Flicken's Blog

Ich bin Flicken, ja! Traditional Islam, food, guns, camping, grammar, Canadianna, Arabic, stuff.

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

The Avatars of Jeem

The Arabic letter jeem (ج) also has a number of pronunciations:
  1. The Qur'anic jeem is very similar to the English j. It is used by the native Jordanian dialects and also by urban Jordanian men who consider the following pronunciation too feminine.
  2. The zheem of the Northern Levant (Syria, Lebanon, and some areas of Palestine) is identical to the French j and is used by urban city women in Jordan. It is also common among some Saudis.
  3. The geem is most commonly associated with the Urban Egyptian dialect, where it sounds almost identical to the hard English g. However, it is also used quite a bit in the dialects of Yemen, though its pronunciation is not quite as close to the hard English g as in the Egyptian dialect. Once when Habib Salim was visiting Amman from Hadramaut, he referred to a gabeera (cast). One of the locals thought he was saying kabeera (big).
  4. The yeem is common in Gulf countries.
  5. The deem is not very common but is occasionally used by some of the Upper (i.e. Southern) Egyptians and Nubians. Instead of Jamal, they will say Damal.
Although the Egyptians pronounce jeem as geem, when they speak English, they pronounce the soft g and j like the French j. As for Jordanian men, they find this pronunciation too feminine and thus pronounce all words with this sound with an English j sound. So, instead of saying, "I have the latest version", they'll say, "I have the latest virgin."


Ghazali on the Role of Logic

In Al-Mustasfa, Ghazali's magnum opus in Legal Methodology, he writes:

Introduction

Clarifying that the Domain of Theoretical Disciplines is Limited to Definitions and Proofs

We mention in this introduction those things that can be grasped logically and that they are limited to definitions and proofs. We also mention the necessary conditions for a proper definition and a proper proof and their categories in a more concise manner than we have in Mahakk Al-Nadhar and Mi`yar Al-`Ilm. This introduction is not a part of Legal Methodology or from the prerequisite disciplines specific to it. Rather, it is an introduction to all disciplines: whoever does not master it cannot be depended upon in his fields of study whatsoever. So whoever does not wish to transcribe this introduction should begin from the first chapter, that being the start of Legal Methodology proper. All theoretical disciplines require this introduction as much as Legal Methodology does.

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Orienting the Orientalists

Some Orientalists, both new and old, have claimed that the Qur'an has grammatical errors in it. The issue is not the particular grammatical issues they raise. Rather, it is that their entire methodology in this regard is unacademic, incoherent, and possibly even dishonest. Were the same standards applied to scientific analysis of empirical data, for example, no one would take it seriously.

The Arabic language spoken at the time of the Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) was a collection of dialects, a subset of which has survived to this day. This language, with its multitude of variants, is collectively known as Classical Arabic. The Pre-Islamic Arabs were mostly illiterate, had a strong oral tradition, and took their language very seriously. Dialects of Arabic were called, "languages" (Ar. lughat) and non-Arabic people and tongues were referred to as being, "non-articulate" (Ar. a3jami). It was as if they only considered dialects of Arabic to be speech. There were no codified rules for Arabic. The way eloquent people spoke defined the language, and anything else was an error. Because of the high standing of poetry in Arab society, poetic license was a standing exception to this rule. This was the descriptive age of Classical Arabic.

The spread of Islam led to the primary texts of Islam (the Qur'an and Prophetic utterances) spreading to people who spoke entirely different languages, as well as those who spoke forms of Arabic other than those used in these texts. (The Qur'an and Prophetic utterances include multiple dialects of Arabic.) In order to preserve the Arabic of Islam, scholars began codifying proper usages of Arabic grammar and morphology. Thus began the prescriptive age of Classical Arabic.

Without doubt, the Qur'an contains difficult grammatical constructs. Any book that aims at reaching the outer limits of human ability will contain constructs more difficult to parse than, "See Jack run." If this is the case with books authored by humans, how could it be otherwise with Scripture? The first flaw that Orientalists fall into is that they fail to distinguish between the descriptive and prescriptive ages of Classical Arabic. The rules of Classical Arabic were formed based on the Qur'an, Prophetic utterances, Pre-Islamic poetry, and limited selections from Post-Islamic literati. Thus, by definition, one cannot judge the Qur'an according to the rules of Classical Arabic. These texts just mentioned are the raw, empirical data while grammatical rules are the theory. If there ever was an incoherent methodology, it would be to judge empirical data as wrong because it doesn't agree with theory. Even worse than this are the attempts of some Orientalists to judge Qur'anic constructs according to the rules of Modern Standard Arabic, a highly-simplified subset of Classical Arabic.

The Qur'an is not a new book. Grammatical analysis of Qur'anic constructs is not something that Muslims sat around waiting for Orientalists to come by and do for them. Yet, when Orientalists raise their concerns about grammar in the Qur'an, they seldom quote classical works of Qur'anic exegesis and grammar. One does not find references to Al-Zamakhshari, Al-Alusi, Al-Sameen Al-Halabi, Abu Hayyan, Al-Razi, Al-Jamal, Al-Sawi, Ibn Hisham, Al-Nasafi or Al-Suyuti in their works. All of these scholars had addressed the issues that Orientalists raise long before the word, "Orientalism" existed. If one does not believe what Islamic scholars have written, then, as an academic, one is still obliged to reference it and rebut it. Thus, the second flaw of the Orientalists is that they do not reference prior literature. What standards of academic scholarship allow one to ignore earlier works? Assuming that Orientalists are ignorant of the texts they fail to reference is a bit far-fetched. However, assuming as much would be giving them the benefit of the doubt, for if they know of these texts and refuse to reference them it amounts to academic dishonesty, which is worse than ignorance.

If one submits that the Qur'an cannot be judged according to the rules of Classical Arabic (and, a fortiori, Modern Standard Arabic), one can then ask: What would constitute a valid criticism of Qur'anic grammar? Since the Qur'an was revealed during the descriptive era of Classical Arabic, the only proof allowable would be that the poets and literati of the time objected to it. Any magnificent text, whether human or Divine, will push language to its limits and introduce terms and constructs that were previously unknown. Thus, simply recognizing that the Qur'an contains unusual and previously-unknown constructs would not constitute a proof against it. It would have to be further than that: poets and their admirers would have to have openly balked, expressed revulsion, or ridiculed it for it to be considered criticism. After all, based on the times, the Qur'an was not politically correct: it told people that they would burn in Hell for worshiping idols. Thus, the pagan Arabs had every reason to find fault with it. If one takes a cynical approach and claims that all criticism was erased from history by opportunistic authors or the killing of critics, this is problematic on two fronts: firstly, love of the Arabic language and admiration of its literature was too widespread to contain by killing off or silencing opponents, and secondly, classical Muslim authors have traditionally courted controversy, including the most blasphemous interpretations and baseless stories in their works for the purpose of academic honesty.

Taking a step backwards, when proving the existence of an unusual grammatical construct in the Qur'an or elsewhere, classical grammarians will often reference a shahid, a quotation from Pre-Islamic poetry that uses the same construct without resorting to poetic license. Clearly, the existence of a shahid proves that the Qur'anic construct was acceptable. However, the converse is not true: the lack of a shahid does not prove that the construct is invalid. As mentioned earlier, every text that pushes the limits of human understanding will introduce new constructs. If a speaker of a language introduces a new construct during the descriptive phase of the language's evolution and it gains widespread acceptance, it is now, by definition, correct. The sole proof that can be used against Qur'anic usage is what was mentioned above: that the literati of the time balked at it, expressed revulsion, or ridiculed it. There is no proof that any of this happened.

There is a need for higher standards in Orientalist writings. Coherent thought, quoting references, and academic honesty are the fundamental requisites of any discipline, yet they are sadly lacking from works that claim grammatical errors in the Qur'an.

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Lisan Al-Arab Online & Open Source Desktops

Lisan Al-Arab is now available here. Like many Arabic sites, it doesn't work properly with Firefox. This is one of the reasons I stick with Windows for my primary desktop. Yes, I realize that I can use IE under Linux, but it's not as if sites have been tested with it. Sorry OSS zealots, I don't have time to try the distro du jour, upgrade my packages, etc. I want to log onto my desktop and get stuff done. And yes, I'm willing to pay for the distro to get out of the way and let me get on with my life. Before you flame me, please realize that I am rather competent when it comes to LAMP programming and administration. Linux is a great server-side OS.

Unfortunately, Lisan Al-Arab doesn't seem to be working at Alwaraq any more.

Muslim Intellectual Stagnation & Abraham's Sacrifice

Anyone who reads books of Qur'anic exegesis (Ar. tafsir) will recognize that, since the earliest times, Muslim scholars have disagreed regarding which son the Prophet Abraham was ordered to sacrifice: Isma'il or Isaac (peace be upon them all). It is not actually spelled out explicitly in the Qur'an and both sides have their arguments. However, mentioning this to the average Arab Muslim will likely agitate them greatly and might even lead to the assumption that you are a complete ignoramus.

But why? Because Muslims are, by and large, intellectually stagnant on two fronts:
  1. We have stopped studying classical texts of tafsir, fiqh, aqida, etc. After all, we have the ultra-dumbed-down books funded by petro-dollars to teach us everything we need to know. You need Everything Islamic for Imbeciles? We have it! (Note: an excellent tafsir site is Altafsir.com, but it only works well in IE. Also, I've never tried using it in English. Doesn't everyone serious about learning Islam know Arabic anyways?)
  2. We have stopped thinking. Dudes: if we say that Isaac was the one chosen for sacrifice, it does not translate to Israel's right to exist. (I recognize Israel's existence the same way I'd recognize a malignant tumour.) The Qur'an mentions the story of Moses and Pharoah extensively, as well as the story of Soloman and Bilqis, Queen of Saba'. Does Pharoah's damnation and Bilqis's submission indicate that Egypt and Yemen should also be ruled by Jews? Get with it guys. There's something called, "logic." Breath deeply and try thinking it through. The Jews were the Chosen People when they believed in the messengers of God. They lost their status when they disbelieved in the Prophet Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam). If the Prophet Isaac was the one who was to be sacrificed, it won't benefit them with their disbelief.

What's a Jewish Muslim Anyway?

In a couple of my posts, I've referred to my Jewish-Muslim neighbour. Some people found this description a bit strange. What I mean by this is that he is ethnically Jewish (i.e. from Bani Isra'il) but religiously a Muslim. In Judaism 101, they define a Jew as, "any person whose mother was a Jew or any person who has gone through the formal process of conversion to Judaism." Given that he has a Jewish mother (which reminds me -- I have to ask him if the jokes have any truth to them), I figured he's ethnically Jewish.

Membership of Jordanian Clans

First, a bit of background regarding Jordan: Jordan is a land of crossroads. Historically, it was a land that travelers passed through between the Levant and Arabia, the Holy Land and Iraq, Egypt and Asia. As with many other areas in the Levant, many of Ibrahim Pasha's soldiers decided to make this their home, which explains the abundance of Egyptian-derived surnames in the Levant.

The mass migrations of Palestinians here in 1948 and then again in 1967 has raised a renewed interest in the identity of, "native" Jordanians. It is a natural human tendency to want to feel special, and given that the majority of Jordan's population are, in fact, Palestinian migrants, some of those who didn't immigrate here over the past century like to feel a bit different.

The problem that arises is that many people do not understand how caliphate-era residents of Jordan determined clan membership. Let's first start with what clans are not: they are not exclusively blood relations. The larger clans (like the enormous Bani Hassan and the Da3ja of the capital region) are split into many families. The members of each individual family are generally closely related, possibly descending from related ancestors. However, different families within a clan are often not related. Bani Hassan absorbed caliphate-era Palestinian and Iraqi migrant families into their ranks in a symbiotic relationship that ensured the safety of all those involved against their common archenemy: Bani Sakhr. Similarly, Da3ja absorbed Egyptians, which make up the Jawamees family. (I once had the strange experience of convincing a young man from the Jawamees that his ancestors were originally Egyptian.) The Mahhadeen family of Kerak is originally Iraqi, and many of the families of Salt are originally from Nablus, Palestine, with an occasional mixture of Egyptian blood for variety.

These migrant families confederated into clans for practical purposes. Living in a resource-scarce area like Jordan, which the Ottomans and other caliphs before them had no interest in controlling, meant that you were either absorbed into one of your neighbouring clans or you would be constantly abused by bedouin raids. The clans thus operated as primitive nations: each family had allegiance to every other family in the clan, and problems would be resolved, in the worst case, by the clan's shaykh. Thus, being the member of a Jordanian clan was a primitive form of citizenship. No one claims that Americans are all racially related. Rather, they stand as a single nation for the purposes of protection, economic advantage, etc. The same principle held for the clans of Jordan.

Friday, October 26, 2007

The Passing of a Giant

Indeed, we are for Allah and unto Him we shall return.

Today (Friday) at fajr a brother asked me if I attended the funeral. When I asked him which funeral he was referring to, he said that of Shaykh Abu Ayman Abu Al-Shamat. I hadn't known about it until he mentioned it.

Shaykh Abu Ayman had been in the ICU of Amir Hamza's Hospital in Tabarbour. I was thinking of visiting him on Thursday but got busy, so I decided to visit him Friday. (Sometimes you don't get another chance.) Alhamdulillah, I was able to visit him last Friday. He was laying on the hospital bed saying in a quiet, struggling voice (اللهم ارض عني), "O Allah, be pleased with me." When the hospital staff asked me to leave, I kissed his forehead and sought permission to depart. He nodded his head.

Originally from Syria, Shaykh Abu Ayman passed on in his eighties, having lived in Jordan for the past fifty-odd years. Despite his diminutive stature, he was a giant in terms of spiritual state and character. Anyone who didn't have their internal eyes closed could see the state of this immense man and would be humbled before him. He was the spiritual mentor of Shaykh Ali Hani (Allah preserve him), whose character leaves no doubt regarding the perfection of Shaykh Abu Ayman's instruction.

May Allah grant us the love of those whom He loves and benefit us through it. Allah be well pleased with Shaykh Abu Ayman.

Jewish Identity Addendum

(Note: I don't use people's names in my blog entries unless they are public figures.)

My Jewish-Muslim neighbour criticized Jewish Identity & Prosetylizing on three fronts:
  1. Many religious Jews recognize that the Holocaust is irrelevant to their salvation and have their priorities straight.
  2. Many Muslims also have their priorities misaligned and truly understanding the Greatness of God above all things is something that most people fail at, not just Jews.
  3. Remembering the Holocaust is a good thing, particularly to Westerners because it was a Western phenomenon.
Regarding the first point, I agree with him: the original post did generalize too much. I actually do see eye-to-eye with the statements of some Orthodox rabbis. Furthermore, my criticism was not directed towards religious Jews who magnify the Divine and that which is connected to it, such as the messengers of God and Scripture. Rather, I am criticizing those Jews who sit back and laugh at jokes about Moses, the Ten Commandments, and even God, but are all up in arms if someone denies the Holocaust. These are the people who have taken the Holocaust as their identity in place of God's Chosen People.

This brings me to the second point: yes, there are secular Muslims who don't have their priorities straight. However, you'd be hard-pressed to find a Muslim, even an extremely secular Muslim, who laughs at jokes about the Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam), the Qur'an, or God. In fact, it would be blasphemy for Muslims to laugh at jokes about Moses or Jesus (peace be upon them). Using religion to justify one's agenda or not truly understanding the Magnificence of God is very different from openly mocking that which God has deemed sacred. Yet, we find that some secular Jews think they have an open license to poke fun at the Ten Commandments and Moses in the name of entertainment.

Regarding the third point, I agree that studying history, of which the Holocaust is one part, is important. I would also like to point out that the stubborn existence of the far-right in Europe is even more reason for Westerners to understand the Holocaust. However, aggressive prosetylizing while inflicting suffering on others breeds contempt. The world has seen many massacres and genocides, yet somehow, Jewish suffering is supposed to be greater than the rest of our suffering. And, in particular, given how much of an affront the state of Israel is to Muslims, having the world recognize Jews as being the objects of suffering without also recognizing how much they perpetrate suffering in Palestine is unpalatable at best.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

On the Origins of Flicken

Back when I was a child, I was eating a dinner of chicken with one of my friends (now my former brother-in-law). In all seriousness, he ripped the skin off of his piece of chicken and tossed it forcefully over his shoulders so that it hit the wall behind him with an audible slap. "Fat's bad for you," he said augustly. Not only did I find the situation hilarious, but it stayed with me over the years.

Then when I was an undergrad at UBC, I was friends with a brilliant, yet arrogant, East German chap. I thought his accent was pretty cool, and given how bright and arrogant he was, making ridiculous statements in mock-German was somewhat of a past-time for me. Once while I was IM'ing him (this was in 1994 using the talk program under Unix), we exchanged thusly:
Me: Flicken.
Him: Flicken?
Me: Ich flicken mein chicken.
Later in life, I found out that the intelligent (and possibly pedantic) way to accept blame was to say Mea culpa, so once when I made a mistake while working at Siberra, I wanted to accept blame yet not be too stuffy. I wrote, "Mea culpa und Ich flicken mein chicken." Strangely enough, my sense of humour had a one-man cheerleading team composed of an Israeli-Canadian. He absolutely loved this statement, telling me that Jews actually did flick chickens on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. All of a sudden, it all made sense: Mea culpa is an admission of fault, suitable for atonement, and so what do you do about this fault? You flick a chicken, of course! Without intending to, I had pithily summarized the entire ethos of Yom Kippur.


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CSIS Addendum

After reading INSET, CSIS, and the Jordanian Intelligence, my former brother-in-law reminded me of an important point that I had forgotten: Steve, the CSIS mole who came by to inquire about me after I came to Jordan, was very concerned about me stating that I lived on, "the Island of Lulu." My Yahoo profile used to list my location as, "Lulu Island." I guess Steve wasn't aware that the land he was standing on in Richmond was, in fact, an Island, and not just any island, but -- you guessed it -- Lulu Island!

Is this why they're called, "intelligence"?

Blog Entries Are Not Essays

The idea behind my blog entries is to put out a thought du jour, solicit input, and repeat. They are thought sketches, not carefully researched pieces intended for reference in you next PhD dissertation. My hope is that you will contribute to the blog in the form of comments.

For example, when I wrote Jewish Identity & Prosetylizing, I was full aware that I am not an expert in Jewish identity and that I was oversimplifying. That's why I solicited the feedback of my Jewish-Muslim friend and neighbour, which he gave in the form of a comment. Insha' Allah, I will be following up on his comment in a later entry.

Jewish Identity & Proselytizing

There are very few things that are so utterly taboo that saying them will guarantee being lampooned to no end. Try saying black people are less intelligent than whites, that young girls should get circumcised to maintain their purity, or try denying the Holocaust.

Let's focus on the last example for a moment. The fundamental problem that I find with reactions to Holocaust denial is that the Holocaust has become the focal point of Jewish identity. OK, so Hitler tried to wipe Jews off the face of the earth. Because of the continued, unrelenting emphasis on the Holocaust, Jews have essentially stopped marketing themselves as God's Chosen People in favour of Hitler's Non-Chosen People. The Holocaust has so completely dominated Jewish speech, identity, and intellect that there really seems nothing greater to them. Isn't your status as the Chosen People greater? Isn't Moses or the Torah greater? Is nothing greater in your eyes than the actions of the Nazis? In Islam, we say Allahu Akbar (God is Greater). Were the Nazis so great and powerful that they have replaced all reference to God and the things He has honoured?

Common knowledge says that Jews don't proselytize. Seeing that Holocaust awareness and prevention has essentially become an idol that Jews adore in place of the Sacred, it is clear that they do proselytize, and quite aggressively so. They sure don't carry the Message of God to others. But they will shamelessly push their own agenda when it comes to forcing Holocaust remembrances down our collective throats.

Wake up guys: Hitler simply doesn't equal God. Please get your priorities straight.

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Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Thou Shalt Brown Nose

I am a programmer by education and worked in the profession for over a decade. It's not easy for me to overcome my respect for rules. However, with hard work and life in the Middle East, I'm overcoming this handicap.

In the Middle East, you get things done not by following rules, but by being nice to people. Act meek, be obsequious, praise people, and ignore the rules; no one follows them anyways.
  1. There is a law in Jordan prohibiting smoking in public transportation vehicles. Expecting people to respect this law is like expecting Bush to say something intelligent: it happens sometimes, and causes a small outburst of joy in one's heart, but it's definitely the exception and not the rule. Instead of expecting people to follow the law, explain to them that the smoke really hurts you, that you don't mean to burden them, that they are kind, etc.
  2. Recently, I went to visit someone in a hospital. The guards told me there were no visiting hours at the time. I told them that I came all the way from Sports City (a 20 minute taxi ride) and they said, "OK. Pray for us." On my way in, someone asked me, "Are there visits allowed now?" I replied, "There are exceptions."
  3. On my way back into Jordan from Syria, I had misplaced my entry card. The Syrian border guard told me I had to pay a 100 lira fine. I told him, "I hear that you guys love to honour your guests and overlook these sorts of things." He smiled, stamped my passport and waved me off.
Moral of these stories: just brown-nose your way to whatever you want.

Letter Sort Order in Arabic Dictionaries

In the original printings of Lisan Al-Arab, words were ordered by the last letter of their triliteral root. The contemporary standard is to sort by the first letter and modern printings of the Lisan follow suit.

It is fairly well known that Arabic words with similar letters often have related meanings. While studying Tafseer Ghareeb Al-Qur'an Al-3adheem by Zayn Al-Deen (not Fakhr Al-Deen) Al-Razi, which sorts by the last letter of the root, I noticed that dictionary entries close to each other had related meanings, so much so that I began to wonder if this was the incentive of sorting the words in this manner in the first place. Being mostly illiterate, the Pre-Islamic Arabs depended on memorization in place of writing, and poets (who sang their compositions) were regarded very highly. Given that Arabic inflection is highly consistent, one could make things rhyme much more easily if the word for what one wanted to talk about ended in the same letter as the word one already had at hand.

Let Them Eat Cake...Just Not in Jordan

Jordan is a great place, but not for food. The cake here is awful. Try to ask them what kind of cream or shortening they use and you'll be lucky if they even understand the question.

Oh how I miss the scrumptious gateau of Egypt's patisseries, with its fresh dairy cream and butter pastries.

The only sweet shop I'd recommend here is Al-Fay7a, which uses pure butter ghee. However, they only make Syrian sweets.

Another food that is very inferior here is beef. I think they raise dairy cattle exclusively and butcher the male calves they don't need. There's no marbling and no one seems to know what a steak is supposed to look (or taste) like.

On the positive side, the local (baladi) lamb and goat here is great, as is the local cheese.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Word Fun & the Many Avatars of Qaf & Kaf

I mistakenly thought that shobe (شوب), the word used for, "hot" (as in, temperature) in the Levant was a corruption of the French chaude. It turns out that the word is pure Arabic. It appears in the Qur'an (Al-Saffat, 67) as لشوبا من حميم meaning, "a mixture of boiling water." Thus, the original meaning of shobe is, "mixture", but since it was used in the Qur'an in the context of one of the hot punishments of Hell, it became used to mean hot. One of the words for honey is shobe, either because it was traditionally mixed in things or because wax is often mixed in with it. The Arabs say, ما عنده شوب و لا روب meaning, "He has neither honey nor culture (i.e. milk)."

Another interesting word is bizr (بزر), a term used here in Jordan for salted, roasted seeds that people with nothing better to do split open and eat the contents of. I thought it was just a mispronunciation of bidhr (بذر), meaning seed, since people of the Levant and Egypt often pronounce the Arabic letter dhal (ذ) as z. Mu3jam Maqayees Al-Lughah indicates that bizr is, in fact, correct, as is bidhr. (There is one scholar quoted that says that bizr is wrong, but the author of the Mu3jam doesn't seem to agree with him.) The word bidhr is related to casting something about and is related to the word tabdheer (تبذير), which means, "waste."

Qaf is a strange beast in these lands. The pronunciations for it are:
  1. The Qur'anic qaf, used by scholars, pedants, foreigners, and native speakers on occasions when any other pronunciation just sounds wrong. For example, the words, "Qur'an" and "Al-Qahira" (Cairo) are almost always pronounced with the Qur'anic qaf. This pronunciation is also used by one of the North-West African countries, possibly Algeria or Morocco.
  2. Gaf. This is used by almost all native Jordanian dialects, many rural Palestinians, and most Arabs in their colloquial speech.
  3. Kaf. This is used by some Palestinian peasants.
  4. Glottal stop (hamza). This is used by city slickers of the Levant and Egypt.
  5. Jaf. The only person I've heard do this is my mother-in-law, a former tent-dweller of the Bani Hassan tribe. She doesn't do it consistently, though. She'll say something like wajif juddam to mean, "standing in front of." This actually does have a basis in older Arabic as one of the Companions said that qistas (قسطاس) was the Roman word for, "justice." Also, the Arabic words qar7 (قرح) and jar7 (جرح) are close in meaning.
As for kaf, it also has some strangeness:
  1. There are those who pronounce it chaf consistently except in the case of pronouns, in which case it's used only for the second-person singular female pronoun. In all other pronouns, it's pronounced kaf. This is the way my mother-in-law uses it. I believe rural Palestinians would have similar usage, but I'm not sure.
  2. There are those who only pronounce it chaf in the case of the second-person singular female pronoun, and possibly to a much lesser extent in a few other words, ochay?
Overall, the usage of chaf in any of its forms seems limited to: Northern Jordan, rural Palestine, and Iraq. The Southern Jordanians certainly don't use it.

Gnostic Quibbles

Suhba: Gnosis through osmosis.
The Habaib: Gnosis through meiosis.
Al-Qaida: Gnosis through psychosis.

INSET, CSIS, and the Jordanian Intelligence

On June 18, 2005, I wrote a fateful email to a bunch of brothers, inviting them over for a Labour Day Weekend full of camping, shooting, and wholesome fun. The body of the email was:
Assalamu alaikum sadati,

Please let me know if you think you can come up to Vancouver during the Labour Day weekend (Sept. 3-5) for a weekend of camping and shooting. We can shoot the rifle in the woods, but we'll have to go to a range to shoot the handguns. 357 magnum will give you quite a kick! Everything we'll be doing is 100% legal according to Canadian law, in sha' Allah. The Abu Fluffy (NOT MY REAL KUNYA) Armoury is fully licensed and registered. :)

In addition to airfare, plan to bring about $100-150 Canadian for camping, gun range drop in fees, and ammo. If you're planning on coming, please let me know as soon as possible. Those of you from California (or Seattle) can drive if you're up to it.

Abu Monkey (NOT HIS REAL KUNYA): please forward this message to Sidi Chimp (NOT HIS REAL NAME) from LA. I don't have his email address.
One of the guys I emailed had given me his work email address. It turns out that he had left his job and someone else was now reading his emails. The guy was in Toronto and around that time there were some gang shootings in the GTA, so he reported the incident to the police. So, one day I got a call from some guys at INSET telling me they want to meet me. When they came by, I met them outside my front door, closing the door firmly behind. They asked a bunch of routine questions and demonstrated their ignorance of Canadian gun laws. They were polite and reasonable. I posted the whole ordeal to CGN.

Later, someone IM'd me from Amman telling me that the authorities were speaking to acquaintances of mine in Ontario about how they knew me, etc. It was rather stirring for those guys. I shrugged it off.

After I moved to Amman, a CSIS mole by the name of, "Steve" contacted my former brother-in-law in Vancouver regarding my Yahoo profile. You see, where it said, "Occupation", I wrote, "Not currently occupying any countries." (The picture of the revolver I have posted was also probably a bit unsettling.) He broke up laughing and told them I'm just a chronic joker, that I was formerly in the army, lived in the Southern US, and gave them various other excuses explaining my love of guns.

Fast forward to my move to Amman: I entered, left, and re-entered Jordan easily, until I applied for my annual residence. The Jordanian Intelligence did the obligatory background check and found the whole story about me inviting over people to shoot, etc. So now, whenever I leave the country and re-enter, I have to report to them. They ask me routine questions like when was the last time I went shooting. Yawn.

This past week, I added, "firearms" as an interest in my Facebook profile. Mubin Shaikh tried to add me as a friend the next day and wrote me a personal message:
Salaam bro - you still here? i still have your gift of the Salawaat...could'nt get into Ymn remember? 416 123 4567 - promise not to wear a wire...lol...
I told him I didn't know what he was talking about in terms of a gift and asked him to specify when we met and what the context was. He replied:
Oh oh - LOL...I confused yur pic with someone else. My bad.

BTW - we may just run into each other one day - planning to come up to Jordan soon, InshaAllah.
First of all, you LOL too much, Mr. Shaikh. Secondly, I dunno if you think you're going to get a heartfelt welcome here, but I wouldn't bet my curry chips on it.




Fast Forward

So, it's been over two years since I posted. At the time, it was my wife, three children, and me in Richmond, BC. Now, it's my wife, three children and me in Amman, Jordan. I moved here in January, 2006. It might seem like quite a change moving across the world with five people and readjusting to a new culture.

In fact, it was a bigger change than you think. My then-wife didn't come along. So, to make a long story short, we divorced, I got remarried, had a fourth child from my current-wife who ended up dying in her 9th day of life, and got sued for insulting a police officer, all over the span of about a year and a half. Way back in 1999 I was moving the family from Waterloo to Tampa. I was waiting for US customs to tell me how much ammo I was allowed to take with me and we risked missing the flight. (For those interested, I was allowed 11 pounds of ammo.) My then-wife told me, "Life with you has never been boring." It's just that sometimes I wish it was a bit boring.

And here I am, living in Amman, happily married but gunless.