your shoulders. You GOTTA do something big.

So where was I? Actually nowhere, I was just rambling(as usual).

There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.

–Franz Kafka

PS: Actually I would say ‘fear’ and ‘laziness’ , and these are the key reasons why humanity is filled with so many zeroes in history.

PS: The cartoons above are our friend Scott Adams singing praise of IIT[hee hee, Narcissus anyone?] in his famous comic strip Dilbert.

PS: Kafkaesque–Marked by surreal distortion and often a sense of impending danger: “Kafkaesque fantasies of the impassive interrogation, the false trial, the confiscated passport… haunt his innocence” (New Yorker).

PS: Schadenfreude– Pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others.

Note: This was an old post written over here: link

lets say for example take the first page of the book- Rich Dad Poor Dad.In the first page there is NOTHING which you can take home as a lesson. The writer is just weaving a web to tell his story. There are no lessons in there. Likewise, most of the paragraphs are sparse in new information for you to process. Mostly they give a background or say something which you already know. That’s why I have impatience reading each and every page of a book(unless, of-course, it is technical in nature).

Apart from new concepts the book may throw in some names ,terms or jargon for you to google.For example I came to know about the term financial intelligence from the book to google and also Peter Lynch.

Other writings are just the same, except for this blog which is packed with new information for you puny brain and each and every word is golden.

So what exactly you plan to do? As for me- I plan to first do:

1)What I haven’t done yet.

And then do:

2) What no one has done yet.

Hmm…now that sounds good!

http://www.muslimwakeup.com/main/archives/2006/12/copenhagen_shar.php#more

Full article by Mona Eltahawy:

Copenhagen Sharia Conference Celebrates “Heresy”

By Mona Eltahawy

COPENHAGEN – This summer at the end of a day-long conference in Copenhagen on freedom of expression in the Arab world a young man with slightly faltering Arabic asked to speak to me.

“Would you give me one example of why freedom of expression and democracy are good things?” he asked after introducing himself as Abdel-Hamid. He apologized for what he described as his basic Arabic, explaining that he was born and raised in Denmark to Arab parents.

At first I thought his question was a joke. The other conference speakers and I had spent hours explaining how the sorry lack of freedom of expression had harmed Arab civil society. And surely as a Dane he appreciated the democracy and freedoms he enjoyed?

“No, really, tell me,” he persisted. “Democracy is the rule of the people. Islam is the rule of the Sharia. So what’s good about democracy and freedom of expression?”

When I realized he was serious – and when I began to see the direction his argument was heading – I dragged out my usual defense to his line of thinking: whose version of Sharia, I asked him? Iran? Turkey? Saudi Arabia? Egypt, my country of birth?

“The Sharia of God,” he adamantly replied.

“There is no such thing,” I told Abdel-Hamid.

That was essentially the message at another conference that took me back to Copenhagen in November at which speaker after speaker bemoaned the Muslim fundamentalist reduction of Sharia to a set of laws.

It has become fashionable among radical Muslims in the West to long for the application of Sharia. Abdel-Hamid, my summer Copenhagen interlocutor and adherent to the idea that there was only one kind of Sharia – that of God -, identified himself as a member of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, the radical Islamist group that wants to reestablish the Caliphate and does not believe Islam is compatible with democracy.

In many parts of the Muslim world, what the State has deemed Islamic is slapped with the label “Sharia”. So when a murderer or a drug dealer is beheaded in Saudi Arabia, it is ostensibly out of adherence to Sharia.

When a dictator or a regime feels the need to burnish their Islamic credentials – often at a time of growing radical Muslim opposition – they make their country’s legislation “more Islamic”. Take Pakistan’s late President General. Zia ul-Haq who in 1979 introduced the Hudood Ordinances, notorious not so much for making Pakistan “more Islamic” but for punishing rather than protecting women who have been raped.
Under the Hudood Ordinances, a rape victim had to produce four male witnesses to prove the crime or face the possibility of prosecution for adultery. President Gen. Pervez Musharraf on Dec. 1 signed into law an amendment to the controversial rape statute to make it easier to prosecute sexual assault cases. Thousands of Islamists gathered at separate events throughout Pakistan to protest the changes.

One has to wonder what kind of Islam those protestors follow and how it came to be so shamefully reduced to an obsession over sex and women.

As the Associated Press reported, under the new law, called the Protection of Women Bill, judges can choose whether a rape case should be tried in a criminal court – where the four-witness rule would not apply – or under the old Islamic law, i.e. the Hudood Ordinance.

And that is exactly the lie at the heart of the calls for Sharia. Why are there criminal courts in which the old Islamic law does not apply? In many Muslim countries, the justice system has been modernized and has adopted either Roman or Napoleonic law, with the exception of one area which stubbornly remains caught in the cobweb of edicts issued by Muslim scholars who lived centuries ago – family law. In other words, in many Muslim countries Sharia is used only to govern the lives of women and children with regards to marriage, divorce and custody of children.

How refreshing therefore it was to hear Emory University law professor Abdullahi An-Nai’m point out that lie at the heart of the calls for Sharia by saying it was essentially an attempt to “protect a patriarchal system by calling it Sharia”.

“I need a secular state to be the kind of Muslim I need to be,” he told the conference.

As Egyptian liberal Muslim scholar Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid noted, “Sharia” these days means nothing more than the “haram” (forbidden) and the “halal” (permissible).

The definition of Sharia as law is based on 500 verses of the Quran, Abu Zeid reminded us – that is just 16 percent of the Quran.

It was a relief to hear Abdel-Hamid’s adamant theory debunked in his own city – and how I wish he was there to hear. But more importantly, Abu Zeid, An-Nai’m and their fellow speakers were crafting the instruments by which all of the Muslims who were present could take the Sharia argument apart.

In a climate of growing right-wing anti-Muslim rhetoric, particularly in Europe, some in the Muslim community find it difficult to stand up to radical Islamist posturing on Sharia. Such hesitation is often based on a mix of reluctance to openly criticize fellow Muslims – so as to not contribute to a further demonization of Muslims – and ignorance as to exactly what the word Sharia means and what the concept entails.

The conference, called “Sharia in a modern context”, was organized by Democratic Muslims, a liberal Muslim group that was launched as an alternative to the voices of radical imams in Denmark during the controversy that surrounded publication of cartoons featuring Prophet Mohammed in Jyllands-Posten.

If the talks given by each speaker represented the tools which we could use to dismantle the Sharia argument, then the lives of the speakers themselves were the starkest examples of the danger of Islamist ideology run amok.

None of the speakers lives in his country of birth. That is a sad testament to the dangerously conservative environment in many Muslim countries today. But the speakers’ presence at the conference and at the various western universities where they teach were testaments to their courage and determination to continue their fearless work.

Abu Zeid, Ibn Rushd Chair of Humanism and Islam at the University of Leiden in The Netherlands, is former Professor of Arabic literature at Cairo University. In 1995 a Cairo appeals court sided with Muslim fundamentalists who raised a case to demand Abu Zeid divorce his wife on the ground of his alleged apostasy. The fundamentalists accused Abu Zeid of apostasy because of his liberal theories on Islam.
The day the appeals court issued its verdict, I was a correspondent with Reuters News Agency in Cairo. I clearly remember typing an urgent bulletin announcing the verdict while thinking it was time to buy a one-way ticket out of my country.

After the court’s verdict against Abu Zeid, Ayman al-Zawahri – who is today al-Qaeda’s number two but in 1995 was head of the Egyptian terrorist group Islamic Jihad – called for the scholar’s murder. Abu Zeid and his wife, fellow academic Ibtihal Younes, left for The Netherlands where they have lived and taught since.
An-Nai’m, an internationally recognized scholar of Islam and human rights, and Mohamed Mahmoud, who teaches comparative religion at Tufts University in Boston, were both students of Sudanese Muslim reformer Mahmoud Taha who was publicly executed for his liberal views by then President Jaafar Nimeri whose introduction of Sharia was opposed by Taha.

Bassam Tibi, a Syrian-born German political scientist who is Professor of International Relations in Goettingen, received a death threat in Karachi when he told a conference that Sharia was not divine.

His points were particularly pertinent to a Europe increasingly struggling with ways to react to radical Islamists. While lamenting European governments’ habit of turning to the most conservative in the Muslim community to speak on its behalf he vowed “In the name of multiculturalism I will not accept cultural rights as a cover for Sharia”.

“I believe in Sharia as morality not as state law,” he said. “I am not willing to shut up about human rights abuses by Islamists just because of the right wing. They are my enemy too.”

“Islamophobia is the weapon of Islamists to silence critics. I do not believe Europe will become Islamist – that is the fantasy of both Islamists and the right wing,” Tibi said. “Are European Muslims committed to democracy or political Islam and Sharia? The debate should take place in Europe.”

One of the best ways to stimulate such a debate is to highlight the views of the scholars who spoke at the conference both within the Muslim community and outside it.

It is imperative that non-Muslims hear the vigorous debates that are taking place between Muslims over controversial issues such as Sharia. The argument between Abdel-Hamid and me is the best proof that Muslim thought is not monolithic.

How representative are we? That is the question most often asked of those of us who call ourselves liberal Muslims. I will let An-Nai’m and Abu Zeid reply:

“Is my voice the minority or the majority? That is a value judgment,”An-Nai’m said. “The question instead should be is my voice loud enough? Islamists blow themselves up and they make the news. My lecture on human rights doesn’t make the news.”

“Islamic transformation is underway,” he added. “My view is demographically representative of the majority of Muslims but it is not very loud……Who defines what Islam is? Islam is what Muslims make of it. Heresy? I celebrate heresy.”

Abu Zeid simply asked “Who said reformation comes out of the majority?”

“We shouldn’t be ashamed of being the minority,” he added. “Mohammed and his people were a minority at first.”

And if you’re wondering what example I gave to prove to Abdel-Hamid that democracy and freedom of expression were good things, all I had to do was point to him and say “you are my proof”.

Hizb-ut-Tahrir is banned in most Muslims countries whereas in Denmark the organization is legal and operates openly.

Mona Eltahawy is a New York-based commentator and an international lecturer on Arab and Muslim issues. Her website is at www.monaeltahawy.com. This first appeared on www.saudidebate.com

All of them have their value. But just now I am rooting for a blog which can be categorised into something like-” blogs which you love to hate but can’t exactly pinpoint why”. Now, that is something. It is the same blog which might call you a pig or a retard. Things which should theoretically offend you. But interestingly you find those interesting. And you come again and again to the blog even though you know that the blogger is a big brag and is going to call you a retard in some way or the other; in-fact you are very much expecting it in bubbling anticipation .

It won’t take much time to figure out which blog I am referring to and who is the blogger I am talking about. If you can’t figure out then me in my all wise knowledge would enlighten your puny intellect in my next post.

Some of you may wonder, how me an Indian and he a Turkish might look alike. Well, it is a bit irksome to explain each time that India has got the most varied gene pool in the world. Hence, Indians can look like ANYBODY. Africans, Caucasians, Arabs, and yes Turkish. Not that I look Turkish, but I may look like someone who is Turkish.What exactly that means? Think about it.

When you think about a typical Indian guy for example, what do you picture? Well, you picture ONE individual[or a small bunch of individuals] whom YOU think might pass as Indians. Human brain can’t process so many faces at once, hence inevitably you think about one , two or at max 3 individuals in some hazy detail. And if a sample is presented to you you may pass him on as an Indian or NOT an Indian[ although it might be easy to tell who is an Indian, it is very difficult to say who is NOT an Indian(figure that out what it means)]. Ok, now let us begin the exercise, take an African an a French. What do they have in common? Both of them have a nose, two eyes, two ears,a pair of lips etc. I mean you can see enough similarity in them to class them in one group say against a group of pigs or hens. Now, there are some differences like skin colour, eye colour, shape of the nose, texture of hair[or absence of it]. Those subtle differences are what make them different. Now take two Africans, of course you can distinguish between the two Africans, even though they lie in the same class as Africans. But now, if you take a group of Africans against a group of French, the differences become even more subtle[an abstract quality in facial features arises if you take groups]. The more varied groups you club together, the features become more and more abstract and diluted. Say you can take an African , and say Africans have flat noses. Now, if there is an African who has a straight nose then is he not an African?

Complexity increases to another level if you take a person who is racially mixed. And the complexity increases even more rapidly if you take a bunch of people with a large gene pool . Here come the Indians. Now someone like me who is not only a member of a large community with a large gene pool, but who is also ethnically mixed down the line- theoretically he can look like ANYONE.

Ok, so there you get the hint. I can look like someone who is a Turk.;-)

There you go.