Dear Blog

sometimes, life redefines 'Busy' and you catch yourself hanging onto every second to cram more work into it. subhaanallaah.
Rasha-Rida this blog needs an update, stat.

you don't say!

Interesting: 7 Deadly Sins of the blogging world - a far cry from Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy and Pride!

Into the Mind of a Mum (2)

Why I won't let you fool around with your hair / face.

Cross posted on the Sisters-in-Faith blog .

''have you ever seen an Egyptian?''

Laila El-Haddad of 'Raising Yousuf, Unplugged' on the opening of the wall:

''Of course the border opening will only provide temporary relief, and the ecstasy it generates will be fleeting, as it was in 2005 when shortly after Israel's Disengagement, the once impervious and deadly, sniper-lined border became completely porous. It was an incredible time. I will never forget the feeling of standing in the middle of the Philadelphi corridor, as it was known. Of standing there with hundreds of thousands of other Gazans, savoring the moment of uninterrupted freedom, in this case, freedom of movement. Goats were being lobbed over the secondary fence; mattresses; cigarettes; cheeses. Egyptians took back bags of applies from northern Gaza, and comforters. For two weeks, it was the free market at work. Once a nesting ground for Israeli tanks, armored bulldozers, and the like-all of the war metal-the face of the occupation- that became synonymous with destructions and death for us in Gaza, and particularly for the resident's of Rafah, Philadelphi had so suddenly become nothing but a a kilometre of wasteland, of sand granules marking the end of one, battered, besieged land, and the beginning of the rest of the world.But traveling this short distance had previously been so unthinkable, that the minute it took to walk across it by foot was akin to being in the twilight zone. You couldn't help but feel that at any moment a helicopter gunship would hover by overhead and take aim.

It was then that I met a pair of young boys, 9 and 10, who curiously peered over the fence beyond the wall, into Egypt. In hushed whispers, and innocent giggles they pondered what life was like outside of Gaza and then asked me: Have you ever seen an Egyptian? What do they look like?

They had never left Rafah in their lives.''

good stuff: the week of young people's blogs

interesting :

"For over eight years, the City Circle has been running a supplementary school that offers academic support to students between the ages of 8 and 18. The school is run by volunteers and serves around 110 students. CC Saturday School enjoys a great reputation and fantastic feedback.

Inspired by the movie Freedom Writers, we decided to give our students the chance to share their views on the CC blogs. The students were given the freedom to write about whatever they want and that the good pieces would be published unedited. To encourage the students, we promised prizes to the best six stories. Over this week, the CC blogs belongs to the young ones, the innocent, those with no political agendas. Some bits will make you laugh, other make you shed a tear, some are entertaining, others thoughtful. Above all, we cannot ignore them. They are the future.

To find out more about the school please visit the school's page.

Sid Djerfi is Head teacher of the City Circle Saturday School.''

Read the 'Pick of the Blogs' here

walking the tightrope on a keyboard

This one's an absolute MUST as in M.U.S.T read: Marina Hyde on treading the thin line between being an 'escribitionist' and an 'exhibitionist' on the internet, in The Guardian.

excerpts:

"'Do you really keep a diary?" a besotted Algernon asks of Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest.

"I'd give anything to look at it. May I?"

"Oh no," replies Cecily with princessy disdain. "You see, it is simply a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form, I hope you will order a copy."

Wilde's jokes are so faultlessly crafted that they tend to retain their bite even a hundred years later, but the latter does lose something of its surreal edge when considered against the news that today there are four million bloggers at work in the UK alone. Four million! It feels like the magic number at which the inner monologue could be officially classified as endangered.

These days, if it's in our heads, out it comes, edited to varying degrees into words and pictures, and presented to a real or imagined audience. Self-important? Perhaps. Often tedious? Certainly. But that doesn't matter as much as people make out.

Even if there weren't the vaguest of ironies in newspaper columnists wondering why people feel the need to share their views on life with anyone, it does seem time to move beyond the sneering accusations of Pooterism that traditionally form the basis of mainstream media attacks on self-published alternatives. If all we had to worry about in this brave new world was preposterous self-regard comingled with a comic lack of self-awareness, then it might be an idyll indeed.

Far more intriguing, and progressively alarming, is the degree to which we have embraced the new exhibitionism. An early term for bloggers - back when it was a frightfully niche pursuit and the internet was all fields and so on - was "escribitionists", and though the word was never what you'd call common parlance, what it stood for has become common practice as personal sites and social networking communities have exploded.

How odd, I found myself thinking recently, that in an age when we seem more and more concerned with encroachments on privacy, we are so increasingly keen to invade our own. My mistake, of course, was to assume there is a "we" at all. According to those who understand far more about communications psychology than I do, the great generational dividing line has been drawn. And broadly speaking, if you're under 30, your private self and public self are interdependent in previously unthinkable ways. Time and again, in surveys of what young people want from their online experiences, keeping socially connected is ranked way above privacy.

[...]But the view that this is a cultural shift with which we must all make our peace is wrong. Naive and cavalier is a dangerous combination, and a disdain for their own privacy will leave young people immensely exposed.

Consider the case of the 23-year-old Muslim woman who was found guilty this week under new anti-terror laws. Samina Malik worked for WH Smith at Heathrow, but was given to writing poetry about beheading non-believers and martyrdom and suchlike. Not long after she had begun visiting chatrooms, calling herself the "lyrical terrorist" - she thought the name "cool" - the knock at the door came. Examination of her computer revealed she had downloaded, inter alia, something called "How to win in hand-to-hand combat". She lives in Southall, awaits sentencing.

When we live in a society where reactionary bedroom poets are found guilty under terrorism laws, it makes you wonder whether their rather more seasoned and significantly more brilliant predecessors such as Swift wouldn't, in a similar climate, have realised the folly of bunging their every move on Facebook, and made alternative arrangements.

The world may be shifting, but we must attempt to encourage in young people an understanding of the value of privacy, and a sense of the very real dangers that might attend them should they discard it."

parental plug: smell the roses

if you want to see the impossible -- spring in winter, blooming pink roses et al, check out the Sisters-in-Faith blog's newest makeover.

One can almost smell the roses,

how the horse got its name

*very* interesting post on one of our favourite blogs: 'How the Horse Got its Name' at Arabic Gems.

Maa shaa Allaah, there's always something interesting and beneficial to read on that blog.

sepia-tinted Ramadhaan posts

Lots of people (now grown up) share childhood memories of Ramadhaan in Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon...reading through these posts brings up tons of memories. Good stuff.

A sample:

Ramadan Memories...
By Mike Odetalla

pic and narrative courtesy: www.hanini.org

The holy month of Ramadan is once again upon us, and its fasting. Muslims will fast from sun-up till sun down, abstaining from food, water, and intimate relationships.

Each year around this time, my memories of Ramadan in our small village of Beit Hanina, a suburb of Jerusalem which was still without electricity, whereby people carried lanterns to light their way in the darkness as they went first to the mosque and from there to visit friends and family: a special part of Ramadan, are once again rekindled.
Beit Hanina had a drummer, charged with the pre-dawn task of awakening the village to sahoor, the light meal whose end marked the beginning of each day's fast. Closing my eyes and thinking real hard, still brings back the sound of Beit Hanina's drummer banging away, and the delightful memories of joining the other children, carrying our decorated fanoosia lanterns with candles burning brightly inside them, as we ran along behind the drummer, singing, laughing and shouting to help awaken the sleeping adults and start them on sahoor and their new day. How I admired the drummer; how I wanted his job and to share his fun.

In Ramadan 1979, my first visit back to Palestine since the '67 expulsion, my cousin and I, both 18 and living in the US, finally became the Ramadan drummers of Beit Hanina. The Israeli invasion of 1967 and the subsequent occupation made the drummers' job very high risk and today they are scarce: Ramadan drummers were often stopped, even beaten, and some have been killed by the Israeli occupying army.

By 1979, the village had not enjoyed a drummer in 5 years, so my cousin and I delighted in our job of walking through the village each morning banging away on large tin cans. It must have been a very humorous sight: the elderly were happy to hear us; the younger people thought we were a great joke and made fun of the 'bored Americans'. But everyone agreed that we had renewed some "life" that had been lost as we broke through the dark still nights of Ramadan.

For me, however briefly, I was transported back to a happy childhood whose memories had never left me for a moment.I still remember sitting by the family's transistor radio with my siblings listening to the special programs as we awaited the "cannon" to go off, signaling that it was time to break our fast. The "cannon" was a World War I era English relic and merely made a loud bang, which was all that it, was good for.
Ever since my children were very small, I had regaled them with the many stories of my childhood in Palestine, enjoying the look of fascination on their faces as they implored me to tell them yet "another story of when you were young in Palestine"…

During Ramadan, my mother would always invite friends and relatives to our home to break the fast with us. As Muslims, we are obligated to share breaking our fast with others, especially those less fortunate than us. It is considered a blessing to do so. It is something that we continue to do here in America as we invite friends and loved ones to share in our blessing on this Holy Month, the essence of which are a time of prayer, fasting, and charity.
Some of the best memories that I carry with me are connected to the month of Ramadan in Palestine when I was a child. The closeness and feeling of "community" that I felt during those times is something that is almost beyond description. The sound of the drummer, the Muezzin call to prayer, the static emanating from the transistor radio, the "boom" of the cannon, the enticing aroma of the special foods that we only ate during Ramadan, the sight of families huddled together on a mat covered floor around the evening meals, illuminated by the flickering light of a kerosene lantern, enjoying their meals, as humble as it may have been, in the company of family and loved ones…

These are my memories of Ramadan before the Israeli invasion and subsequent brutal and inhumane occupation which has destroyed many families and communities and is now in the process of causing further havoc as Israel continues to erect its Apartheid Walls, checkpoints, and roadblocks which have reduced many Palestinian villages and cities to nothing more than walled off ghettos and open air prisons.

Unfortunately, these will constitute the next generation of Palestinian children's memories and experiences…

did you see this? (parental plug)

If this isn't the cutest Ramadhaan blog makeover in the world, I don't know what is!

*where* do I begin?

so MUCH to say, so little time and energy to say it in.

May Allaah bless our time in Sha'baan and enable us to reach Ramadhaan.

اللهم بارك لنا شعبان و بلَغنا رمضان

COMING UP NEXT on this blog (in shaa Allaah):
*points taken from last week's khutbah on the start of the new school year and Ramadhaan, by the Imaam at Madeenah, Abdul Baary ath-Thubayti.

*an excerpt from a very recent, real-life story on the reality of not knowing whether we're going to reach Ramadhaan, in spite of all our Ramadhaan resolutions and challenges and stocked fridges, by Sh. Ahmad al-Hawwaashi.

*Ramadhaan diaries by Rasha-Rida (they're ambitiously planning to write one every day...we'll see how it goes, in shaa Allaah)

*links to other interesting Ramadhaan diaries from around the net

*and the coup de grace: inputs from The Ed :)

''do you think I will be assassinated?''

After a really long time, I finally caught up with the intensely brave blog of Palestinian journalist and mother, Laila El-Haddad: 'Raising Yousuf Unplugged' ...that can serve as an eye-opener to even the most blinkered specimen of the human species.

an excerpt:

''I was down in Rafah again this week. While inspecting the site of a future park project my friend Fida is working on (and which we are making a film about), we were disrupted every few minutes by the voracious sound of multiple F-16 fighter jets flying overhead in unision. Sometimes one or two; then four or five.

Children scurried about playing football with a deflated basketball on the sand lot.

"Do you think I will be assassinated one day?" one child asked another. He didn't say this jokingly.''

3 years + over 500 posts = finis?

so...a lot of ppl have been writing in to ask where on earth are we, and to express extreme irritation at our frequent tendency to vanish without leaving a forwarding virtual address...jzkx 100000 for writing in...we're around alhamdulillaah, just extremely extremely bzzzzzy, alhamdulillaah...we haven't run out of things to say, just the time to say them in (:P)

I just realised today, it's been almost 3 years since we started this blog...subhaanallaah, time flies!

just like every other piece of personal writing out there, this blog has had its share of drama/dilemmas...but the one overwhelming ambition I've had for this site is for it be a positive space, where a reader's click leads them to something that can enlighten/amuse/enrich...elicit a thought process or a smile...and in shaa Allaah, I hope we've succeeded somewhat in that endeavour (notwithstanding the occasional rant aka 'thinking aloud' post :P)

I think one of the most positive things that happened on the blog was when we removed the site-meter and the comments option... doing away with that drastically reduced the pressure to 'perform' to our own/strangers' expectations...allowing us the luxury of being introspective or inane or irregular with our posts, without having to worry about what it would do to our site stats..

blogging is a medium born with an Achilles heel ...its very plebeian-ness, that contributes to its huge popularity is damaging to its prospects in the long run...most people refuse to take blogs/bloggers seriously (except perhaps bloggers themselves)...sometimes with good reason: unlike other media that at least *attempt* to appear unprejudiced and 'balanced'; blogs carry no sense of personal/professional accountability...and a personal bias/outright agenda is actually considered a good thing...

I've often been asked: what's a person like you doing in a place like this, and I've always replied in defence of the medium...blogging is entertaining and engrossing, and in the absence/restriction of real-life contact, is a great way to connect with/simply look in and learn from other people's experiences and perspectives and lives...does a 'real-life' connection with people whose facial and vocal expressions one can see and hear, whose cheeks touch one's own in greeting everyday, make this remote connection redundant?

I sincerely hope not.

even though we're all really busy with real-life projects, that, unlike push-button publishing require tons of patience and perseverance and paperwork to see them through, we still hope to keep this connection alive...in shaa Allaah.

blog stats

*very* interesting article on the history of blogs, as blogging comes of age 10 years after the birth of the first blog, 'Scripting News', with 120,000 blogs and 1.5 m posts being written worldwide everyday.

*very* interesting reviews on the phenomenon by journalists and entrepreneurs that range from the laudatory: "Blogging and other kinds of conversational media are the early tools of a truly read-write web," said Dan Gillmor, author of citizen journalism bible We The Media. "They've helped turn media consumers into creators, and creators into collaborators - a shift whose impact we're just beginning to feel, much less understand."

...to the mildly derogatory: "Andrew Keen, a former dotcom entrepreneur and the author of the forthcoming book Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture, says that though it is enticing to believe that online diaries are empowering, the hype is dangerous.
"It's seductive in the sense that it convinces people to think they have more to say and are more interesting than they really are," he said. "The real issue is whether it adds any more to our culture. Most of it is just so transient and ephemeral."

I'm really liking...

Alpha Mummy

any blog that writes about real life issues like "how to fold a shirt in 2 secs", "getting multiple kids to school with a smile on their face (and yours)" and has a video demonstration of a disabled mum changing a diaper with her feet has my vote.

Excerpt:
Research has shown that getting two children up, dressed and out of the house in a hurry is more stressful than landing a Boeing 747 in a snowstorm. Not real research, but... anyway, here are seven great tips from a feature about the school run by Helena Pozniak from The Times back in October. It's always slightly stressful to read the words 'Try not to get stressed' but it's a good list anyway...

2005-2006, the year that was

If 2004-2005 was the year we found our voice on the blogosphere, then 2005-2006 was definitely, The Year of the Bitten Lip…

in other words, as the readership of this blog grew beyond the close friends who helped us set up and get this place started, we began carefully weighing what to say and the words to say it with; graciously assisted by our very own inhouse censor who was horrified when we carried this post..and another time insisted that I remove my single line contribution to this post, which was the fact that I had found it funny and laughed… for fear that people might misunderstand it to be a tacit encouragement/acceptance of v-day..

This was also the year we were eclipsed by a satellite, inundated with sickening spam that eventually led to the removal of the guestbook…severing all contact with the strangers from the Great Wide Somewhere who used to surf in by chance and leave us kind words to remember them by, giving us the motivation to post..

After we took off the guestbook, we started receiving more mail…some of it was very encouraging and gratifying (jazaakumullaahu khayran to all the people who wrote)…and some of it was not so complimentary …it was unnerving and took me a while to get used to people commenting on posts that were basically outpourings of my thoughts…

There were people who questioned us when we carried links to articles on the need to tell Muslim kids the facts of life before they heard it from the nudge-wink-snicker network or non-Muslim sources or the media (someone officially and publicly exchanged this blog’s U rating to Parental Guidance…which is just as well..)

Recently someone took umbrage when I called a daai’yah ‘charismatic’, asking me to seriously consider re-wording it, and then there were the FAQs…so many FAQs…

How many kids do we have? (alhamdulillaah, enough to enable this blog to go on in the same format for many years)

What happens to the blog in the future? (allaahu a’alam)

Would we become muslim-teenz when R-R eventually became teenagers? (probably)

Why do we use double vowels? (it makes for more correct transliteration)

And the most FAQ Faq of all: Why Blog?

This is the hardest question of all to answer, b/z it’s hard to explain to someone who’s never scribbled feverishly at the back of used envelopes and doctor’s prescriptions and even currency notes what a compulsion it is for some people to write…

My guess is that the people who ask us why we have a blog are actually trying to ask us why do we want to be heard, why do we feel the need to have a voice?

This blog is our means of bringing some meaning into our life, combat the boredom that comes from staying in a place where sometimes it’s several weeks before we go out and have an intelligent, stimulating exchange with other people, and if a random reader can find something in the process that would benefit them in some little way, or even make them smile…that means this blog has more than served its purpose..

This blog is also about nixing assumptions (which is my favourite pastime btw)…for example, I am a very quiet person, a listener and observer to the point of being thought of as taciturn and snobbish or part of the scenery :P…by revealing this, I hope to make you understand that if a person is not talking much that doesn’t mean that they have nothing worthwhile to say…it could also mean that they have too much :P…

Hypothetically, a person walking down a street who could see me walking my kids on their stroller (some crying, some playing hooky, some skipping out of reach just in time to avoid a whack) and think: poor beleaguered oppressed soul, I bet she’s never heard of Nietzsche, or the Third Law of Thermodynamics or Thich Nhat Han…

appearances, even in real life, are only a part of one’s personality..they are never the sum total..they can never be, because there are so many facets to the human soul, so much uncharted territory that could never surface even in a lifetime of cursory conversations and meaningless encounters… if I could convince even one person of this, this blog has served its purpose..

This blog is also an expression of my love for the internet…it is an incredible medium…almost like a 4th dimension in a 3-D world…

I’m a bit like the character in Francoise Sagan’s Un Certain Sourire (A Certain Smile), who would rather talk about people’s lives, their dreams and emotions, their ambitions and childhood memories when we meet, rather than mouth plastic platitudes (in fact, I think small talk is a new-world conspiracy to end all human contact among humans and make aliens of us all …literally)

Until I discovered the intenet, I thought I was the human equivalent of a platypus, a creature so fantastically strange that its existence was considered a hoax by scientists, with so few characteristics in common with other animals, that it has to be classified in a class of its own..alhamdulillaah..I have seen and spoken to and known of many people on the net with the same concerns and thoughts, the same feelings and hopes that I have, it’s been such a reassuring connection with the world… this feeling of not being alone..

Someone also asked me why is this blog called muslim-kidz when I monopolise it all the time, why not name it muslim-mumz :P?

Without my kids (especially Rasha-Rida) I would never have become the person I am..being with children is a constantly transforming process, where one is constantly learning and re-learning lessons in life…this blog is about sharing our lives and the lessons we learn …please spare us a prayer…may the learning never end.

PS: I would have posted this on May 24 th (the day we started our blog 2 years ago), but we don’t do ‘days’ :P…