The religious scams …

This one is going to be a bit of a circular reference :p Funky Dung posted an entry where he linked to a post made by me and in going back and reading his entry, I came across the Apostates of Islam.

When I first read the site, I was like, "OK, this seems to be by Muslims who’ve gotten tired of all the negativity attached to Islam at the moment". I didn’t agree with their viewpoint but everybody is free to make their own choices, right? 🙂 The reason I didn’t agree with their viewpoint was because if you give up your religion just because people have misconceptions about it and because there are people in your own religion who don’t understand what the religion is all about, then it just means that you didn’t have enough faith or didn’t truly understand your religion either. However, religion is all about faith and you should follow the path that you truly believe in.

But then, I saw the link that the Apostates of Islam posted for Muslims. When I went to this page and read what they had to say, my conception of this site changed rather dramatically – but probably not in the way the site owners intended it to :p This site is certainly not created by "former" Muslims. In fact, I don’t believe any Muslims had any hand in the site at all. If they did, then they are as equally ignorant of Islam as the terrorists whom they claim to abhor. The site is basically religious propaganda :p It starts with a twist on a Quranic verse which is supposed to cleverly reveal to Muslims how wrong Islam is. If the Muslim is uninformed, then perhaps it will have effect. The verse they quote is from Surah At Taubah – verse 5. This verse is supposed to indicate that Muslims are supposed to kill non-believers at every opportunity.

The fact that most people ignore, either conveniently or out of ignorance, is that every Quranic verse was revealed for a specific event or under some context. This particular verse gives some of the context if you read from verse 1 – instead of just taking verse 5. It says that there was a peace treaty between the Muslims and the Mushriks (pagans) of Makkah. This treaty was violated by the Mushriks of Makkah. A period of four months was given to the Mushriks of Makkah to make amends. Then comes verse 5 about killing of disbelievers, which pertains to only a particular period when the disbelievers had rejected a treaty. To draw this particular event out and to say that you are supposed to kill all non-believers for all eternity is just plain ridiculous. But then again, as P. T. Barnum never said, "there is a sucker born every minute" and the Apostates of Islam, amongst others, seems to be simply trying to draw the newborns in :p

The problem is not with Islam, or with any other religion in the world. The problem is with humanity. We find it easier to wallow in ignorance, in prejudice, in hatred and in bigotry than to actual think for ourselves or to understand our fellow human beings. So if anybody ever wants to start an Apostates of Humanity site, then sign me right up … but then again, maybe not … I’d rather try to change humanity than to leave humanity behind :p

Is it the people?

I hardly ever go out anymore. Before I was married and before I got my current job, I had to meet a lot more people every day. There were people that I had to interact with at work, people I had to meet in the course of work, family get togethers and what not over the weekends and so on. Most of the work stuff dropped off once I got my current job and because of my marriage, we also moved away from the family circle – because we live on our own. Due to the nature of my work (I work remotely for a web hosting company), I don’t have the same schedule as everybody else here. I work over the weekend here and so the usual chances of mingling and meeting other people is greatly lessened. In fact, there are times that Laurie and I go a whole week without seeing anybody else :p This period probably would get extended even more if we didn’t have to go out to buy groceries.

So what has this got to do with anything else? Well, the fact is that every time we go out, I get headaches. Sometimes they are fairly mild but sometimes they can get to be rather intense. Now we’d been over to my parents’ place two days running this weekend (and then had to go out and meet other people with them) due to stuff going on at their end and now I have a doozy of a headache. It makes me wonder – is it all the people who give me a headache? Am I just allergic to people? :p Or maybe it’s just the complications involved in dealing with people that gives me a headache? At home, there are no complications – we understand each other and can (usually) tell each other what we think. But when you go out, you have to worry about how to phrase something diplomatically, how to make sure that feathers don’t get ruffled, try to figure out what people are "actually" saying as opposed to what their words mean and so on. Dealing with people is a rather complicated subject and I’m not certain that I take too well towards having to jump through all these hoops :p Is this what gives me a headache? I don’t know …

Cartoons and chaos

I have been staying away from commenting on this issue because I don’t believe I can be totally objective in my commentary. My religion is close to my heart and while I would try to be objective in my commentary, I can’t be a 100% certain that I was totally and completely objective in what I said. However, I went to mosque yesterday for Friday prayers and the sermon included references to the whole cartoon row and I must say that I totally disagreed with some of the comments by the Imam of the day and felt I had to write this here just so that there are opinions to the contrary – opinions which hopefully present a more balanced view.

Firstly, one of the tenets I believe Muslims should live by are words straight from the Qur’an – specifically Surah Al Kafiroon.The verses basically say, "you believe what you believe and I/we believe what we believe, you have your path and I/we have my/our path". This, to me at least, is one of the central rules of guidance for Muslims – both in dealing with others of different faith as well as other Muslims who decide to take a different path. We cannot try to enforce our ways, our beliefs on others nor does God want us to. Faith, any faith, is about belief – it might be belief in God, belief in an afterlife, belief in rebirth, belief that there is nothing after death but it is about some form of belief. This belief is personal to us. So why would we go worrying about what others say or do regarding our beliefs? Their beliefs (and actions) are theirs. Unless they forcibly try to stop us from believing what we believe or somehow try to coerce us into believing what they believe, what they do should not have any impact on what we believe. We should, as Muslims (and human beings), learn to co-exist with those of other beliefs because none of us will ever believe the same thing – even amongst Muslims, you have differences in belief. So why cry about the differences in belief that somebody else has?

Yesterday’s sermon started with something good. About the fact that yesterday, the 10th day of the first month according to the Islamic calendar, was a holy day for Muslims, Christians and Jews alike. Now I don’t know if this still is the case – this particular incident which was related was from the prophet’s (PBUH) time. At that time, both Christians and Jews had fasted on this day because that was the day Moses had led the children of Israel out of Egypt and defeated the forces of Pharaoh. This again illustrated something that I strongly believe in – whether Muslims, Christians or Jews, we believe in the same God We all believe in the God of Moses, so unless there were three separate Moseses, we believe in the same God! So whether it’s prophet Mohammed (PBUH) or Jesus or Moses getting caricatured, we should be equally offended. (Yes, I realize that there are other issues in the case of a depiction of the prophet (PBUH) but again, that falls under your beliefs/my beliefs).

Where the preacher diverged from Islamic tenets, (in my opinion of course) was when he started with such a good foundation and then went on to say that we should do what we can to oppose those who publish the cartoons by boycotting their goods. If he’d built upon what he’d started, said that we all follow the same God and that while there might be those who might do stupid things either for the sake of publicity, stirring things up or simply because they believe they are doing the right thing, that what we had to keep in mind was that our faith was ours and that we couldn’t force anybody else to believe what we did, I would have agreed wholeheartedly with him. But he didn’t say that. In a way, I’m glad that Islam does not have a clergy – because probably a lot more people would have blindly accepted what he said because he was "authority" if we’d had a clergy.

As far as I’m concerned, Muslims have three God given things that dictate our path – the Qur’an, the prophet’s (PBUH) hadeeth and our brains. We should try to interpret the first two using the last and decide our course of action instead of being told by somebody else what is right and what is wrong. If we all learned to do that, we’d have far fewer problems from Muslims as a group both within the Muslim community and outside. But again, being human, I am not sure we’ll ever get there …

When people care …

A few weeks ago, I talked about how people seemed to care only about money sometimes and not about the things that mattered. If you rant about the bad, you must also talk about the good 🙂 During the last few days, I had some very positive experiences with people who cared as well, so let me share.

I had gone to Soft Interface’s site a while back because I was interested in their Diff Doc software which does a great job at comparing two Word documents and letting you merge the changes. There are other such software around but Diff Doc is probably one of the more cheaper solutions and they do a great job. Unfortunately, the price tag of $400 was a bit too much for me since I don’t do any professional work using Word. I simply use Word to write my stories and Diff Doc was great for comparing changes between two versions of my manuscripts. Now if I had a writing contract and making money, I would have had no problems with paying the $400 but since $400 is more than a lot of people make a month here, I just couldn’t afford to. A few days ago, I received an e-mail from Soft Interface’s Allen Segall and he wanted to know if there was anything they could do to interest me in purchasing Diff Doc. I told him the situation and told him that if it had been about $50, I would have bought it immediately. Allen came right back and told me that they could drop the price down by $300 for me! To be honest, I was stunned. Not many people would care enough about a potential customer to do that. Of course, the price was still too high for me and I can’t afford to go for it but I still like how nice they were.

Then there is Eugene over at Add-in Express. I’d written a Word macro recently that would highlight often used (and misused) words and phrases as an aid to writers. The macro was a bit clunky to use since it didn’t have a nice user interface or anything. So I was looking around for a way to turn the macro into a nice user-friendly add-in when I came across the Delphi Add-in Express component. It was just what I was looking for! I wrote to Add-in Express and asked them if there was a possibility of getting a free copy to use in a freeware tool. I heard back from Eugene a couple of days later and he gave me a license, for free! For a piece of software which sells for at least $150!

These are just a few of the good people I’ve run into. There are more. There’s the nice folks at ElevateSoft, Addictive Software and WP Tools who have also been kind enough to donate software. Then there are people like Joana, Mary and Gino Sion who have been kind enough to agree to do covers for my book. These people are doing these things out of the goodness of their hearts, because they are genuinely nice people. So while I might rant about there not being enough care in the world, I do acknowledge that there still *is* care in the world – care for something other than money 🙂

Are we free to talk?

The freedoms that we enjoy, they sometimes confuse me :p People say, "I have freedom of speech, I can say what I want". And I guess this is right. But what exactly does the freedom of speech entail? What are the boundaries? What can you say and what can’t you say? I guess the general answer would be, "there are no boundaries, you can say whatever you want!" But is this correct?

The whole idea of "free speech" is a veritable minefield as far as I’m concerned. If you insult somebody because you believe what you say is right, you’d think it’s freedom of speech. The other person might think of it as a mortal insult punishable by a beating. Take the same situation, but you don’t believe in what you say – you say it just so that you can annoy the other person. But you’d still be covered by freedom of speech … or would you? How far exactly does freedom of speech go? Can you say anything you want about anybody you want just because you are free to say it?

This is the question which perplexes me. And if you aren’t free to say whatever you want, who judges what you are allowed to say? The government? Your neighbour? The collective opinion of the "people"? Who is to say that any of these people are right in their censorship? Can anybody be entrusted with deciding what can be said and what cannot be said by somebody else? I am not so sure they can.

So freedom of speech has its drawbacks and censorship certainly is not desirable. What are we left with? We can try to impose a (theoretical) code of conduct on freedom of speech such as, "Say what you honestly believe and do not say something that you wouldn’t want said against you!" (I’m just thinking aloud here). Would that work? You know it won’t :p You can honestly believe, based on evidence that seems irrefutable to you, that your neighbour is a litterbug and you might say so out loud and clear. Unknown to you, the littering might be done by another person who wants to implicate your neighbour. Was your exercise of your freedom of speech justified?

Yes, I know I’m simplifying the issue :p Rabid proponents of freedom of speech might say anything ranging from "You speaking out against the perceived littering by your neighbour opens the room for dialog to find the real culprit" to "It’s your freedom to say your neighbour is a litterbug and it’s his freedom to deny it or to call you a name!". Mind you, I’m neither for nor against freedom of speech. I just want to understand how it is supposed to work without it actually being abused – intentionally or unintentionally. For the life of me, I can’t really see it working – not with humans the way they are. Now if we were rational, ethical, non-impulsive creatures, perhaps … but that’s just too much to ask for :p

Certainties and attitudes

Americans, not saying all Americans mind you, seem to be very certain that they know and use the English language better than anybody else :p Maybe this perception comes from the fact that most of the English speakers that you meet are from the US than any other English speaking country but still, the impression remains.

For instance, I had an American teacher in the ’90s. She was here in Sri Lanka for a year on a project. The place where we were studying, was set up to teach English and other skills to Sri Lankan students. I believe I’m being objective (but are we ever when we talk about ourselves? :p) when I say that my knowledge of English was at least on par with theirs. (So what was I doing there then? That’s a different story :p) Some of the other teachers accepted the fact that I knew English as well as they did and would even acknowledge the fact. But there was this one teacher who would not even consider the fact that her knowledge might be deficient. One particular instance that springs to mind is the word "rune". During a classroom discussion about something, I used the word "rune" and she said there was no such word. I, of course, knew better :p So I brought the word up again in a different class later, she again flatly refused to believe that there was such a word and even dismissed the very thought of checking up to see if there was such a word.

Recently, I got another comment, again from an American, who thought that I was looking words up in the thesaurus and inserting them into my writing because the word usage was different from what she was used to. Of course the usage was different! My writing’s closer to the British style (though a lot of Americanisms do creep in :p) because in Sri Lanka we are still learn English "the way the British do" (that’s actually common misconception – I believe Sri Lankan English and British English diverged paths a long time ago too .. but still the spelling and certain forms of usage is closer to the Brits than to the Americans). But to get back on track, this person totally dismissed the possibility that there might be other usages for a word or phrase than she was used to.

Is this just an American trait? I don’t know. But it’s true that so far, I’ve encountered this blindness only in Americans. I just wonder how you can come to be in a position like that – one where you dismiss all other possibilities than what you know yourself. Isn’t that also going to limit your ability to learn because you’ll keep rejecting new opportunities to learn because you believe the other person is wrong? That seems a little sad … but then again, I guess that’s humanity for you :p

What’s your style?

The above is a question that I find myself grappling with now that I’ve started on a short story. For the longest time, I could not write anything because I didn’t seem to have my own voice, my own style. The standard narrative style seemed just too bland for me but that’s about all that I seemed to be able to manage when I thought of writing something. Then I wrote my first novel and I found my voice.

I discovered that a dry, humorous style of narration is what suited me best. I’d used a variation on this during my days of writing non-fiction for newspapers. I used to have a self-deprecating/self-insulting style which poked fun at my own pronouncements and the readers seemed to love it 🙂 So, I was simply going back to the same roots and this seemed the right place to be. Of course, there were the inevitable comparisons with Terry Pratchett. Now, I didn’t want to be called just another Pratchett imitator, trying to cash in on what I perceived to be a good market. That wasn’t my intention at all. That just happened to be the style I wrote in and I’d written that way (at least for non-fiction) long before I discovered Terry. But that’s beside the point …

The real point is that I wrote my first novel and it had a fairly consistent voice. It was dryly humorous all the way through. Then I sat down to write my second novel and I wasn’t sure that I could pull it off a second time. Could I be that humorous a second time? Could I find ways not to have the same old jokes again? Could I even remember which jokes had been used where? I wasn’t too sure anymore. Of course, I got through only about 2-3 pages of the second novel before I put that away to write the short stories but I wasn’t really happy with the tone of the second novel. It didn’t have the same kind of easy flow as the rest – something was missing.

Now the short stories, they don’t have much humour at all. I am excited about the one I’m writing at the moment because I feel that the world the story is set in has potential and that I can do a whole bunch of stories set in that world. But does it have the same style as the novel? Not at all. This one’s straight story telling – more Asimov than Pratchett. So I find myself wondering again, what is my style?

Choices …

As you grow older, do you just get pickier or do you simply become more selective because of the lessons that experience has taught you? Or is it just two sides of the same coin? :p I realize that most of the time these days that I at least tend to want more out of software than most software offers. I want it to be simple, easy to use, safe and secure. Unfortunately, most of the stuff out there seems to be lacking in one department or another. One good example was my search for tagboard software recently. I couldn’t find one board which had all the features I wanted and had to end up trying to combine the code from two different boards which came fairly close. Of course, I got sidetracked by something else and that project kind of went into limbo :p

Now, I want a mailing list script. I looked around and while there are plenty of heavy-hitter scripts which will do the job fairly well, I didn’t want a heavy-hitter. I wanted something simple and easy. But do I find one? No :p Either the script has no admin interface at all or it has an admin interface but no protection – you have to go with directory password protection. Is it too much to ask that you have a well-secured script? I didn’t think so but then again, maybe I’m wrong.

So I again took two scripts and started to merge their features together. But then I realized that I’d probably end up spending another week on tweaking, modifying and getting things to work exactly right. Do I have that kind of time to waste? I wasn’t sure that I did. So I’m back to searching for a mailing list script :p Maybe I’ll go with a heavy-hitter after all but the problem there is that the scripts can get so cumbersome that if there is a script exploit, that I won’t know about it till it’s too late. Decisions, decisions … :p

Perceptions

Isn’t it interesting that we don’t always see ourselves the same way as others see us? Or is that just another facet of human nature? I’m aware of the fact that our perception of ourselves (or how we think others see us) isn’t always the same as how other people actually view us. But I had not considered the fact that this could be true also of cultural or racial groups. The fact was brought home to me recently by a comment somebody made.

I had just written an article for a Sri Lankan travel magazine about the Muslims of Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka, to lay some background to this whole entry, is kind of strange in that the people here don’t consider themselves Sri Lankans. Instead, they usually consider themselves as parts of a different ethnic groups – the Sinhalese, the Tamils and the Muslims. To me, that’s the strangest way to go about being a nation because you are never a single whole but a sum of fractured parts, if that makes any sense :p But then again, I guess this same sense of fragmentation occurs in many nations, human beings being who they are, just not to this extent.

Anyway, as I said before, I wrote this article about the Muslims of Sri Lanka. I was asked to write the article since I am a Muslim myself. So I wrote it and I kept it totally factual – I researched the story thoroughly, though I knew most of the bare outlines, and laid out the story of the Muslims from the early days in Sri Lankan history to the present (well, not actually the present – most of the major historical stuff ended around the British colonial period but who’s counting, right? :p) The editor’s comment on reading the article was that it was good but "not what he’d expected". I was a bit surprised since I thought the story was fairly accurate, so I asked him what he’d expected thinking that I’d slipped up somewhere. He said that he’d expected a story replete with buriyani and watalappam.

Now for the confused, let me hasten to enlighten you. Buriyani is a rice-dish that Sri Lanka Muslims are famous for, in Sri Lanka. It’s actually an Indian dish but they call it biryani there, what do they know? They might have invented the dish (I don’t know if they actually did …) but they can’t go around naming stuff differently than us Sri Lankans now can they? :p It’s basically rice, meat (and sometimes potatoes – the recipe varies a bit) cooked together with spices and it tastes really good. Muslims usually have buriyani at weddings, festivals and other festive occasions and so buriyani has come to be identified with Muslims.

Watalappam is a dessert. It’s basically a jaggery pudding. But then I guess I have to go into what jaggery is :p It’s the solidified treacle from either the kitul or coconut palm and is really sweet. It’s like a big, brown, chunky block of sweetness 🙂 And watalappam is basically jaggery and eggs. Again, it’s considered a Muslim delicacy in Sri Lanka and most people agree that Muslims make the best watalappam.

So what has all this got to do with the article? From my perspective, nothing :p I didn’t really think of the Muslims as being identified by either buriyani or watalappam since that has nothing to do with who the Sri Lankan Muslims are, how they came to be in Sri Lanka and their involvement in Sri Lankan history or politics. On the other hand, the editor, being a non-Muslim, expected me to write about buriyani and watalappam because I was after all, a Muslim :p I just find the fact that we have such diverse perceptions of the Sri Lankan Muslims as a whole and find myself wondering, if another Sri Lankan Muslim had written the article, would s/he have written about buriyani?

Memories are made of wisps

I have always (well, almost always :p) believed in the infallibility of my memory. I remember when I was 10 to 15 years old, how my parents would marvel at how much I could remember from my childhood. I still can remember things from when I was 2-5 years old even today. However, as I grew older, I discovered that there are certain blind-spots in your memory. There would be incidents that I’d completely forget and then remember one day for no apparent reason. I could then for the life of me figure out how I could have forgotten the incident in the first place. It’s kind of disillusioning to find that you can’t rely on your memory after all :p

Then I married Laurie. Now I had another person to verify the events of day to day life and my memory against. Now I didn’t have to rely on just what I believed had happened. But here is where it got even more confusing – sometimes Lauries account of events did not gel with mine and how do we figure out who had the right version? Or did either of us have the right version at all? :p

If you think of your memory as a hard disk (or even a floppy) and you basically operated on the assumption that what was on the disk was the true and correct picture of the world around you, what would happen if somebody could alter the contents of the disk without you being aware? Scary, huh? (Or maybe not, maybe I’m just conjuring up paranoid dreams :p) Because how would you ever be certain that you could trust anything you knew about yourself or the world around you?

I began thinking of this yesterday after Laurie and I had watched the season ender for the second season of "Stargate-SG1". (No, we are not totally behind the times or in a time warp :p We got the full DVD set for seasons 1-7 and have been slowly making our way through it.) There is this character who apparently miraculously (to me) is revived from the dead and I commented on it and Laurie was like, "Oh, she didn’t die. She just got up and walked away. It was in that scene we just watched." I was like, "I didn’t see her just getting up and walking away and I watched the scene with you!". So we argue back and forth as to what had really happened. I watched it today again and she does get up and walk away but there is so much smoke that you don’t actually notice it unless you are watching for it … and Laurie has probably seen that episode (and almost all other episodes of SG-1 as well) probably about 7-8 times :p So she would notice that. Whew, at least this wasn’t one of the times where memory was playing tricks on me … or Laurie :p