Food Needs:

• 3 Empty Barrels: $135
• Non-Perishable Foods to fill: $1000

Total Food Cost: $1135

Books:

• 100 A Gift for the Intellects in Explanation of the Three Fundamental Principles of Islaam of Imaam Muhammad Ibn ‘Abdul-Wahhaab with the exp. of Shaykh ‘Ubayd al-Jaabiree $1200
• 100 The Prophet’s Prayer Described by Imaam Muhammad Naasirud-Deen al-Albaanee $700
• 100 Fortress of the Muslim $210
• 100 The Collection of an-Nawawee’s 40 Hadeeth (Pocket Size) $210

Total Book Cost: $2320

Da’wah Pamphlets:

• 200 Common Misconceptions About God
• 200 7 Fundamental Questions About Islaam
• 200 Women in Islaam
• 200 Muhammad: A Witness, Bearer of Glad Tidings and a Warner
• 200 Uprooting the Forces of Evil: Islam’s War on Terror

Total Pamphlet Cost: $0 (to be donated by TROID)

Shipping Charges: $285

Dominica Total: $3740

Has anyone noticed that they ask for more money to distribute two particular “salafi” texts than they do for food? While I do not see anything wrong with sending a few Islamic books or dhikr manuals like Hisn al-Muslim, surely people in the Carribean need money to buy other necessities than food, such as clothing or tools or cooking equipment, than “salafi” propaganda tracts.

Shriver asks the question of why such events keep happening, and offers three possible explanations. One is, simply, guns: the fact that Virginia has among the most lax gun laws in the USA, allowing the purchase of “only” one handgun per month, and does not require criminal record checks when buying weapons at gun shows. Another article attached to this gives a few reasons why Americans cherish their rights to keep and bear arms: they don’t trust the government to keep them safe, a sentiment with which I sympathise enormously, as I’ve written on the past when we are threatened with the extension of our country’s callous and idiotic anti-weapon laws. The second is that these attacks are copycat crimes, with the reporting of each one increasing the potential for another; each one seems to have a new twist, as with the attack on the Amish school last year.

The third, most interestingly, is this:

I do not believe that the choice of schools or colleges for the pursuit of grievance or, often, for the staging of what I call “extroverted suicide”, is arbitrary. For most of us, school and university are the seats of profound and formative emotional experiences, and the psychological power of these locales does not necessarily abate with age. Only last month I had reason to walk down the hallway of an elementary school in the US, and the lockers, lino and acrid chalk-dust smell sent my head spinning with memories, not all of which were pleasant. I felt claustrophobic, smothered, actively grateful to be spared the tyrannies of Mrs Townsend’s home room, and relieved to get out. In fact, I couldn’t believe I was allowed out of the door without a pass.

For a lucky few, school and college are where we first distinguish ourselves. But for the majority, they are the site of first humiliation, subjugation and injury. They are almost always our first introduction to brutal social hierarchies, as they may also sponsor our first romantic devastation. What better stage on which to act out primitive retribution?

I don’t entirely agree with this. What she says about schools, particularly at secondary level (11 to 16, in the case of the UK), is absolutely true, but this massacre took place at a university, and the culprit was a final-year student. Universities are often the first place people experience freedom from the strictures and pressures of school, not a continuation of them. We now know that he had a history of mental illness and that he was known to local law enforcement for sending annoying messages to female students. While the culture of US high schools came in for much scrutiny after Columbine, the same does not seem to be happening in the case of university culture now (although it’s early days). School shootings are distressingly frequent in the USA, with university shootings much less so: according to the Guardian, the most serious one before this was in 1966, in Texas.

Massacres are often motivated by grudges against one group of people or another: Palestinians (Hebron), women (Montreal) and even children (Dunblane). Over the last couple of days, since I’ve posted a link to Abdul-Hakim Murad’s article on Bosnia and the attitude of the churches to the massacres that went on there, I’ve had a few comments referring to the grievances the Serbs supposedly had against the Bosnian Muslim population, with the devshirme (the Ottoman boy-tribute which was abolished in the 17th century) figuring heavily as always. The fact that nothing of which they refer happened in anything close to living memory precludes any of the grievances being genuine when clung to by the generation which carried out the atrocities in Bosnia. The grievances the Hutus had against the Tutsis in Rwanda related to their respective status under colonial rule, in which the Tutsis were cultivated as a ruling class, but I can’t remember hearing it suggested that this justified the genocide; however much the West indulges Israel, it would not countenance an Israeli nuclear attack on Germany to avenge those murdered in the Holocaust. And of course, when anyone mentions the grievances which lead to the terrorist acts some Muslims carry out, they are accused of justifying the acts of terrorism. All these things took place within living memory, not at least 125 years ago, the time which elapsed between the explusion of the Ottomans from Serbia and 1992, the year the war in Bosnia started. That anyone would think this justifies, or even mitigates, the genocidal acts such as Srebrenica, or the mass gang rape which took place elsewhere in Bosnia, is pretty sickening.

In other words, there was a leak. Got that, everyone?

I’m a map geek, and I know where a lot of places are that others don’t because I like to gaze at maps and read travel guides. I’m one of those people who buy Rough Guides and Lonely Planet books and never go to most of the places they are about. I’d heard of Biloxi before last week’s hurricane. I first heard it being pronounced Biluxi last Saturday morning, and I thought it was the reporter putting on an American accent. My guess is that most people from outside the region, and certainly outside the USA, have never heard of Biloxi at all. Nor would they know, for example, that Lafayette is pronounced two different ways depending on which Lafayette you mean, or that the last syllable of “New Orleans” is actually short, or any of the other examples DP gave us last Saturday.

Is it reasonable to expect people from outside an area to instinctively know its unusual ways of pronouncing things? New Orleans is a famous city, but most people do not know that locals pronounce it with the last syllable short. Over here, we have a few weird pronunciations as well, although they are usually small towns. Wymondham in Norfolk is Wyndham; Launceston in Cornwall is Lawnston; Teignmouth in Devon is Tinmouth (remember, the ou in mouth is short) - and these are things I didn’t find out until I was in my teens. And there’s a way of pronouncing the name “Cirencester” when you’re in Cirencester which does not make you sound like a tourist. To say nothing of all the other funny features in English place names: ham is “um” unless it’s a name in itself (Birmingum, Beckenum, Twickenum), “cester” is just “ster” (Gloster, Lester, Wooster, and Towcester becomes Toaster) but “chester” is pronounced as it looks.

We have a few stereotypes of Americans here, among the most common being that they are ignorant about countries other than their own. As I read in one popular newspaper, to most Americans, England is a place where it’s always foggy, where they make that whisky (brewed in the village of Scotland, England) and where Shakespeare wrote Oliver Twist. It can probably be fairly said about the average Brit that he doesn’t know much about the geography of the US either.

For one thing, asked to name a single southern state, he might well pick California. Or Florida, which is a southern state, but he wouldn’t know why Florida is and California isn’t. He would probably not be able to name a single city in Mississippi - or Massachusetts for that matter, even though he would have heard of Boston. Perhaps he might not know what state New York is in (New York, New York is something Frank Sinatra sung to fill out the syllables, innit?) or that Washington (the city) is nowhere near Washington state. And of course, most Brits don’t know what a Yank or a Yankee is. They probably think that because they’re more American out west and down south (New England is, after all, New England), they’re bigger Yanks than they are in Connecticut.

And I didn’t even learn about Yankees in history - I learned about that by chance in an English class where we did a bit of comprehension on a short piece on the Texas Rangers when I was 14. Most of what kids are taught in history here is about British history - the Romans, a bit about the Vikings and other invaders, the Tudors and Stuarts, and the Second World War. We learned a bit about the Civil Rights movement, but that’s pretty much all we learned about American history. You don’t learn much about other countries’ history in British schools, except where it relates to this country.

I guess if there’s a silver lining in any of this, it’s that it draws people together and allows people to learn about their different communities. One thing many people might have learned is that poor whites and poor blacks in that part of the world are often in the same boat rather than being enemies, as is the usual stereotype. But we can’t learn anything if we pounce on each other for making innocent mistakes. After all, I can’t think of a single other example in the whole English language of an “o” being pronounced like that in front of an “x”.

Yesterday morning, Vanessa Feltz was doing the 9am-midday phone-in, sitting in the vacant seat left at BBC London when Jon Gaunt was sent (back) to Coventry. “Could it happen here?” was the topic of conversation: in the event of a disaster striking London and people being desperate, would Londoners run riot, loot and rape? Would you just help yourself to the DVD recorder you wanted if you thought you could get away with it? Would you (she really offered this example) rape your neighbour’s Scandinavian nanny if you were all going to die soon anyway? People really thought that the British “stiff upper lip” would put paid to any such lawlessness, which I think is nonsense, but someone wrote in and said that rioting was not something working-class white people did. It was something you get from black people (as in Brixton, LA and elsewhere) and Asians (as in the riots in Yorkshire and Lancashire a couple of years ago).

Feltz is Jewish, and no doubt was told about pogroms when she was a child, so I’m surprised she allowed this arrant load of rubbish to go unchallenged. Pogroms, for anyone who doesn’t know how this term originated, were mob attacks on Jewish villages in the former Russian empire. The perpetrators were Russians and Ukrainians, particularly Cossacks. And guess what colour Russians and Ukrainians are.

You don’t have to be Jewish to know that white people are as prone to lawlessness as anyone else, however. Did anyone see the rioting on TV which followed the decision to allow Protestant marchers through Catholic areas in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s? Not many black people there. Not to mention the “no-Popery” rioting which periodically affected the UK during the 18th and 19th centuries. Some of this was kicked up by people who actually went around giving anti-Catholic presentations - among other things, by staging spoof Catholic masses, and taking their shows to places with large Irish populations. And then, of course, one must ask what colour the people who used to gather to lynch black people in the places now affected by Katrina. Did they come all the way from Mexico for the purpose? As for looting, you might look at the British Museum in London for plenty of evidence of looting by civilised white Brits with their stiff upper lips, to say nothing of the vast quantities of loot moved around the world by both Nazis and communists during the 20th century. We’re not talking of TVs and washing machines here, but artwork and other heritage items which sell for millions.

To hear these people talk, you’d think black people rioted just for fun. The causes of all such incidents of rioting are well-known; usually they are related to the police attacking and harrassing black people (particularly men) in the streets. Anyone who doesn’t know this can easily find out before offering their opinions. On the other hand, when whites have rioted in Europe in recent years, it has usually had something to do with a setback for the football (soccer) team they support, such as when Millwall fans rioted in London in May 2002, following their team’s failure to win promotion to the Premiership. The New Orleans situation is being used by those who relate everything to race as simply another excuse to carry on doing so. There are some people who resist any attempt to connect black underachievement in both Britain and the USA to anything other than their genes, be it crime, low academic achievement, or whatever.

Rioting generally takes place when powerless people are oppressed; the white people in Zimbabwe did not riot when Mugabe turned on them because they, unlike Afro-Americans, had an escape route. America is simply the only home most blacks (unlike a lot of whites) have. None of this matters to a racist; to them, blacks are simply less human, and just one step away from behaving like animals. It’s all baloney, of course. I’m white and have lived among whites all my life, and I can assure anyone who is in doubt that they are as capable as blacks of acting like uncivilised rabble.

Much Vain Speculation

Part of the brilliance of the Qur’an is that it makes no compromises over God’s transcendence, as it battles against pagan and Christian attempts to ‘localise’ God; while at the same time it makes no compromises over the human requirement to worship Him. In the Qur’an, His transcendence is not in tension with His immanence. This is because the transcendence is true in an absolute sense, because His nature is transcendent. The Qur’an’s language about the immanent God (the God of tashbih) is true contingently, because human beings are contingent. Tawhid was identical in all prophetic teachings since the beginning of time; but the ways in which He is worshipped and spoken of familiarly may validly change. It is thus a fundamental Muslim belief that ‘He is not asked about what he does.’ (21:23) For to ask Him would be to impose upon him purely human conceptions of the meaning of His names.

Reflections on the Tsunami, by Zaid Shakir (at Lamppost Productions):

Only God could have ushered the awesome power unleashed by the earthquake that moved the island of Sumatra 100 feet, yet left it intact. Only God could have ushered the awesome power to send a wave of water, whose depth reached from the surface of the water to the ocean floor, thousands of miles across the ocean at speeds exceeding five hundred miles an hour. Only God could devise an “early warning system” which told myriad species of animals to flee to the safety of high ground. Only God.

The appeal said WorldHelp was working with native-born Christians in Indonesia who want to “plant Christian principles as early as possible” in the 300 Muslim children, all younger than 12, who lost their parents in the tsunami. “These children are homeless, destitute, traumatized, orphaned, with nowhere to go, nowhere to sleep and nothing to eat. If we can place them in a Christian children’s home, their faith in Christ could become the foothold to reach the Aceh people,” it said.

Full story at Washington Post (you may need to register):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5018-2005Jan12.html

Update: al-hamdu lillah, the group has dropped the idea after the Indonesian government blocked their plans (story here at Wired News).