November 25, 2011
Seven Years
Unfortunately, there is not much to show for the seventh anniversary of Irrelevant Opinions. Someday, I'll update this.
May 16, 2011
Shadow and Flame
 |
| Slave Lake Mosque (apologies for my poor cellphone camera picture) |
I awoke this morning to the news that the entire city is now burning, due to forest fires carried by heavy winds. While the residents have been safe alhamdulillah, their property and belongings have largely been destroyed.
The pictures depict many streets I've walked myself. The hardest hit areas appear to be those within walking distance of the mosque itself, so it is entirely likely that their beautiful mosque is among the ruins. I can only hope and pray that the community can find a way to pick up the pieces again, and that they work alongside neighbours to rebuild their town. It would be a powerful statement of mutual respect and cooperation that could insha-Allah help them overcome the distrust and fear that split the community over the last decade.
Important numbers | |
|---|---|
| To donate toiletries, bedding call Edmonton Emergency Relief Services | 780-428-4422 |
| To donate to Red Cross | 1-800-418-1111 |
| To register as evacuee or to reach evacuees call Red Cross | 1-800-565-4483 |
| Info on hospital patient evacuees | 1-866-301-2668 |
| Wildfire information line | 1-866-916-INFO |
| WildFire Road Closure Hotline | 780-644-5653 or 310-4455 |
May 03, 2011
Repost: Morning
Reposted from January 2006.
... except very little of this holds true today. Parliament is no longer outside my window. In fact, I woke up in a Toronto hotel on a gloomy, rainy, and unseasonably cold day. I didn't sleep particularly well. Neighbours didn't smile; instead, they cursed under their breath as they watched the morning news, and honked their horns on the highways. The Senators and Maple Leafs have both been relegated to insignificant bottom-feeders, and the Habs were eliminated from the playoffs last week.
All that being said, however, there is no point in moping. Because life goes on, and it is up to each individual to make the most of it. Things may not always go according to plan or desire, but such is life.
A Conservative majority may change many things for the country; for better or for worse remains to be seen. But what happens in the halls of power do not change the fact that I am ultimately responsible for myself. And who I am, who we all are, is what truly represents our country.
I woke up this morning and looked out the window as I always do. I looked upon the Canadian Parliament buildings, the famous Peace Tower rising above downtown office buildings. The flag perched above the tower blew in the wind, much like it has every other day.
Much has changed beneath that tower and flag, but the structure remains the same. The surroundings remain the same. The country looks the same. For the most part, the people have not changed. The government may have changed, but many things remain constant. My neighbours still smiled in the hallways. Strangers still chatted merrily on the bus. The Ottawa Senators beat the Maple Leafs again. Unfortunately, the Habs kept losing.
I stepped outside; the weather was warm, only a few degrees below zero. I slept well the night before; I was ready to put in a good days work.
The election may not have gone as I hoped, but things aren't so bad after all.
... except very little of this holds true today. Parliament is no longer outside my window. In fact, I woke up in a Toronto hotel on a gloomy, rainy, and unseasonably cold day. I didn't sleep particularly well. Neighbours didn't smile; instead, they cursed under their breath as they watched the morning news, and honked their horns on the highways. The Senators and Maple Leafs have both been relegated to insignificant bottom-feeders, and the Habs were eliminated from the playoffs last week.
All that being said, however, there is no point in moping. Because life goes on, and it is up to each individual to make the most of it. Things may not always go according to plan or desire, but such is life.
A Conservative majority may change many things for the country; for better or for worse remains to be seen. But what happens in the halls of power do not change the fact that I am ultimately responsible for myself. And who I am, who we all are, is what truly represents our country.
November 15, 2010
The Forgotten Slaves: The Curious Case of Slave Lake
Our perspectives repeatedly clashed, but we typically got along very well. Me, having lived all my life in Canada; him, having grown up in Africa, then migrating to Canada, then returning to Africa for studies, and eventually settling back in Canada. He was uneasy, unsettled, ready to leave at the first opportunity in order to secure the value of tradition in his family. That I felt no desire to leave, he felt, was a sign that I rejected tradition and embraced a culture that placed no value in family and morality.
While leaving has crossed my mind in the past, it usually ended up detouring to Tim Hortons before forgetting where it was trying to go. The thought could never make full the journey from idea to objective; the body, meanwhile, remained unmoved entirely by those fleeting ideas.
He never did feel comfortable in Ottawa, afraid for his daughter born days before my own. How could it be, he argued, that his daughter grow up in this society, with this culture, and still find room in her heart to embrace and practice her faith? How could she identify with the religion when she could not identify with a land that embraced the religion?
It was a conversation that carried on for a while, as we travelled westward towards the Rockies before the journey north to Yellowknife. It was an intimidating journey, one that would take days to complete, but it was sure to become a memorable experience.
And then we arrived at Slave Lake.
After the Second World War, as Muslim immigrants began migrating in large numbers to Edmonton, a smaller community made the journey northwards to this small fur trading town to establish business. Muslim generations grew up in this small town, mixing with the larger community until they were as much a part of them as they were of each other. By the 1990s, a small mosque was established to finally meet the needs of this growing congregation.
However, the mosque was something of an anomaly for Slave Lake. While the Muslim community worked for generations to mesh with the greater population to the point of becoming indistinguishable, the mosque stood out like a weird uncle. It didn't quite fit the family values, nephews would pretend they weren't related, but ultimately it still was part of the family - it had to be tended to, respected, and visited. And like this, the community maintained a relationship, however tenuous, with the mosque. Its existence was a significant achievement for the city as a whole, but it suffered from a lack of scholarship, a dearth of individuals capable of teaching, and a general disconnect with the larger urban centres nearby. As such, the promising Muslim community of Slave Lake, with roots four generations deep, lost touch with their identities.
Then, in the days following 9/11, the mosque was set ablaze, leaving a fiery ruin that suffocated whatever little spirit was left.
The people became afraid. It was never established, at least to me, who caused the fire - it may have been the Muslims themselves, it may have been others. It may have been a freak coincidence. But however it happened, it gave birth to a prevailing sense of fear in the community, the desperate feeling among the threatened populace that they could no longer be associated with this religion any longer.
A new mosque was rebuilt, eventually. A beautiful mosque, in fact - one of the best I've seen in the country, for its size. But it was little beyond mere walls; barely five people, mostly travelers, would join the Friday prayer, standing behind an imam who with his best intentions struggled with even basic Islamic terms. The mosque timetable only included 'Asr and 'Maghrib prayers - there was no expectation that one might actually pray outside of those hours during the summer, and no expectation of any prayers at all during the winter.
But more depressing was the refusal of basic services to those of us passing through the city who appeared visibly Muslim. "All I want is a slice of pizza!", pleaded a friend at one Lebanese-owned pizza place. But his beard indicated to the owner that he had other intentions, and the owner kicked him out with no meal. The business owners, afraid of being associated with those who identify themselves as Muslims, refused even to sell to us travelers, ironic given the economic history of the city.
This, my friend argued, was what our second generation communities were coming to. He felt that Slave Lake represented a microcosm of the growth of a new community in the West - initial optimism, gradual loss of tradition, and an eventual disappearance of all connection to Islam within a matter of three to four generations. This, he argued, was why he could not raise his own children in this country; perhaps, with Allah's help, they could keep things going through one generation, but two or three generations down the road, they may be refusing pizzas to men with beards.
Circumstances are different, I felt. Slave Lake was a small town, isolated and detached. The size, my friend argued, only accelerated the process of decline, but that decline was indeed the path all Muslim communities in the West will take over time. For larger cities, perhaps the decline would be more gradual, but loss of religion was inevitable.
Given my own upbringing, I have always decoupled the concepts of geographic tradition and religious tradition; one does not necessarily lead to the other in my mind. There is no guarantee that raising a child in a Muslim country would result in a better upbringing anyway; in fact, there are enough examples I can think of where youth embraced their religion only after leaving their Muslim homelands behind. But my friend was convinced otherwise, and who was I to argue with this friend whom I greatly respected; he had far more knowledge and experience than myself, and had traveled far more extensively throughout the country and world than I had. He was speaking out of experience, whereas I was only speaking out of false, misplaced hope.
But false hope is hope nonetheless. And it is that hope, misplaced as it may be, that can inspire a generation, while fear can suffocate it as it has done in Slave Lake. As Muslims, we are to live between hope and fear, which for me exists right where I am right now; it is home.
While leaving has crossed my mind in the past, it usually ended up detouring to Tim Hortons before forgetting where it was trying to go. The thought could never make full the journey from idea to objective; the body, meanwhile, remained unmoved entirely by those fleeting ideas.
He never did feel comfortable in Ottawa, afraid for his daughter born days before my own. How could it be, he argued, that his daughter grow up in this society, with this culture, and still find room in her heart to embrace and practice her faith? How could she identify with the religion when she could not identify with a land that embraced the religion?
It was a conversation that carried on for a while, as we travelled westward towards the Rockies before the journey north to Yellowknife. It was an intimidating journey, one that would take days to complete, but it was sure to become a memorable experience.
And then we arrived at Slave Lake.
After the Second World War, as Muslim immigrants began migrating in large numbers to Edmonton, a smaller community made the journey northwards to this small fur trading town to establish business. Muslim generations grew up in this small town, mixing with the larger community until they were as much a part of them as they were of each other. By the 1990s, a small mosque was established to finally meet the needs of this growing congregation.
However, the mosque was something of an anomaly for Slave Lake. While the Muslim community worked for generations to mesh with the greater population to the point of becoming indistinguishable, the mosque stood out like a weird uncle. It didn't quite fit the family values, nephews would pretend they weren't related, but ultimately it still was part of the family - it had to be tended to, respected, and visited. And like this, the community maintained a relationship, however tenuous, with the mosque. Its existence was a significant achievement for the city as a whole, but it suffered from a lack of scholarship, a dearth of individuals capable of teaching, and a general disconnect with the larger urban centres nearby. As such, the promising Muslim community of Slave Lake, with roots four generations deep, lost touch with their identities.
Then, in the days following 9/11, the mosque was set ablaze, leaving a fiery ruin that suffocated whatever little spirit was left.
The people became afraid. It was never established, at least to me, who caused the fire - it may have been the Muslims themselves, it may have been others. It may have been a freak coincidence. But however it happened, it gave birth to a prevailing sense of fear in the community, the desperate feeling among the threatened populace that they could no longer be associated with this religion any longer.
A new mosque was rebuilt, eventually. A beautiful mosque, in fact - one of the best I've seen in the country, for its size. But it was little beyond mere walls; barely five people, mostly travelers, would join the Friday prayer, standing behind an imam who with his best intentions struggled with even basic Islamic terms. The mosque timetable only included 'Asr and 'Maghrib prayers - there was no expectation that one might actually pray outside of those hours during the summer, and no expectation of any prayers at all during the winter.
But more depressing was the refusal of basic services to those of us passing through the city who appeared visibly Muslim. "All I want is a slice of pizza!", pleaded a friend at one Lebanese-owned pizza place. But his beard indicated to the owner that he had other intentions, and the owner kicked him out with no meal. The business owners, afraid of being associated with those who identify themselves as Muslims, refused even to sell to us travelers, ironic given the economic history of the city.
This, my friend argued, was what our second generation communities were coming to. He felt that Slave Lake represented a microcosm of the growth of a new community in the West - initial optimism, gradual loss of tradition, and an eventual disappearance of all connection to Islam within a matter of three to four generations. This, he argued, was why he could not raise his own children in this country; perhaps, with Allah's help, they could keep things going through one generation, but two or three generations down the road, they may be refusing pizzas to men with beards.
Circumstances are different, I felt. Slave Lake was a small town, isolated and detached. The size, my friend argued, only accelerated the process of decline, but that decline was indeed the path all Muslim communities in the West will take over time. For larger cities, perhaps the decline would be more gradual, but loss of religion was inevitable.
Given my own upbringing, I have always decoupled the concepts of geographic tradition and religious tradition; one does not necessarily lead to the other in my mind. There is no guarantee that raising a child in a Muslim country would result in a better upbringing anyway; in fact, there are enough examples I can think of where youth embraced their religion only after leaving their Muslim homelands behind. But my friend was convinced otherwise, and who was I to argue with this friend whom I greatly respected; he had far more knowledge and experience than myself, and had traveled far more extensively throughout the country and world than I had. He was speaking out of experience, whereas I was only speaking out of false, misplaced hope.
But false hope is hope nonetheless. And it is that hope, misplaced as it may be, that can inspire a generation, while fear can suffocate it as it has done in Slave Lake. As Muslims, we are to live between hope and fear, which for me exists right where I am right now; it is home.
July 05, 2010
From Far and Wide
I've been asked many times to update my blog, which I've been meaning to do anyway. However, the summer - in spite of a lengthy holiday - has been bizarre and, as usual, travel has busied my schedule leaving me unable to just sit and write. But with things seemingly settling down now, I will try to get back into it lest my literary skills suffer.
The travels have been long and exhausting, but have provided me with a fair amount of inspiration for things that I would like to elaborate on through this blog. Alhamdulillah, I've traveled quite a bit in my life, and recently wrote a list of all the cities I've spent time in. Taking a cue from Target Theory, I intend on writing about most of these places at some point.
In the last two months, I haven't spent a full week in one city. My last two months of Jum'ah prayers have been performed as follows:
May 7th: Ottawa, Ontario
May 14th: Kingston, Ontario
May 21st: Gatineau, Quebec
May 28th: Calgary, Alberta
June 4th: Edmonton, Alberta
June 11th: Slave Lake, Alberta
June 18th: Yellowknife, Northwest Territories
June 25th: Edmonton, Alberta
July 2nd: Kingston, Ontario
And this upcoming Jum'ah, July 9th, I expect to be back in Calgary after a brief sojourn at home in Ottawa. I still hope I can get some writing done insha-Allah between flights and family responsibilities, so stay tuned.
The travels have been long and exhausting, but have provided me with a fair amount of inspiration for things that I would like to elaborate on through this blog. Alhamdulillah, I've traveled quite a bit in my life, and recently wrote a list of all the cities I've spent time in. Taking a cue from Target Theory, I intend on writing about most of these places at some point.
In the last two months, I haven't spent a full week in one city. My last two months of Jum'ah prayers have been performed as follows:
May 7th: Ottawa, Ontario
May 14th: Kingston, Ontario
May 21st: Gatineau, Quebec
May 28th: Calgary, Alberta
June 4th: Edmonton, Alberta
June 11th: Slave Lake, Alberta
June 18th: Yellowknife, Northwest Territories
June 25th: Edmonton, Alberta
July 2nd: Kingston, Ontario
And this upcoming Jum'ah, July 9th, I expect to be back in Calgary after a brief sojourn at home in Ottawa. I still hope I can get some writing done insha-Allah between flights and family responsibilities, so stay tuned.
Nauman Theory
Nauman Theory: A Special Presentation of Irrelevant Opinions.
Congratulations to Nauman on his marriage!
Congratulations to Nauman on his marriage!
Open publication - Free publishing
September 23, 2009
Newborn, three others injured in 417 rollover
Newborn, three others injured in 417 rollover
Alhamdulillah, we're all safe, and avoided any life-threatening injuries. Please make du'a for me and my family, that everyone makes a full recovery, and that this incident brings us closer to Allah.
Everything in life is a test, and Allah will test the believers on their gratitude and patience. May He accept all of us.
Alhamdulillah, we're all safe, and avoided any life-threatening injuries. Please make du'a for me and my family, that everyone makes a full recovery, and that this incident brings us closer to Allah.
Everything in life is a test, and Allah will test the believers on their gratitude and patience. May He accept all of us.
September 13, 2009
Antisocial
When an e-mail worm affected my rarely used Hotmail account, I did the judicious thing and changed my password. I've never used Hotmail as a primary e-mail account, but was still hung up on MSN Messenger, where the majority of my online communications used to take place. Somehow, the Hotmail password change didn't register with MSN Messenger, and the Live Messenger client has refused my credentials ever since. Since very few of my friends actually used instant messaging anymore, I didn't lose much, so never bothered to investigate further.
It was a rather quaint relic of the early days of the Internet, having to download an application that could only communicate with others using the same application; online social networking has been the domain of large web-based platforms like Facebook and Twitter for quite some time now. I avoided those services early on, and somehow that became my "thing". People came to know me as "the brother who hates Facebook", and for lack of anything else, I decided to embrace that title. I found alternatives to the services that Facebook provides, with the critical exception of actual people. If I were to join, however, it would feel like being late to a party.
But peer pressure and the cuteness of my newborn daughter caught up to me, so now I have a Facebook account. The first thing I found bothersome was how much of a profile they already had on me. I had been tagged in other people's pictures in the past, and every single invitation I've received over the years has been kept in their databases, awaiting me upon my first login. So, even without being a member, the Facebook team could already identify me, or almost anyone else with an e-mail address, in great detail if ever required. From a privacy perspective, this bothered me, but if I had anything to hide, I wouldn't have a blog with my real name either.
The other thing that annoyed me was the famous "Facebook picture". One of the first things I did was look up my old high school to find people I've lost touch with over the years. And almost every profile picture was the same overexposed shot of random people holding alcoholic beverages while hooting at the camera; usually one of them looks like he or she is about to vomit. That picture wasn't clever or original or even interesting the first time, and it isn't any more interesting the eighteenth time. Somehow, after seeing people I know in these shots, I can never look at them the same way afterward.
As a data architect by day, I've always been fascinated by the layers of information that we expose online, and how they can be pieced together. An e-mail address can be considered as a globally unique identifier from which one can consolidate all the various data streams to put together a comprehensive repository of data. It's a little bit scary, but from a purely technical perspective it's rather intriguing.
Communication has evolved over time, and I suppose it was only a matter of time before I caught up. One of the more recent trends has been the efforts of consolidating all the various protocols into single streams accessible anywhere. The Palm Pre has Synergy, HTC does it in the Sense UI, and Motorola is now pushing their MotoBLUR system, all in an effort to unify online identities to actual people; anonymity and privacy are hardly objectives.
These trends will continue for some time, as protocols open up and intercommunication becomes easier. And eventually, who we are online may be as important to ones livelihood as who we are offline.
But as people, as human beings, we must keep our humanity alive through our works, and not our status messages. Joining a Facebook group condemning something does not equate to standing up for justice. Writing a wall post in support of a sick friend can never replace visiting them in person. And one cannot fulfill the rights of family by "friending" them.
It takes a little blood, sweat, and tears to attain goodness in life. It's what separates man from machine.
It was a rather quaint relic of the early days of the Internet, having to download an application that could only communicate with others using the same application; online social networking has been the domain of large web-based platforms like Facebook and Twitter for quite some time now. I avoided those services early on, and somehow that became my "thing". People came to know me as "the brother who hates Facebook", and for lack of anything else, I decided to embrace that title. I found alternatives to the services that Facebook provides, with the critical exception of actual people. If I were to join, however, it would feel like being late to a party.
But peer pressure and the cuteness of my newborn daughter caught up to me, so now I have a Facebook account. The first thing I found bothersome was how much of a profile they already had on me. I had been tagged in other people's pictures in the past, and every single invitation I've received over the years has been kept in their databases, awaiting me upon my first login. So, even without being a member, the Facebook team could already identify me, or almost anyone else with an e-mail address, in great detail if ever required. From a privacy perspective, this bothered me, but if I had anything to hide, I wouldn't have a blog with my real name either.
The other thing that annoyed me was the famous "Facebook picture". One of the first things I did was look up my old high school to find people I've lost touch with over the years. And almost every profile picture was the same overexposed shot of random people holding alcoholic beverages while hooting at the camera; usually one of them looks like he or she is about to vomit. That picture wasn't clever or original or even interesting the first time, and it isn't any more interesting the eighteenth time. Somehow, after seeing people I know in these shots, I can never look at them the same way afterward.
As a data architect by day, I've always been fascinated by the layers of information that we expose online, and how they can be pieced together. An e-mail address can be considered as a globally unique identifier from which one can consolidate all the various data streams to put together a comprehensive repository of data. It's a little bit scary, but from a purely technical perspective it's rather intriguing.
Communication has evolved over time, and I suppose it was only a matter of time before I caught up. One of the more recent trends has been the efforts of consolidating all the various protocols into single streams accessible anywhere. The Palm Pre has Synergy, HTC does it in the Sense UI, and Motorola is now pushing their MotoBLUR system, all in an effort to unify online identities to actual people; anonymity and privacy are hardly objectives.
These trends will continue for some time, as protocols open up and intercommunication becomes easier. And eventually, who we are online may be as important to ones livelihood as who we are offline.
But as people, as human beings, we must keep our humanity alive through our works, and not our status messages. Joining a Facebook group condemning something does not equate to standing up for justice. Writing a wall post in support of a sick friend can never replace visiting them in person. And one cannot fulfill the rights of family by "friending" them.
It takes a little blood, sweat, and tears to attain goodness in life. It's what separates man from machine.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)