Disney's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" Opening Sequence

Most Disney adaptations are eyesores compared to their source materials. Replete with fundamental story differences and childish embellishments, complete with the almost-mandatory comic-relief sidekick, it may have been a good thing they finally dissolved their traditional animation division last year.

However, elements of these adaptations do shine through the commercial money-making machine that Disney animations had become. One such masterpieces was found, I believe, in the opening sequence of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." I think it has to be one of the most powerful musical introductions I've ever seen on screen, up there with Tim Burton's "The Nightmare Before Christmas".

It's not just the style of the telling of the story in music that I enjoyed very much, but the heavy cultural themes they put in. Traditional choral elements rang heavy through the entire sequence, adulterated to good effect by Hollywood-typecast heavy instruments. What I especially liked was the choral Latin lyrics, whose meaning I discovered only after a brief Google.

Sheikh Hamza Yusuf mentions such a thing about ancient languages, how they ring in the ear and "feel" more powerful than modern languages. I completely agree, and I find such languages as Latin and Hebrew and Classical Arabic absolutely astounding in their beauty and tremendous ability to resonate with the soul, even when one barely understands what it says.

As such, I paste here, what I believe to be among the best opening musical sequences dedicated to storytelling I have ever seen. It would be through great inspiration and talent that any individual can reproduce such an effect on a listener, should one ever wish to embark upon such a task:

Clopin: 
Morning in Paris, the city awakes
To the bells of Notre Dame
The fisherman fishes, the bakerman bakes
To the bells of Notre Dame
To the big bells as loud as the thunder
To the little bells soft as a psalm
And some say the soul of the city's
The toll of the bells
The bells of Notre Dame

Listen, they're beautiful, no?
So many colors of sound, so many changing moods
Because you know, they don't ring all by themselves
- They don't? -
No, silly boy.
Up there, high, high in the dark bell tower
lives the mysterious bell ringer.
Who is this creature - Who? -
What is he? - What? -
How did he come to be there - How? -
Hush, and Clopin will tell you
It is a tale, a tale of a man and a monster.

Dark was the night when our tale was begun
On the docks near Notre Dame

Man #1: 
Shup it up, will you!

Man #2: 
We'll be spotted!

Gypsy: 
Hush, little one.

Clopin: 
Four frightened gypsies slid silently under
The docks near Notre Dame

Man #3: 
Four guilders for safe passage into Paris

Clopin: 
But a trap had been laid for the gypsies
And they gazed up in fear and alarm
At a figure whose clutches
Were iron as much as the bells

Man #4: 
Judge Claude Frollo

Clopin: 
The bells of Notre Dame

Chorus: 
Kyrie Eleison (Latin: Lord have mercy)

Clopin: 
Judge Claude Frollo longed
To purge the world
Of vice and sin

Chorus: 
Kyrie Eleison (Lord have mercy)

Clopin: 
And he saw corruption
Ev'rywhere
Except within

Frollo: 
Bring these gypsy vermin to the palace of justice

Guard: 
You there, what are you hiding?

Frollo: 
Stolen goods, no doubt. Take them from her

Clopin: 
She ran

Chorus: 
Dies irae, dies illa (Day of wrath, that day)
Solvet saeclum in favilla (Shall consume the world in ashes)
Teste David cum sibylla (As prophesied by David and the sibyl)
Quantus tremor est futurus (What trembling is to be)
Quando Judex est venturus (When the Judge is come)

Gypsy: 
Sanctuary, please give us sanctuary

Frollo: 
A baby? A monster!

Archdeacon: 
Stop!

Clopin: 
Cried the Archdeacon

Frollo: 
This is an unholy deamon.
I'm sending it back to hell, where it belongs.

Archdeacon: 
See there the innocent blood you have spilt
On the steps of Notre Dame

Frollo: 
I am guiltless. She ran, I pursued.

Archdeacon: 
Now you would add this child's blood to your guilt
On the steps of Notre Dame

Frollo: 
My conscience is clear

Archdeacon: 
You can lie to yourself and your minions
You can claim that you haven't a qualm
But you never can run from
Nor hide what you've done from the eyes
The very eyes of Notre Dame

Chorus: 
Kyrie Eleison (Lord have mercy)

Clopin: 
And for one time in his live
Of power and control

Chorus: 
Kyrie Eleison (Lord have mercy)

Clopin: 
Frollo felt a twinge of fear
For his immortal soul

Frollo: 
What must I do?

Archdeacon: 
Care for the child, and raise it as your own

Frollo: 
What? I'd be settled with this misshapen ..?
Very well. Let him live with you, in your church.

Archdeacon: 
Live here? Where?

Frollo: 
Anywhere
Just so he's kept locked away
Where no one else can see
The bell tower, perhaps
And who knows, our Lord works in mysterious ways
Even this foul creature may
Yet prove one day to be
Of use to me

Clopin: 
And Frollo gave the child a cruel name
A name that means half-formed, Quasimodo
Now here is a riddle to guess if you can
Sing the bells of Notre Dame
Who is the monster and who is the man?

Clopin and Chorus: 
Sing the bells, bells, bells, bells
Bells, bells, bells, bells
Bells of Notre Dame

A minor note: the voice of the archdeacon is actually David Ogden-Stiers. Don't remember him? Major Charles Emerson Winchester, from M*A*S*H!

"No!" to the Mechanization of Education

My nostalgia for my old school years runs very deep, reflected very poignantly by a weblog dedicated to that very topic: My Years In Choueifat. Very obvious from the contents of the weblog, my experiences there were rather traumatic. Despite this, our famous regional director, Mr. Germanos (who I renamed in that blog as Mr. Hollandos) insisted that once we went to university, we would be grateful for everything the school did for us.

I've had more than one friend who has done exactly that: they told me that everything the school did for us helped us a lot. Yes, it is true, actually, that I can recall the equation for power as a function of electric current and resistance at will, although I cannot recall to any considerable extent the fundamental concepts of the Michaelis-Menton equation from first-year Biochemistry. However, I still insist, I don't think I have the school to thank for that. No, I wouldn't thank the school at all.

There's something intrinsically learnable, if there is such a word, about a setting where a class of maximum 30 people who all know each other, sit together and put on freeze all social relations and for almost an hour, without talking to each other, sit and listen to someone draw on a blackboard and construct from scratch seminal theories of mathematics, science or whatever topic. Literally, from a blank green board, everything from Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity to allegorical analyses of Shakespeare's Macbeth comes to life.

The traditional blackboard method introduces information from a logical progression. It starts from a clean slate, and progresses as quickly as is needed to teach fundamental topics and advanced constructs in a very effective way. As such, after 2 years of university education, I am sick to death of endless powerpoint slides, ridiculously distracting speaker systems and class sizes of upwards of 350 people.

I say no to powerpoint slides, to microphones and lecture theatres with capacities of anything above 40. This impersonal and dessecated version of teaching and acquiring knowledge and information is destroying what passion there is to be had in such a pursuit. It is to downgrade ourselves from milk and meat, to the mundanity of bread and butter.

I am now moving well into the end of my second year at university, and not only do I not know any of my teachers, I know but a handful of my classmates, and I can barely remember anything I learnt in first year.

The mass-production of university graduates in my field (Life Sciences) at our university (National University of Singapore) is an unfortunate black hole into which I am now irreversibly committed. Increasingly, as time goes by, I find myself growing fonder and fonder of the thought of being under the nose of a cantankerous Chemistry teacher, ready to pounce on my illiterate self like a lioness upon her prey.

In conclusion, this reflects greatly the confusion between means and ends. These technologies are but means to serve the end of education, and there are but many means. To consign oneself without thought or hindsight to any mean is to make it an end. My school was such a one, forcing us to learn kinematics via webcast, from a teacher who was in Dubai, over the internet. I never liked it, and struggled through it, and here I find myself back in the same pit. All over again.

Stephen King: His Stories, His Success, and His Advice

Stephen King doesn't count among my popularly rated authors. In fact, he's down there with absolutely nobody else, because I enjoy the works of all the other authors I have read (except, perhaps, for Robert Jordan). Reading is more a holistic experience than a linear task. Keeping that in mind, Stephen King's wonderful stories continue to astound me in their genius, and his endings continue to incense me.

His writing style has nothing spectacular in it, he uses common parlance, which is probably a good thing, because he's a bestselling author God knows how many times. It's not usually his writing style that I have a qualm with anyway, despite its mediocrity, but his endings. I've read two of his books: The Stand, Complete and Uncut, and The Eyes of the Dragon. I have also watched three of his stories adapted to movies: The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrik, The Green Mile, directed by Frank Darabont, and Dreamcatcher, directed by Lawrence Kasdan.

Needless to say his stories are scary, and they are also very nicely developed. The Stand, all 1200 pages of which I read with great ease was a wonderfully gripping novel about a post-apocalyptic Earth (something I had been fanasizing about a lot since childhood), populated by a select but polarised (between good and evil) population that survived a genetically-enhanced disease outbreak by random selection. All the evil people go to the West Coast of the United States, and all the good people go to the East Coast (there's no point moaning about taking the United States to be the centre of the world, he's an American novelist, let's cut him some slack).

The story itself was brilliantly developed, if I may say so myself. In "The Stand," he introduces minor characters halfway through the story for several pages at a time, and then kills them in a most untimely manner, which offers a level of realism and tragedy to the whole post-apocalyptic scenario. He also develops some of the greatest and finest protagonists and anti-heroes I have come across in stories. My one qualm, however, are his endings. He seems insistent on not letting his villains die proper deaths.

Spoilers Ahead. At the end of the Stand, the story effectively ends by one of Randal Flagg's (the villain) own cronies, who happens to be a pyromaniac, blowing him up with a nuclear weapon that Flagg assigns him to find, for the final showdown with the GoodGuys. However, it seemed the ending wasn't sufficient for King, and the story terminates with a scene with Randal Flagg somewhere in the Caribbean or some African island with torn clothes, and black people worshipping him. This ridiculous and anti-climactic ending is consummated, to no good effect, with an illustration.

I figured I would give Stephen King a second chance, and so I read “The Eyes of the Dragon.” Well, what do you know? It's a villain with uncannily the same characteristics as Flagg, and again the villain does not die, but gets recycled into another realm, where the main characters go for a final showdown.

I have been informed by a Stephen King aficionado that apparently, that particular villain appears in several of Stephen King's novels, and that he plays a much grander role than what is implied in the two books of his that I read. I suppose I can respect the concept of having a character that seems to transcend between a modern-era, 20th century novel (The Stand) and a fantasy-style, almost Tolkien-esque prehistoric, mythological setting in the Eyes of the Dragon. However, to add such an ingredient into your storytelling at the expense of the finality a reader is to experience by finishing a book is not very wise.

In addition to not liking the endings of his stories, despite liking their story development, the movies adapted in his name are also sorry excuses for films. Stanley Kubrik's "The Shining" is counted among the top scariest films ever created, but I must absolutely and completely disagree. The film itself is missing something very fundamental: a story. Of course my main beef here is with Stanley Kubrik and not with Stephen King, so I will leave it at that. Dreamcatcher, another film adaptation was also a complete disappointment.

The problem I have with Stephen King is actually his talent. He has an uncanny ability at developing characters that are such marvelous pieces of fiction, you can't help but fall in love with them. The potency of his character design is so strong, I believe it blooms through, even in the sorry excuses for movies that come out in his name, like Dreamcatcher. Here is a movie with a beginning so grand, you expect something you will remember for years. Yet, by the end of the film, you find yourself lamenting the waste of 2 hours of your life to watch a story that has no deeper meaning beyond parasitic aliens killing their human hosts and crawling out of their anal pores. I find that not only unacceptable, but unforgivable!

One adaptation I find very much redeeming to Stephen King is The Green Mile, which I believe is a brilliant and touching movie about a big, seemingly mentally retarded Black slave, accused of raping and murdering two young girls. Although the message he was hitting for is somewhat lost on my Muslim psyche, the movie was well-executed, and it managed to pull the Hollywood trick of making you feel deeply for something that could be seen as somewhat superficial.

A recurring theme I find in Stephen King's books is one of holding secrets within mentally retarded people or children. In "The Shining," it was Danny, the child with his little finger friend who seemed to somehow know his father would go mad and attack him and his mother. In "The Stand," it was Thomas, who is one of the main heroes and one of the few that survive till the end, and he was completely mentally retarded. In "Dreamcatcher," it was Duddits, the one who saves the day by killing the aliens, and in "The Green Mile" it was John Coffey, the imposing gentle giant with a magical ability to heal and read minds. Quite interesting, really, but it gets old.

In any case, regardless of the misgivings I may have with his style of storytelling (and the fact that my familiarity with his works rest on two books and three movie adaptations), he is counted as probably the most successful American author in history. As such, when I came across an article titled "Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully: in Ten Minutes," I took notice.

He gives some nice pointers. The fact that his stories don't agree with me should, I guess, in no way interfere with what he perceives to be how he got where he got, since nobody can deny, he's a bestselling author.

As for me, I've given up on reading what Stephen King calls "the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries": Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Sidney Sheldon, et alii.

Home Sweet Home

An all-encompassing digital beep woke him. "Cabin crew, landing in five minutes," a muffled voice said incredibly fast. He was surprised he could understand what it said at all.

He looked at his watch: 2.30am. Rather late. Mentally, he corrected himself. No, it's only 12.30am, his watch was fast by exactly 2 hours. Ah, the wonders of the modern age, the world is round, and so it isn't the same time everywhere.

Inwardly, he thanked God for getting him this far. Two days ago, it seemed an utter impossibility that he would be here. A room, worn-in by 4 months of habitation to be packed, a set of muscles atrophied by a month of exams, unfit for physical labor to be used to carry cartons full of books to storage, and a mind ravaged by the stress of studies, to be relaxed by the imminent joy, it seemed an insurmountable task for him to have come this far. It seemed the adrenaline of possibility was made all the more potent by the inherent fear of unfulfilment of expectations harbored for so long.

Slowly, he reached under his seat to find his seat belt, as the Fasten Your Seat Belt sign went up, punctuated by a muffled beep. He looked around him. Everyone seemed tired, yet expectant. He lay back and closed his eyes; this was a cakewalk. He had done it so many times before, it had become a matter of routine.

Yet in all the 4 months between leaving and returning, this moment, as clichéd as it had become by repetition over the years, held special meaning. The feeling of anticipation was a special one, and he knew it. He opened his eyes slowly, and turned his head toward the small porthole in the cabin, his head firmly set on the headrest. He looked out at absolute blackness.

The aircraft banked to the right, and a star of artificial lights filled the view of the small porthole. Silently, he praised God, for
teaching man that which he knew not, that they may illuminate the darkness, make day of that which was night. He marveled at what he thought was humanity's greatest accomplishment and possibly its undoing: technology.

His reverie was broken by the anticipation that swelled up within him, fighting for his attention. Now is not the time to admire or introspect, now is the time to palpitate. With all his might, he tried to hold that thought, the anticipation. The expectance of something greater, the desire for something bigger overwhelmed him as he closed back his eyes and shut out the world around him. If he were given a choice to hold a moment, and to be held in that moment for the longest time, he would choose this one. The uncertainty of expectation and possibility, and the certainty of past record and experience bubbled within him, fighting for supremacy.

After what seemed a long while, the plane jumped up and down as she touched her mother's bosom; land at last! He closed his eyes again, as a man looked at him. "Look hard, dear friend," he thought to himself. "Not everyday do you see a man sleep through a landing as rough as today's." The engines went on reverse thrust, and all sense of hearing was bleached with the bass rumble of the mighty engines that propelled this steel beast that carried him across the sea. Mentally he made a note to remember this awful excuse for a pilot for landing so harshly.

A ripple of clicks filled the air as passengers unbuckled their seatbelts, almost in unison. Again, he wondered at the marvels of herd behaviour. Despite his efforts, he could never recall unbuckling his seat belt so noisily or so soon after the engines stopped the unbearable reverse-thrust, yet every time when the plane landed, he heard them. He cleared this thought from his head, inwardly chastising himself on over-analysis of the world.

The airhostess proceeded to recite the instructions pertaining to ticket reconfirmation and the decorum of staying seated until the aircraft came to a complete standstill. First in beautiful Bengali, then in mangled English.

Shortly, he noticed people standing up, retrieving their luggage from the overhead racks. He sat still. From the view outside, the aircraft was still only halfway through taxi. The terminal was a far way off according to his calculations.

A mind-numbing hour went by as he disembarked from the plane, got his passport stamped by manically depressed, disgruntled immigration officers, and retrieved his luggage. Retrieving luggage from this airport was always a charm. Yelps and screams cut through the late night air as corrupt officers told off equally corrupt laborers to go easy on the baggage, and the conveyor belt squeaked its futile squeak, unheard by whatever semblance of maintenance engineers walked the hallowed terminals of this airport.

His heart beat like the drum of a Dragon Boat, rhythmic, intense and unforgiving, as he approached the automatic doors opening up to the humid air of Bangladesh. A whiff of particulates and noxious gases from natural-gas and petrol engines assaulted his olfactory senses as he looked upon a familiar sight: his mother, craning her neck, looking right past him. She was looking for someone plumper, more clean-shaved and with shorter hair. How he loved this part.

His father recognized him, though. Being the engineer he always was, he always anticipated the longer hair and acute weight-loss. Putting the trolley aside, the boy knowingly smiled back at his father, and ambushed his mother with a bearhug before she could properly lay eyes on this sorry excuse for a man she once bore for 9 straight months so many years ago.

She protested, but he refused to let go. He looked up behind his mother where his brother stood, only one of two precious gems for siblings that he had. "Not the whole set tonight," he thought to himself, "but this will have to do…" as he praised God with every drop of his soul. He was home.

A Cowardly New World

Idex stands for International Defence Exhibition, and the United Arab Emirates hosts one such exhibition every year. This year's exhibition is said to be the largest of its kind in the world, according to this article titled "Idex is 'testimony to our capabilities'" in Gulf News. Capabilities, eh?

Capabilities, perhaps, to organize meetings after major terrorist events and beg the United States not to invade you? To stand around and scratch your beards and say "Hmm, no, don't invade Iraq, it's better if you don't..." and then let them invade anyway? Impressive!

Well, some situations are better understood if one takes into consideration the context. Well, here's the context: Curtain Falls on Shopping Festival. Yup, that sure flashes a floodlight on the issue. Smack on the dot.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world says the Arab and Muslim world lacks leadership, time and time again. It's a hard and fast rule: Muslims are a decapitated community. Refer to Link TV - Who Speaks for Islam? - with Shaykh Hamza Yusuf... - Streams. As this is discussed, editorials couldn't be more insightful!

In the editorial of 13th February, 2005, the editor, while frothing at the mouth praising General Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, says finally and once again a brilliant and prolific Arab leader, spearheading the cause of the moderate world at large, points out what nobody before has known: bringing about a solution to Palestine should put a dent into terrorism. Absolutely mind-boggling.

General Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid is famous (infamous) for hiring dirt-cheap labour from the Indian sub-continent to work on risky projects like his famed Burj Al Arab, the tallest 7-star hotel on the planet (something to boast about for the desert Arab), where worker death tolls were unacceptably high and compensation unacceptably non-existent. Yes, the same General Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid whose legendary "vision" and influence in the UAE Supreme Council oversees systematic discrimination against people of third-world origin for people of first-world origin, regardless of degree or experience ("Forget the Experience. It's the Passport that Counts!").

Untitled Short Story

This short story was adapted from Islamic Voice.com's Children's Page. The original version can be found here under the title "Charity Never Decreases a Person's Wealth."

Fareed stepped out of the mosque and recited the remembrance of departure: "O Lord, I ask You for Your favor, O Lord, guard me from Satan the Outcast," a century and a half-old tradition of the faithful.

As he put on his sandles, he saw a beggar by his car, badgering passers-by. The beggar was bald and sported a lengthy beard. He was clad in haggard and dirty attire, and Fareed wondered for a moment how he could wear such unseemly clothes. From his face, Fareed could tell the man was no more than 40, yet he was hunched over and quivering. "A professional," he thought to himself.

As he approached the car, the beggar intercepted him. "Please, my son. For the sake of God!" the beggar recited with a quivering voice. Fareed walked past without flinching, and the beggar matched him stride for stride despite his hunch and quiver.

Fareed unlocked the car and paused for a moment. As though restraining himself, with a stiff jaw he said the first thing that came into his mind: "God will provide."

On hearing this, the beggar stopped shaking. Fareed got into the car and pulled down the window for a breath of air.

The beggar frowned, his eyes downcast. He spoke softly, almost to himself: "I did not take you as my Provider. I have never denied God..." His voice trailed off.

Fareed looked at the beggar through the windshield as he backed off. The man's quivering had stopped, and from what Fareed could see, his eyes seemed dark, as deep pools of red. Fareed quickly changed gears and drove away.

The beggar stood there, motionless on the sidewalk. For many years he went about his business, but never once did he think of how his actions reflected on himself. He never questioned his faith for he never dug that deep, but upon having to assert his faith in defense, he felt a sickly sense of dishonesty in his soul, as a layer of oil on a clear pool of water. His words of defense came as mere prattling of his tongue; his heart did not resonate, and he felt an aching emptiness within. He realized then, that all his life he had taken as Lord those who were slaves. He could not honestly say that he hadn't denied God.

As the beggar stood there thinking, a little girl, minding her father's biscuit shop by the parking lot saw what happened. Digging into her pocket, she took out a dirham coin and handed it to the beggar as he passed by, walking stiffly. The beggar held the money and paused for a moment. Hints of a smile crossed his face as he put his hand on her head.

"You pay me, yet I did not ask," he said. The little girl smiled up at him. The beggar was too ashamed for prayer, but he cast concern for himself aside for once, and made a most private and hearty supplication for the girl as he turned the corner. It was his sincerest request in years.

As Fareed was about to turn into the main road, he was introspective. "I did not pay the man," he thought to himself, "because he was a professional beggar. He is young, yet he shivers with age. What hypocrisy!" He was trying to reconcile what he thought to be an awful thing to do, to refuse a beggar.

Fareed made it a point never to pay professional beggars, and he maintained this with great difficulty. He was a very sentimental and charitable young man, but he decided not to as a matter of principle, for to patronize their trade is to encourage it, and they are a hindrance and an unseemly sight, feeding on the pity of others.

Despite the cold, hard facts, he could not forget the man's eyes now, and he knew he would have trouble coming to terms with ignoring him like that. "Oh, just this once,"he thought to himself. He parked the car in front of a house by the road, and walked back to the parking lot a short distance away as he pulled out a ten-dirham note from his wallet.

When he got there, the lot was empty. The mosque too was abandoned, for prayer time was over. Soft melodies of recitations of the Qur'an emanated from within the mosque, but from without, it was desolate. His eyes came upon a little girl minding a small biscuit shop on the sidewalk.

Not willing to put the money back in his pocket once he had decided on giving it to charity, he gave the ten-dirham note to the little girl who had just paid the beggar one dirham, and quietly walked away.

An Encounter with Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad

The following is a retelling of an incident that happened in Singapore, circa August, 2003.

Everything felt different. The sites and sounds were different. The smells were different. People looked different. They dressed different, they talked different. I had an embarrassing time conversing with them, for their English was mutilated almost to a point of incomprehension.

This was Singapore. Yet among the chaos of contrast and novelty, there were glimmers of familiarity. An extremely helpful Malay Singaporean senior, and some supremely brilliant young Pakistani gentlemen, one of whom was from Sharjah; a common background at last!

So they told me a man came to Singapore. A scholar of particular eminence. It was but the second week of classes, and all the freshmen (except myself) were giddy from orientation and other such activities I chose not to partake in. I had nothing to do and was perfectly healthy, so I was game.

Rashid, a friend of my heart who hailed from Sharjah, gave me his wireless SBS transit card, which I still haven't returned. Him and Babar, a Lahore'i Pakistani senior, an astoundingly hospitable and friendly chap for whom I have only the utmost respect and praises, accompanied me. Rather, I accompanied them. We went, us merry band of Mawzlim fundamentalists to a talk at a place called Darul Arqam, somewhere in the depths of Singapore.

Darul Arqam is a place of shelter and education for Muslim converts in Singapore. It has been praised by Sheikh Nuh Keller himself, as he remarked, to the best of my memory:

"I have the utmost respect for this institution and anyone attached to it, because I can relate personally. When I became a Muslim, there was nothing like this in Los Angeles... and there still isn't."

Steps at the outer entrance lead to a glass door, revealing a grand, wooden entrance hall with a stairway at the centre leading to the second floor. Beyond the stairway were chairs and a projector screen set up at the far end; they had been anticipating a crowd of exceptional numbers. On both sides, fogged glass and wood decorated the walls.

We sat at the bottom of the stairs, us merry band. That lasted for about five minutes when we decided perhaps we could sit on the floor just ahead of the first row, not to disturb anyone else but still garner the best seats in the house. An up-close and impersonal view at a projector screen beaming a saturated, over-contrasted image, with a speaker that shrilled and shrieked.

An emaciated, tall man with a cream-colored shirt confronted us on the projector screen. I was a bit disappointed, since I thought this was going to be a "live" talk. I wanted to see a man, and it seemed I had come all this way to watch television.

He had a small goatee and was wearing a tie, along with a Muslim skull cap. It seemed a rather strange combination at first, but I thought let's give him a listen before judging his sense in fashion.

He spoke with a most refined British accent, but after getting the drift of his talk, his accent was the last thing I could pay attention to.

I have grown weary over the years of frothing-at-the-mouth scholars, their hearts riddled with hatred and bitterness, offering challenges to our "enemies" in all lands across the world, yelling into the microphone as if we were deaf, disrespecting our women and shielding their perversion behind Prophetic candidness by quoting Ahadith pertaining to matters more suited to private discussion, so I wasn't expecting much. I was, at first, reluctant to come at all, but something in me told me that I had nothing to do, so I might as well go.

My heart did not betray me that day. This man in his strange combination of skull cap, goatee and tie began speaking in Arabic. He quoted beautiful verses from the Qur'an, first in Arabic and then their on-the-spot translation. This man was learned; he knew what he was talking about, although he was clearly a white Englishman. But then he spoke Farsi. My ears shot up. He spoke of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi as insightful and intelligent. He spoke of love and of unity with the Divine. He spoke of a world I had long since forgotten, a world of both good and evil, but one of beauty and affection, amidst the sorrow and pain.

The talk ended, and my eyes were radiating with noor, such was the insight he offered. A young man with a thick Singaporean accent went on to mutilate/summarize the talk, and offer people a chance for Q&A.

"Thank you Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad..."

"What?" I said to myself. "That was Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad? The Abdul Hakim Murad? They have a videotape of him here?!"

I told Rashid that I knew of this man. I had read his writings for years now. But disctracted, Rashid lead me away. He wanted to get a better view. One of the wooden panels on the walls opened up to a very small hallway with an elevated recording studio, and then what seemed like an auditorium through a door on the right. I thought to myself, "Yet another projector, but they probably had better speakers than we did."

Rashid went in, but I stayed in the small hallway, choosing not to venture into the small auditorium, which sounded like it was packed. Someone asked a question, and Sheikh Murad answered satisfactorily, no doubt. By this point, I had totally forgotten the contents and subject matter of his talk and was trying to come to grips with the fact that the man I had been listening to for the last hour was Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad, of Cambridge University!

Just as I began to realise what had just happened, I heard Rashid on the loudspeaker. "What?" I told myself. I peered into the auditorium, and there sitting on a table, a bottle of mineral water and a glass in front of him, sat Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad, in the flesh, Rashid at the microphone, asking a really good question, no doubt.

I wouldn't know, of course, because I immediately withdrew, such was my astonishment. Biting my knuckles and suppressing a great yawp of childish fervor, I focused on coming to grips with the fact that I was almost in the same room with Sheikh Murad. Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad! I was breathing the same air he was breathing! By God in Heaven, what fate!

Fan-boy excitement coursed through me and I marveled at the experience while trying to come to grips with the facts that confronted me. "So this is what it's like to be in the presence of a celebrity!"

Viciously, I suppressed myself. "What are you doing, you pubescent fool! This is a Sheikh, not a movie star!" I stood there, in the small hallway with the adjacent recording centre, gasping for breath. I dared not look back into that auditorium and feast on the view that would be Sheikh Murad in the flesh. I did so a few times, however, while biting down on my knuckles after I withdrew, to control the fresh flow of energy that coursed through me.

He exited the auditorium into the entrance hall where we watched the video broadcast, and a bunch of Malay youth, trained in the refineries of Sufi reverence, shook and kissed his hand. I stood from a distance, shaking my friend Rashid at regular intervals when the reality of the situation dawned on me anew for the umpteenth time. He irked me to go and meet him, and offer my Salaam. But I did not, for I saw he was surrounded from every direction. I would give this brilliant man some respite from my fan fervor, which might well overwhelm all my senses of propriety should I stand in his presence, or perhaps cause my legs to give way.

Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad, whose articles I read over and over for their genius, whose URLs I passed to friends and family, whose wisdom and linguistic prowess I couldn't aspire to if I studied ten lifetimes! I was in the same building as him! It took me the entirety of the bus ride back to campus to come to terms with what had just unfolded.

Skull cap, goatee and tie indeed. Sheikh Murad can wear whatever he likes!

Education in the GCC Region

Most new states come from very humble beginnings, but they usually do have centres of learning that date back to colonial times. Whether good or bad, it does give an institute a foundation to work from, but the Middle East (i.e., GCC states: Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) doesn't seem to have many universities that date back to any time before the 70s.

One look at the Yahoo! Directory for colleges and universities in the GCC reveals a rather emaciated list of universities. All GCC states combined yield 50 entries in the Yahoo! Directory, of which 31 are in the United Arab Emirates. Bangladesh has more entries than Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Saudi Arabia combined, and Pakistan has more than all of the GCC, source of almost half of the world's oil.

Most research today is pushed forward by funding, and most institutes make their presence felt in the form of publications. Although pioneers of centuries past of most modern sciences, the Arabs have fallen behind miserably when it comes to education and knowledge, there is no question.

The universities that span the Middle East nowadays are not only immature in their age, but the majority that have been established in the past decade are focused almost entirely on the secular science of engineering. Particular attention seems to have been given to petroleum and chemical engineering, their life force, and to computer engineering, the current educational "fad." A fad in which they've also fallen behind, because the "in" thing nowadays is biotechnology. They can't even keep up with fads in the undergraduate scientific community, it seems. Nothing is given, even to the pure sciences! Not to Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry or Biology.

The disturbing trend is that not only are they doing a poor job of studying the sciences, no attention whatsoever is given to philosophy, literature or art. What courses they have in language is for vernacular Arabic to English translation, and not for academic purposes. The hospitability the Arab has been famous for over the ages is now exclusively for the Western passport holder, while his brothers wallow in poverty across Asia, their talents squandered no less than his own oil wealth. Stories remain untold, artists live unappreciated, books lay unread and forgotten, as an entire people, whose contribution was so crucial in the development of the world, remain grossly misunderstood.

They have ignored completely the broader sense of education, and have narrowed it down to a cash-machine; something in which you put money in, and after some time, it spits money back out. Everything has to be profitable in accounting terms, everything worth it's while on the calculator. Their desert frugality seems sorely misplaced.

Of Miracles and Corruption: The Indian Ocean Tsunami

Thanks to brother Pathawi, who offered his editorial insights to refine this article.

The massive tsunami in the Indian Ocean has shaken the world in more than one way. The tremendous loss of human life is literally incomprehensible. It is difficult to come to terms with one death. Extend the grief to ten, the size of a family and some close relatives. Extend it to 175,000, and the imagination is stretched to a point where it throws in the towel. The number no longer registers and media desensitization kicks in.

In these moments of grieving and sadness, shimmers of light shine upon the afflicted and the homeless. The vagaries and pettiness of politics are discarded for a brief moment, and billions in food and aid money has at least averted deaths from starvation.

And from among the rubble, fantastic tales of survival and hope emerge. From children holding on to palm trees to old men lying under rubble for days to be rescued at the eleventh hour. Though it is difficult to find consolation from these stories despite the thousands dead, these tales, marred as they are with tragedy and gloom, offer hope. It is in the apparent randomness and selectivity of fate that veterans of war, and survivors of calamities in the face of insurmountable odds, become superstitious or attribute their survival to higher forces.

But rationalism, although inadequate on its own, aids a lot in gleaning insights into the prevailing human condition during times of disaster. Consider, for example, that although ancient structures such as statues of Buddhas in Sri Lanka and mosques in Aceh remain standing, many modern structures have been swept away. Some here will argue that although some ancient structures remain, many were indeed destroyed, and although some modern structures were razed, many do stand.

That may be true, but one must pose the question: surely no ancient structure can outlast a modern structure in technical proficiency, yet there are cases where the exception in devastation is a single mosque, standing in the midst of rubble and desolation. Something is amiss.

The religious will attribute it to divine origin, and say that God is angry, and though sparing His own houses, has sent down destruction upon the astray, to teach them a lesson. But what does it all mean?

The systematic blasting of coral reefs in the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal did not mitigate in the least the tsunami’s fury. They were effectively dynamited through to allow large ships to pass and allow for the trade of scrap and clothes on which the region survives. Coral reefs, apart from being cradles of life far greater in number than the entire human race combined, have been known to alleviate the effects of tsunamis and tidal waves. The damage of this natural force was further compounded by the destruction of mangroves that used to line the coastlines, now cleared for residential areas bearing the people that so tragically perished.

What is more tragic is that Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii could not warn the countries nearest to the tsunami because bureaucracies had not yet established proper protocols for the dissemination of such information. It did, however, warn the Pacific Islands, where disaster warning systems were in place, but those regions were barely affected. Had it been a cyclone instead of a tsunami the protocols were established for Indian Ocean nations to be warned, and a warning would have been sent out. Solely because it was a tsunami, the lines were silent, and the absurdity of bureaucracy bloomed in all its glory that fateful day. If God is truly angry, perhaps we can’t quite blame Him.

The red-tape and corruption in these countries, apart from preventing warnings to come through, also causes structures to be built on flimsy foundations, not in line with proper specifications. Turkey became infamous for this, when in August of 1999 in Izmit, an earthquake killed 17,000 people. Had construction guidelines been followed, many lives would have been saved, but corrupt construction practices killed people in the thousands.

So when statues of Buddha or mosques and temples stay standing, perhaps their builders knew more about their land than we do. Perhaps they didn’t skim off the top in building materials to make a quick buck. And despite two millennia of progress, here we are, numb with grief, mourning the death of so many we can no longer comprehend the loss.

Finally, after the worst tsunami in recorded history (topped not even by the tsunami of 1400 BC that historical texts say killed 100,000), the United Nations is finally putting its foot down on the corrupt, graft-ridden, red tape-laden governments of the Indian Ocean region. A proper warning system should be up and running by June of 2006.

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events is a series of books, (11 books so far; 13 are planned all-in-all) about the Baudelaire children, three rich siblings heir to a sizeable inheritance after their parents die in a mysterious arson attack at their mansion.

The first three books of the series have been adapted by screenwriter Robert Gordon of Men In Black II fame, starring Jim Carrey as the villain, the beastly Count Olaf, a distant relative of the Baudelaires who, in the story, is an actor by profession.

The author, Lemony Snicket, is a pseudonym of Jewish author Daniel Handler. He graduated from Wesleyan University in Worchester, majoring in English and American Studies, and is now a fulltime author.

The Series of Unfortunate Events is distressingly true to its title. It is indeed, a series of extremely unfortunate events that come tumbling down ruthlessly on the Baudelaire orphans almost at a regular interval of 10 pages. Dark and depressing, important characters are brutally murdered, and the cruelty the orphans face almost brings tears to your eyes.

In an interview on sfgate.com, he says:

"I think you learn something from any good book, and I think that one's education comes largely from literature. But over and over, the message of children's books is, 'If you behave well, you'll be rewarded.' Which is not a very Jewish message. It is just not an interesting message to me, and not a true one."

"Judaism doesn't really promise any reward, they just emphasize that good behavior is more or less its own reward,"

Amid the terrible circumstances faced by the orphans, they remain tremendously resolute, never despairing and always doing the right thing. And so, Handler introduces humour in the dark and dreary context of the story, never forgetting to keep at least one sympathetic character in every book.

Handler talks to the reader in a conversational first-person tone, and describes and explains "difficult" phrases and words in the context of the story. As such, after reading the first 6 books in the series, I would suggest these books to any adult or child, because there is actually much to learn from Handler's narration.

The Chronicles of Narnia on the Silver Screen

After the sweeping success of the screen adaptation of the Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien, I learnt somewhere on the internet that the Chronicles of Narnia, by CS Lewis, were also being adapted for the silver screen. Having not been much of a reader for most of my childhood, my only experience at fantasy was Raymond E. Feist who took for his own much of the concepts introduced by the fantasy of Tolkien.

So, upon seeing a single-volume version of the Chronicles of Narnia, I immediately picked it up, without hesitation and took it with me to Bangladesh, to read over the vacation. After having read the first four books of the Chronicles, including the prequel "The Magician's Nephew," I feel that adapting these books to the silver screen should be immensely difficult.

Lewis unabashedly includes talking animals in his narration, which may be wonderful for the mind's eye but I believe quite difficult for a cinematic treatment. Whether chosen to be fully actor-driven or the more technically demanding computer graphics-driven, the talking animals of Disney will no doubt haunt whatever semblance of awe and reverence a director may try to endow upon a talking lion, Lewis's deity figure, Aslan.

Speaking of deities, I also find the religious themes quite blaring and bluntly presented, when the White Witch kills (crucifies) Aslan and Aslan rises up again (is resurrected) in "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe," and how the lion makes Shasta and his friends feel for his whiskers and nose when they disbelieve he is indeed a lion, much in the great Christian tradition of insisting on Jesus's diophysitism, his simultaneous humanity and divinity.

In addition to that, Lewis doesn't do as good a job as many of his latter-day heirs like Raymond E. Feist and Robert Jordan when relating battle scenes. His narrative, at least in "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" seemed to purposefully omit a refined treatment of the melée in the battle scenes, which left me somewhat disappointed.

The film adaptation of the Chronicles of Narnia are being undertaken by director Andrew Adamson who has both Shrek movies in his directorial resume, and the special effects are being helmed by the genius of Weta Workshop, owned by Peter Jackson and the magic behind the Lord of the Rings. Seeing the featurette they released recently on the creatures of Narnia, however, I just might give the movie a fighting chance now.

Suffering of Minorities in Bangladesh

In the December 10th issue of the Daily Star Weekend Magazine, they put up a cover story on the plight of Hindus in Muslim-majority rural Bangladesh.

"[...] the community that was subjected to merciless beating, humiliation and [continuous] persecution by a group of miscreants out to grab their land, saw no signs of empathy from the local authorities. [...] I ask her how old she is. 'Four kuri and five,' a villager chips in. This means four into twenty, plus five; which makes her 85. At this age she has enough reason to worry over the safety of her community. The land the usurpers are out to grab is the sacred cremation ground that has been a part of this village for as long as she remembers.

"[...] during the atrocious attack, the whole community found itself at the receiving end of a premeditated aggression. Some received severe beating and some ended up with near-fatal injuries. Gouri Das, around fifty, was brutally attacked. On the palm of her right hand, she bears the deep gash of being struck by a sharp weapon. There is another cut on the right side of her head. As she speaks it becomes clear that there is little she remembers of the mayhem, as she was knocked unconscious from the first few blows [...]. She does however, remember her first attacker. "It was Kader, son of Mafizuddin, who struck me on the head with a sharp weapon," she asserts. She cannot tell "who else beat her up later". As she gained consciousness, she found her sari missing.

"Hari Dasi, another 40 year-old villager, found herself in the same predicament. She was literally trampled by a bunch of men, men who knew no mercy. [...]

"The patch of land, the main cause of the atrocity, lies [beside] a pond. [...] For the Hindus of this region it is a sacred ground, as it is their final resting-place. Broken earthenware is scattered all over the ground, signs of cremation punctuated by mounds of earth, under which the remains of the dear ones are buried. [...]

"[The] girls of the Hindu community at Gopalpur village have stopped going out of the house in fear of these miscreants who openly harass them on the streets.

"Malati Rani [is] a seventeen-year-old girl. [...] Faced with the question of why she stopped going to school from which she received a stipend, Malati is hesitant. Her answer to why she quit school is short: 'they swear at me.'

"In the face of the worst attack on the Hindu community by the group of land-grabbers and their henchmen, not much has been done by the authority to mitigate the victims.

"Lakhshan recalls the previous year's incident. 'When they scooped out all the fishes out of the pond beside the cremation ground and the temple, a case was filed. Even the newspapers took it up. At first the law enforcing agency seemed very active, but soon everything died down,' laments Lakhshan.

"[...] a group of people installed a water pump to siphon out the water from the pond next to the cremation ground. The ground is only 27 acres, but it has been a source of a lot troubles since the day the land grabbers targetted it as the next piece of land for usurpation. The miscreants consisting of Lal Miah , Ibrahim, Jahangir, Kader, Mojibor, Zohurul, Ziaur, Malek [and] Hashem [...]. There was a string of women who stood in a circle, guarding the water pump. When the people of the community rushed to put a stop to the siphoning, one of the men said, 'charaler po (son of a commoner), don't cross the limit; if you do, we will file a case for repression against women and will throw you out of this country.'

"They waved off the threats [...]. 'If we cannot protect our own religion what's the use in keeping on living. This small patch of land has been our cremation ground, it has been so since the time of our ancestors.'

"What followed after that was something no one from Subhash's community ever anticipated. The band of men, who installed the water pump and were trying to siphon the pond, rushed toward the paddy field, where they kept their weapons hidden. Armed with machete, sticks and lances, they swooped on the community that had little protection from the authority, let alone any influential group or men.

"The invading men went looking for women and children. They scrambled inside their houses. They beat them up, slashed them and plundered their homes [...].

"Sixty-five families have categorically being victimised by this 'land-grabbing clique.' It is more a case of wresting properties from the weak than of religious persecution. As Hindus of the locality are the weakest, they keep losing their lands to aggressors who reign the localities with their muscle as well as social and political clout. This is the reality of Bangladesh, and the village of Gopalpur is no exception."

I find little solace in recognising this as not so much a religious issue as it is merely an issue of victimisation because of one's locus on some pecking order. If being weak is tantamount to welcoming oppression, then we are no better than animals.

Bangladesh's human rights records has plumetted in the past few years and chronic lawlessness fanned by gusts of misrule and irresponsibility has become the law of the land.

All of the names of the perpetrators were Muslim names.

"Do not oppress and do not be oppressed."

- The Prophet Mohammed, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him.

Patriotism and Objectivity

The Daily Star has done it again! Some time in October, I stumbled across a "Letter to the Editor" on the main page of the Daily Star, a newspaper I check daily (except during Eid, because, hear this, the newspaper stops publishing during Eid! Wow, only in Bangladesh).

In this very interesting "Letter to the Editor," a man laments the "international conspiracies" hatched against Bangladesh, one such accusation levelled at Bangladesh that basically says Bangladesh is "Asia's most dysfunctional country." I believe he was referring to Time magazine's infamous article, "State of Disgrace." Although, I think the article was a bit harsh, I think it hits the mark close enough.

Rather vexed by the argument that patriotism dictates being blinded to realities that may be harsh, I wrote a reply, which I thought never got published. But apparently, it did, and I discovered it in the Daily Star's archives just tonight! Almost a month after they published it!

"In response to Md Shahidul Islam's letter to the Editor on 27 October, I couldn't help but chip in my opinion on this matter of patriotism and reality.

"I believe the common man should make it a point not to believe in "conspiracies" like the "international conspiracies" Md. Shahidul Islam quotes to "stop [Bangladesh's] progress." It is extremely naive to think that in this world, with problems as deep as looming water shortages, global warming, energy crises, genocide and wars initiated for purely political and economic ends, anybody would care about a small country in South Asia that most people have never heard of. It is indeed true that truth is stranger than fiction, and on most occasions, conspiracies are very easily mistaken for stupidity. The two are divided by a very fine line. The harsh reality about Bangladesh is that nobody really cares what happens in this far corner of the world, and no international conspiracy is out to get us. Disregarding the vast majority of our politicians that come from the lowest crust of our society and academy, if notable intellectuals say something, it's time to listen. If intellectuals say Bangladesh is a den of terrorism, it's time to give the situation a look.

"People, however learned, are always subject to their ego [sic], and it is possible that some intellectuals are known for their verbosity and over-emphasis, the academic equivalent of making a mountain out of a mole hill. As such, I would agree that to say Bangladesh is a den of terrorism like, say, Afghanistan was, is libellous. But to say that our patriotism dictates that such a claim, or any other claim that potentially reflects on our nation negatively, is an international conspiracy to hamper the progress of a fledgling, immature democracy, is no less than sheer denial.

"The fact that our bureaucracy is viciously corrupt is undeniable. Whether we are the world's most corrupt is debatable, but the fact that corruption is a part of life is as true as the sun rises from the East.

"To be patriotic is admirable. To be blind to your own mistakes is blameworthy and will harm nobody but yourself."

In response to my response, another fellow wrote a Letter to the Editor.

Maybe I should write a reply.

So much for my Blog Hiatus.

The Tech Support Generation

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6522314/site/newsweek/

"Next week, millions of college students and young professionals will head home for the [...] holidays. We’ll sit with our families in warm, [...] dining rooms [...], reminiscing over old photographs, [...] and … Please. Let’s be frank. We are going home to fix our parents' computers."

"We are the Tech-Support Generation. Our job is to troubleshoot the complex but imperfect technology that befuddle mom and dad, veterans of the rotary phone, the record player and the black-and-white cabinet television set."

"For our parents, the lingo is foreign and indecipherable. IP address? Why should they even have to know what that means? The worst part is that they know it should and can work—if they can just crack the alien code. When they can’t get it to work, they make preposterous compromises they never would accept with a new car or household appliance."

Story of my life.

Blog Hiatus

I'm on Blog Hiatus until the 27th of November.

Sheikh Zayed Expires

Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'oon.

Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan, 33-year ruler of the United Arab Emirates, my birthplace, passed away yesterday.

Whatever the merits or demerits of his rule, this unlettered Yemeni has made his mark in history.

Osama, The Return

As the new Osama bin Laden tape appears just in time for the US elections in 2004 and the repercussions of such a tape being spoken primarily in the election context, insurgents in Iraq are growing bolder, and rasher.

The spate of kidnappings is getting worse with every subsequent headline. What is strange, however, that the kidnappings don't make much sense. By kidnapping an Irishwoman that lived and worked in Iraq for so many years as a humanitarian and married an Iraqi, I have no clue what they hope to achieve except enrage their own brothers.

Now, they have kidnapped a man from the world's third most populous Muslim country, Bangladesh. 42-year-old Abul Kashem, along with a Dinesh Rajaratnam of Sri Lanka, were kidnapped last week, though kidnappers are still strangely silent on their demands.

I think the general trend of declining popularity of the terrorists and insurgents should only be accelerated by recent events.

Osama bin Laden has enjoyed popularity, to a limited extent (and, I believe, now waning), in countries like Pakistan and most of the Arab states. The insurgents, however never got as much screentime as Osama, and so never had much of a chance to garner a following among the simpleton Muslims of the world. Whatever caliber of adoration they may have had to start with, it can only be declining considering their lowly tactics and sheer lack of taste.

The popularity of these groups should be severely declining in the Arab and other Muslim states. Moderate Muslims have always condemned the Wahhabi attitute of indiscriminate killing, but now I daresay even the Wahhabis are starting to get a little unnerved.

Bangladesh has a strong Saudi-backed Wahhabi movement. All fundamentalist issues in Bangladesh arise from Al Qaeda, the standard-bearer of Wahhabi fundamentalist activism while the Saudis fund fertile hatching grounds for Al Qaeda in their mosques and numerous madrasahs.

I've seen the kidnappings in a revolting light, always. But I'm wondering what the fundamentalists in Bangladesh, once open backers, now cornered into latent support of Osama bin Laden because of the success of the liberal Bangladeshi media, are thinking now.

There are several ways to look at it, I imagine. Al Qaeda doesn't depend so chiefly on popularity per se on their activities. No doubt, as a lethal activist movement, they're not out to win any popularity contests, but their main source of manpower is from the madrasahs that they fund in and around the Muslim world who are not subject to the opinions of the educated and opinionated middle-class.

With as much open negative publicity they're getting by kidnapping and killing what the normal man would perceive as standard, everyday people, not even sparing Muslims, their recruitment grounds, I would imagine, should be growing thin.

I wouldn't be so brash as to think that the end of Al Qaeda is anywhere on the horizon because of negative Western publicity. The Wahhabis have tremedously powerful machines of propaganda. I do find it difficult to imagine with all that has been happening with car bombs killing Iraqi civilians and tales of grizzly night-time murders of rookie Iraqi policemen splattered in the front news, how they can possibly enjoy any support at all, even from within.

Anybody that still supports Osama bin Laden, after he made the strongest references to his involvement in the September 11th attacks in his recent tape, must be ill in some form or another.

The days of conspiracy theories are over.

Afghans in Middle Earth

http://www.gulf-news.com/Articles/World2.asp?ArticleID=137659

"A New Zealand court was considering whether to order two Muslim women to remove their burqa veils when they testify in a fraud case an issue that has sparked a debate about how much immigrants should change to fit into society here."

"The two, both Afghan [...] refugees, have refused to remove their all-encompassing burqas in court while giving evidence for the prosecution."

"But defence lawyers have insisted on seeing their faces when they testify, saying 'we need to see the body language' of witnesses."

"If the women are ordered to remove their veils and they refuse, they could be held in contempt of court and face penalties that include imprisonment."

"Defence lawyer Colin Amery told the radio station that people who come from outside New Zealand 'cannot expect to impose an alien culture, clothes and so on, upon a system of law which has always had openness,' [...] adding that migrants when in Rome (must) do as the Romans.'"

Boy, do I hate that phrase.

The loyalty of these women is admirable, Masha Allah, and understandable that the superior thing to do is to fight for what one believes in, that it is superior to cover the face as was the practice, although the face does not qualify by Sacred Law as awrah (part of the body that must be covered for basic decency). However, to say that one would be in trouble with God for taking off the niqab would be incorrect, since traditional Hanafi jurists (Afghans are primarily Hanafis) have said that maintaining niqab is difficult in the West and there is no blame in removing it.

However, the women are confronted with a situation of conditioning, just like normal people. Not used to exposing their faces in front of men, they have grown accustomed to the personal freedom that they perceive in being covered from head to toe, not dissimilar to the personal freedom other women feel by not covering.

This judgemental attitude of believing oneself to be "open" and another to be "closed" must be abandoned. All societies have norms and unwritten restrictions that are easily circumvented over time. That the Muslims choose to document them to preserve their perception of decency is, if anything, to their credit. Since "open" Western culture chooses not to have any such standardized moral code, they are open to integrate foreign elements of culture and norms, and by taking in refugees and immigrants, must be prepared to handle these elements in a manner that is mutually beneficial.

These immigrants come from distant and foreign lands where they grew up, and have known nothing else. They leave behind their families and possessions not out of will but out of need. A more compassionate and understanding stance needs to be taken, to reason with them and help them integrate rather than cornering them by judging them for being different and impoverished.

Like most immigrants, they have much to offer.

The Arab Problem: A Fear of Expression?

According to Youssef M. Ibrahim, a former correspondent for the New York Times now residing in Dubai and writing for UAE-based Gulf News, the biggest "gene" in the Arab psyche is fear of expression.

After reading his article, I saw a little advertisement where the Gulf News asked for responses from readers, albeit crippled (understandably) to only a hundred words. And so I wrote the following:

"Mr. Yousef is mistaken. First, he states the Arab problem is fear. This is wrong, it is ignorance and complacency. Second, he mentions 'hordes of enemies [...] poised at the gates.' I see no enemy but the Arab himself.

In addition, he calls for "reform" of "what is left" of Arab civilization. I cannot differ more. Islam, the standard-bearer of Arab civilization for more than a millenium thrives at full bloom, and needs no reformation, but a wholesale abandonment of "reformation," namely Wahhabism.

Finally, his statement that the US is a robust democracy is highly debateable; the candidates are as different as Coke and Pepsi, and it has the lowest and most class-skewed voter turnout of any Western democracy."

I summarized Mr. Youssef's arguments and put in my thoughts on the ones I found most pertinent within the 100-word limit. But I had much more to say.

Indeed, the Arab problem is not fear of expression. After living in the United Arab Emirates for the first eighteen years of my life, most of the Imaratis I ever met had little to express. Limited in their faculties of expression and thinking, the few that were intellectually inclined gave their loyalty wholesale to the dictator Sheikh Zayed, regardless of his numerous wrongs and misdeeds, simply because he was, I quote, "a good leader."

The intellectuals who had the courage to be vociferous were summarily silenced, but their primary audience and source material during their short tenures were expatriates, "foreigners" like myself.

I refuse to believe the Arab problem is fear of expression. The expression, for the few who have the taste for it, is there. Like I mentioned in my feedback, it's ignorance and complacency. They are vastly ignorant of their rights and the rights of others by common human standards, and unforgiveably complacent with their wealth. The vast majority of Imaratis are whole-heartedly fond of Sheikh Zayed, and those that are dissatisfied (and trust me, there are) are few and far between.

Youssef M. Ibrahim says:

"It even affects expatriates and visitors who come and go, so much that many of the foreigners who live among us in this Arab world become a version of Lawrence of Arabia, striving to be more Arab than the Arabs."

I have absolutely no idea where Mr. Ibrahim draws this conclusion from. The heart of Arabia in which T. E. Lawrence lived was primitive, barbaric and had little or no foreigners in them. Lawrence went to Arabia because his passion was Arabia.

Today, Arabs are no longer primitive, endowed with as much technology as money can buy, and their governments are barbaric only when nobody is looking. Modern Arab culture is exclusive and grossly adulterated by "Counter Strike" and "Friends," only "open" to Westerners, who enjoy a cup of Qahwah, sitting uncomfortably in a tent considering the possibility of a belly-dancer.

People like my family, educated professionals from Muslim India, lived there for 26 years without the name of a single local Arab family we were close with, and children of the United Arab Emirates like me and my brothers, learn Arabic and discover Islam only after leaving our desert abodes.

Society in the United Arab Emirates exists in pockets, each pocket neatly containing a single ethnicity. Arabic is not popularized as a language and no effort made to make it a more widely used. The language of taxi drivers is what goes, effectively Urdu or what forms of it exist from the majority Afghan taxi drivers. Arabs themselves take to learning Urdu, as is widely seen in places like Dubai, where marketability has a higher premium than in oil-rich, laid-back Abu Dhabi where I grew up.

There is no drive for integration whatsoever, and I have not seen any such versions of T.E. Lawrence in my time.

He then says:

"Hordes of enemies are poised at the gates, and huge internal pressure for change lies within."

By enemies, I can only infer countries like the United States, and the specific case of Iraq, as he himself mentions later in the article.

I see no enemy in the United States. The only enemy I perceive is the Arab himself. Endowed with wealth beyond imagining for over half a century, he has accomplished little but his own destruction, alienation and abandonment of his brothers in Palestine and consummate moral and spiritual impotence, that a vicious secularist and murderer as Saddam enjoyed popular support among the Arabs before the Americans swooped in on him.

I daresay, the enemy the Arab faces is much more menacing than any father of civilian carpet-bombing, or any Daisy-cutter that fell upon the innocents of Iraq.

"And if we cannot reform what is left of Arab civilisation will evaporate making place for a new agenda set by someone else."

The mindset of "If it doesn't work, reform it" has become so deep-rooted, that all other possibilities (like returning to a millenium of successful, pluralist tradition) is ruled out. This comes from a desire to be accepted not through integration, but through assimilation. The only "reform" I can visualize is the undisputed import of unlimited democracy where the will of the mob rules all, and unlimited freedom of speech, both unlimitedly Western in their inception and application.

Reform has been the bane of the Muslims, inciting violence and murder within the pluralist Muslims of old. Reform is not the solution, but revival.

In conclusion, despite the harsh poverties facing not only Arabs, but all Muslims alike, we must maintain the Prophetic tradition of optimism; no matter what "agenda set by someoene else" should befall us, we are fully aware of Who has set the Ultimate Agenda.

"Airport Wahhabis"

Stephen Schwartz is a Jewish writer and journalist. He is a vociferous opponent of Wahhabi fundamentalism (and many other things). The following passage reminded me of one of Ahmed Deedat's talks where Sheikh Deedat mentioned so-called Saudi "petrodollars."

"The vast mafia of princely parasites, over some 70 years, further exacerbated the clash between Wahhabi claims of fundamentalist puritanism and the real character of their rule. Previously known for mixing religious piety and political opportunism, the Saudis introduced the new and even more outrageous problem of their private immorality. The Saudi aristocracy would become known as 'Airport Wahhabis'--once their private jets left the runways, bottles of whisky appeared, women's veils disappeared, and a high time was had by all. The 'Saudi oil prince' became an unparalleled symbol of debauchery, ostentation, and waste, as well as ignorance, prejudice, and brutality. Expenditures to clothe and bejewel their women, indulge in their children, build and decorate their palaces, and otherwise satisfy their appetities became legendary. Their tastes led them to taverns, casinos, brothels, and similar establishments. They bought fleets of automobiles, private jets, and yachts the size of warships. They invested in valuable Western art they did not understand or like and which often offended the sensitivies of the Wahhabi clerics. [...] Yet at the same time, they dedicated a large portion of their wealth to the promotion of international Wahhabi radicalism, in a desperate attempt to bridge the gulf between pretense and reality.

"How was it that the grotesque duplicity of the Saudi regime--fostering official puritanism and unofficial degeneracy, proclaiming loyalty to Islam while rooting out its traditions, and agitating for the wholesale destruction of Israel while proclaiming loyalty to the United States--was ignored for so long by Western leaders and public opinion?"

- Schwartz, Stephen. The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror. Doubleday, 2002.

US Presidential Debates, 2004: Points to Note

I'm glad they only plan three presidential debates and not more. The repetitiveness really gets to you toward the end. The same points were repeated over and over again: 95% of crates uninspected (why doesn't anybody do anything about that, Kerry's said it on public television like four times already), 75% of Al Qaida brought to justice (Bush was smart enough to actually paraphrase that to "three quarters;" hats off to his trainers), 90% of the cost of the war borne by American taxpayers, Kerry's consistent inconsistency, X-ray the cargo but not the cargo hold (any airport authority people listening?), 125,000 Iraqis trained, spread "freedom" and "liberty," et cetera.

A few points to note. First and foremost, Dubya improved markedly on the second and third debates. I bet he had to do a lot of homework for it, but he did a good job. The first debate was a joke, I think he was surprised John Kerry actually opposed him. He had a look on his face that spelled "Is this guy with me or against me?" But he improved in the second and third debates. He even used a long word in the third debate: he said the word "exaggeration," albeit after a dramatic (no doubt preparatory) pause. It's a miracle he didn't get a standing ovation from the audience that very moment, though I suppose the audience agreed to stay silent (where's the fun in that?).

Secondly, I don't know about other viewers, but Dubya's smirking was getting decidedly vexatious as the debate wore on. I have no clue what it is he finds semi-humorous enough to get him to smirk through the entire debate. I tried doing it myself, and I figured if I kept this up, I'd get face cramps by the first half hour.

At one point during the third debate, the questioner asked the President about homosexuality. He asked whether he thought it was a matter of choice or birth. George W. Bush's answer was a good one: he didn't know. His ambivalence reflects that of the scientific community, where definitive evidence for a genetic basis to homosexuality is yet to be found.

When John Kerry was asked about it, he mentioned Dick Cheney's daughter as a strong "it is a matter of birth" response. I winced when he did that, because I didn't think taking Cheney's daughter's name was a wise thing to do. Of course, that's just me and my naivete. The truth is the Cheney's have used their daughter to show their "compassionate conservative" outlook during their campaign for a while now. Although George W. Bush didn't mention anything about it after John Kerry made his response, there has been a public outcry after the debate.

I don't think anybody's going to raise the issue that George W. Bush didn't mention anything during the debate. Now, Dubya's come up with an official position on it. I don't see why he didn't make it clear during the debate, I'm sure many people would have liked that. I think this is a case in point: Dubya's plain slow. He's the pretty little doll, the ever-smirking simpleton. If anything needs a response, you can count on his speech-writers to include that in his next speech, or his trainers to teach him to make the point at a later date, but saying something on his own? Nuh-uh. This matches with Paul O'Neil's vicious indictment of the President's complete lack of participation in cabinet meetings.

One more point to note. Considering how much of a mess the United States is in, or any country for that matter, the sheer enormity of such a responsibility, how can anyone actually campaign for such a job? I wouldn't want such a job even if people begged me to take it and I knew I had the ability to carry it out properly.

In conclusion, I'd like to say that Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" was the highlight of these debates. I found myself intently looking forward to the 5-minute video clips they put up at their website after every debate. Jon Stewart, the host, is an absolute riot. It's a shame we don't have these back in Bangladesh. We have much more material than the Americans do.

Which reminds me of one of Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad's "Religion & Ethics: Thought for the Day" that the BBC features. In his 8th July entry, he reminds us that jokesters offer a "healthy disillusionment [of] institutions that have grown cruel, or complacent, or corrupt."

As Sheikh Murad puts it, "by pulling our legs, they keep us on our toes."

An Encounter With Dr. Douglas Osheroff

It’s a very refreshing experience to meet great people every once in a while. Sheikh Nuh says in his talks that the soul thirsts for wisdom, and good company.

I had the opportunity of observing a Nobel Laureate today, a Dr. Douglas Osheroff. His autobiography can be found here. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1996, sharing it with three other colleagues for the discovery of superfluidity in Helium-3, whatever that means.

Dr. Osheroff came off as an archetypical sweet, old man. Slightly hunched over, grasping the arms of the sofa he was sitting on, he spoke in a low, consonant voice and placed the quips flawlessly to keep the students involved. I suppose Americans are generally well-known for their easy-going attitude, a tendency to not take things too seriously and tremendous sense of humour. However, I particularly liked his insistence on humility.

Upfront, he said that he was not looking for the discovery that lead to the Nobel Prize, and maintained that most scientists that get Nobel Prizes are just ordinary people. Perhaps as consolation, he opined that although Stanford is home to about seventeen Nobel Laureates, it endows no particular advantage on an educational institution to excel. Obviously he was addressing the scientific community’s (and my university’s, no doubt) collective ambition for the Nobel Prize or some such appellation of achievement; I share no such ambition.

Side Note: Too many professors I have seen are quite taken by the concept of the Nobel Prize. One such Organic Chemistry professor of mine insisted on mentioning something of the Nobel Prize in almost every lecture, having had a Laureate as his supervisor during his postgrad at Harvard.

However, reading his autobiography where he talks candidly of his academic troubles, watching an interview and hearing him talk up-close and personal, it is truly gratifying to see people with the instinctive insight to insist on humility and not looking at oneself as above others.

Rethinking the Solutions, Revisited

The Daily Star is Bangladesh’s premiere English language daily. It runs a website which it updates daily and has archives as far back as November 2001. This website is at the top of my list when I want the lowdown on what goes down in and around Bangladesh.

It hosts, from my perception, an above average array of patrons of the sciences, with frequent op-eds that come from some of the more intellectually inclined from among our educated middle and upper classes.

One such piece caught my eye the other day, a rather detailed essay on long-term solutions to the floods in Bangladesh by a Dr. Nazrul Islam. My previous blog entry, “Rethink the Solutions,” was partially inspired by his latter piece on October 2nd, though after blogging, I discovered the Daily Star’s archives and dug up his article from August 10th and the opposing article on August 13th, both of which he refers to.

They make for some interesting reading, and so the links are here for reference in order of appearance:

1. A Permanent Solution to the Floods, by Dr. Nazrul Islam, August 10th 2004
   
2. Permanent Solution to Flood: Point to ponder, br Engr. Amirul Hussain, August 13th 2004
   
3. Cordon Approach or Open Approach?, by. Dr. Nazrul Islam, October 2nd 2004
   

At the time of writing my October 2nd blog entry, I wasn’t familiar with Dr. Islam’s complete opinion. Though after reading the entire chain of articles, I find a startling similarity between the approach of Dr. Islam and Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad’s article on the Turkish earthquakes.

Rethink The Solutions

On September 13th 2004, the capital city of Dhaka was completely inundated after a 72-hour splurge of torrential rain. One of Asia’s megacities, for three days thereafter, came to a grinding halt, and the centre of the economy of a nation of more than 120 million people was shut down.

The rainwater inundated 25 of WASA’s water pumps, used to pump water out of the city, rendering them unserviceable. The remaining pumps were ineffective anyway, as the heavy winds that accompanied the rain took down the power lines servicing them. As Mother Nature’s attack, seemingly engineered for the suffering of her inhabitants, withdrew, and the city officially at a stop, rickhsaw pullers were charging exorbitant rates for trafficking passengers because of the increase in demand, businesses were forced to close down and drinking water became scarce as 10 million souls in and around Dhaka, bewildered, wondered if God had no decency, sending down such untold suffering only weeks after the “official” floods receded.

It is too simplistic to say that the natural disasters God sends at us are divine punishment. However, we pave the way for our own suffering, by divorcing ourselves from the land and from ourselves, unleashing the forces of nature, long held at bay by our connection and realization of the realities in which we live.

The world exists as a play between the attributes of the Divine. The Compassionate, The Merciful and the Gentle also appears as the Overwhelming, the Just and the Avenger. Thus the world is a play of darkness and light, of joy and hardships and of celebration and mourning.

It is a strange thing to witness that after so many years of thriving civilization in the low-lying delta lands now known as Bangladesh, only with the advent of the promises of “modern technology” do floods cause suffering to more people.

As Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad so eloquently puts it, modernity serves but one idol: money. What is termed today as “progress,” serves neither the people nor the realities of the land, but dedicates itself wholesale to the outward semblance of the corporal world.

As Dhaka grows horizontally and vertically without rest or restriction, already-impotent city authorities are being pushed to the blinding edge. Their incompetence, indulgence in bribery and corruption, short-sightedness and complete disregard of their responsibilities are destroying one of the world’s largest cities.

The concrete monstrosities that have mushroomed in modern-day Dhaka are partly to blame. An inflated indicator of economic progress, many of these ill-constructed, badly maintained and sometimes abandoned structures are built on former water bodies that served as buffer storage for the sudden deluge of rainwater that hits randomly. These high-capacity structures also put a tremendous strain on a neglected low-capacity sewage and power distribution system that the authorities just cannot be bothered to cope with.

But we all know this. The news regurgitates these reasons every day. Where, then lies the solution? A thousand-kilometre coastal barrier along the shores of the Bay of Bengal? I believed Bangladesh missed an immense opportunity at being a miracle of modern innovation by reverting wholesale and without thought to the architecture of her former European masters.

The "modern" outlook of infrastructure in Bangladesh should be completely abandoned and the traditional solutions brought back to the fore. The roads that line Bangladesh's countryside and run shamelessly through what used to be rivers should all be dismantled, and the nation put on a program to regenerate the rivers, ultimately to be reinstated as the primary mode of locomotion through the country. A new industry of research, development, innovation and ingenuity should be built from the ground up for these vehicles. Major roads such as those that run between Chittagong, Dhaka, Khulna and other major cities should remain intact, but remodeled to allow rivers to do their job.

Dhaka and other major cities should be cordoned off, their limits set and the city authorities should set up long-term plans for raising these cities to the skies if they need to expand outside their generous boundaries. Major cities should be modeled after the villages, dotted with ponds and lakes that the villagers know are excellent storage for excess rainwater, and sections of the city should be leveled and gardens planted to improve the water uptake of the soil that is essential to ground water regeneration. All areas within city bounds should be landscaped to allow water to run off into these water bodies and parks, that have the capacity to store the excess rainwater.

If corruption was erradicated, funding even these ambitious projects would become much less of a problem. International aid has always been ready, but our politicians don't have the credibility to make our case. International organizations like the World Bank come in, sanction multi-billion dollar projects modeled after the solutions they used in wherever, by foreign engineers who have never lived in the country, that know nothing of the realities of Bangladesh and spend a lot of money churning up good, God-given soil only to be hit harder by the floods the next year. The politicians don't mind, because they get a healthy 10% of the aid and several hundreds of thousands of taka in bribes from local contractors who need the contracts. Overpaid foreign specialists are brought in, that siphon most of the aid money back with their luxurious salaries as engineering graduates from our most prestigious institutes loiter unemployed and after wallowing for years, take their brilliance to a foreign land. This vicious cycle must end.

Our people stand at a crossroads. We can either choose to realize the realities in which we live and mend our ways, or we can continue on the path to perdition, in which case natural disasters are just the beginning. The world’s climate is changing, and Bangladesh will be among the first nations to be swallowed by the sea. Radical solutions are needed. We must do something.

Decision 2004, Reprinted

The following is an article by the owner of this blog, from The Ridge, the official NUS campus magazine. It appeared in the October 2004 issue.

The 2004 US presidential election promises to be among the more interesting ones in recent history. As its status as the world’s sole superpower grows as a result of a series of unilateral aggressions against sovereign states (with debatable results, necessity and international support), American politics is becoming more and more relevant to those abroad.

How It Works

Contrary to popular belief, public opinion in the United States is not split into two neat halves. The great American electorate actually breaks down into thirds. Incumbent George W. Bush controls a third on the right, challenger John F. Kerry controls a third on the left, and then we have the centre, called swing-voters, who do not hold loyalties to either party. It is the swing-voters that John F. Kerry and George W. Bush are trying to woo, and it is the swing-voters that ultimately decide who the president will be. They constitute a mere 10% of the electorate.

The centre has been behind the incumbent for the large part of George W. Bush’s 4-year tenure. They supported him during his invasion of Afghanistan soon after the attacks of September 11th, 2001 and they largely supported his alarmist and grossly misinformed arguments for an invasion of Iraq.

American casualties in Iraq, however, have crossed the 4-digit boundary to a thousand and are still going strong. Pictures of Abu Ghraib haunt the American military’s reputation. With Bush’s tax cuts explicitly favoring the rich, a larger proportion of the 200-billion-dollar cheque for the war in Iraq comes from the middle class, and only two years after a record budget surplus the nation has the largest budget deficit in history.

With parameters such as these surpassing psychologically important levels, and an increasingly critical media brought to shame for its reproachfully biased dissemination of the administration’s pitch for war in early 2003, George W. Bush should have something to worry about when appealing to the votes of the centre swing-voters.

The Race

Bush’s continued competitiveness, and near lead, in public opinion polls, however, comes to show exactly how ambivalent the public is. Though not too keen on Bush, swingers do not seems too keen on Kerry either.

Bush’s lead on Massachusetts Senator Kerry owes heavily to his publicized persona as an established wartime president and Kerry’s fundamental disadvantages as a “waffler.” Only two senators throughout American history have actually gone on to become presidents. Senators have to pass many votes for and against bills of similar themes under different circumstances and these public records can be used with remarkable effectiveness to challenge a contender’s decisiveness and credibility.

In addition, re-election bids are more of a referendum on the incumbent’s performance in the past 4 years than an election. It is more of a decision as to whether or not the incumbent has done things well enough rather than a 50-50 choice, so the election is essentially Kerry’s to lose.

A Bipartisan Farce

American foreign policy as of late has shifted toward “pre-emptive strikes” and “regime change.” It insists on both safety at home and touts the noble cause of (selectively) endowing democracy abroad to those under the yoke of tyranny. Despite the noble rhetoric, America has the lowest and most class-skewed voter turnout among any Western democracy.

Tens of millions of voters regularly abstain from presidential elections, with a less than 50% voter turnout in 2000. The class gap is marked, with only 40% of eligible citizens in families with incomes of less than $15,000 voting, compared to 76% of families with incomes of more than $75,000 during the 1996 elections. The gap is projected to have increased in subsequent elections.

A significant portion of potential voters (and ultimate abstainers) in America look at bipartisan politics very skeptically. The Democrats and the Republicans, to them, is much like Coke and Pepsi; same product, different packaging. Their skepticism also owes itself to the fact that American politics revolves largely around big business. Six out of ten of Bush’s major campaign contributors are financial firms, and Kerry fares no better.

Noam Chomsky rather harshly contends that democracy in America “is to be construed as the right to choose among commodities.” Chomsky, a professor of linguistics at MIT and notable intellectual, maintains that real issues such as the economy and jobs are pushed to the background, and superficial vagaries such as “qualities,” “leadership” and “personality” are brought into the fore to marginalize the public and transfer decision-making to “unaccountable private power systems,” a “virtual Senate” of private investors and lenders.

Exploitation of a Tragedy

The Republican campaign insists that September 11th 2001 changed the face of the world forever. As such, only an experienced “wartime” president would be fit for the role, or else, as Dick Cheney stated on September 7th 2004 to reporters in Iowa, America could be hit again.

The attacks on September 11th 2001 were carried out on American soil, and represented a level of creativity not imagined possible by terrorists. Yet, according to their own investigations, the attacks were in planning for years before their near-flawless execution. It marked the beginning of a “War on Terror,” though it being dubious at best to declare war on an abstract noun.

America’s over-emphasis on terrorism has become a sickness of sorts among politicians and bureaucrats around the world. When questioned with the possibility of negotiations with the terrorists of the Russian Interior Ministry’s Beslan bungle on September 6th, 2004 Vladimir Putin cited the possibility of the United States negotiating with Bin Laden. To leverage the severity of the crisis, links to Al Qaeda were mentioned, which have since been discredited. Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al Faisal called Al Qaeda attacks on Saudi soil on May 12th 2003 “our 9/11.” Former New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani perversely stipulated August 30th 2004 that the nation owes it to the victims of 9/11 to re-elect George W. Bush.

When foreign and domestic politicians use a tragedy shamelessly and repeatedly to push their own agenda, it no longer becomes a tragedy. It becomes a marketing tool. The Republican insistence on a “new world” based on the gruesome events of September the 11th 2001 and the follow-up scare tactics are a masterful execution of the first rule of thumb in politics: when in trouble, change the topic.

The election next November can go either way, but both ways are similar enough in terms of foreign policy (most relevant to us) to cause worry. As the United States continues to dominate the world political and military scene, the chances of the common man coming under its thumb continue to increase. Despite the great freedoms endowed by the defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allies almost 60 years ago, the subversion of public awareness and exploitation of the media threatens the fabric of free society and the right to self-governance, and ultimately undermines international law as has now become painfully apparent. From this side of the ocean, however, all we can do is watch.