Arabic Class

After a 12-year hiatus, I’m finally taking formal Arabic lessons again. It meets once a week at night in the “basement” of the ustaz’s house who gave the talk at our surau last week. Not a basement really but a room built on the ground floor, underneath his house on stilts.

The last classes I took were two semesters of Modern Standard Arabic at the U. I stopped after two sems for a couple of reasons, but one was the atmosphere of the course. The Arabic class was using the textbook that had been adopted by the US State Department. Students of the course were majoring in International Policy with minors in Subverting Popularly Elected Governments. All the vocabulary and drills were totally secular in nature. We would learn “office” as in “Take me to the office of your director”. We would learn “to travel” as in the sentence “I am traveling to the oil fields now”. Now I am taking a course where the students arrive after isha’ prayers, still wearing their sarongs and kufis and sit cross-legged on the floor. Now we learn “to leave” as in “The muslims left the masjid” and “to do” as in “What did you do after the salat?” The ustaz will explain grammatical constructions by reciting a verse of Quran or hadith where it occurs. It is highly motivating.

The only catch is the class is in Malay. My Malay skills are only a notch or two over my Arabic skills, and that’s not saying much. The most difficult part is when I have to speak the meaning of an arabic sentence in Malay. I would spit and sputter getting it out in English, what to speak of Malay. Still, even if I lag behind the class in Arabic, it should at least help me improve my Malay. I had looked around for adult Bahasa Malaysia classes in Kuching, but couldn’t find any. The ethnic minorities here get BM in school as kids, and there must not be enough immigrants like me to make a class viable.

Madrasah al-Kamaliyya

My in-laws are from a small isolated village mostly preoccupied with growing coconuts. It has only between 50-60 homes, two small stores selling basic necessities like sugar, rice and fermented shrimp paste, a primary school …and three mosques. One of them is Madrasah al-Kamaliyya, a surau lying about 150 meters from my mother-in-law’s house.

Madrasah al-Kamaliyya was built in the 1920’s. It is built essentially the same as a traditional Malay house, entirely of timber on stilts, with the prayer area one full floor above the ground. It was not uncommon for homes in those days to be built entirely without nails, as was the home my late father-in-law built. Instead, the posts and beams are assembled using a mortise-and-tenon system, with the beams leveled and tightened in place by wooden wedges. The forests of Malaysia and Indonesia have some of the best timber in the world for building, and the Malays certainly make good use of it.

Madrassah al-Kamaliyya
Signboard in Jawi
Rain-fed Ablution Pool
Entrance to Prayer Hall
Inside the Surau
Wooden drums struck before the azan, in times gone by.

The design of the surau does have some differences with a house. It has two stairways leading to the prayer hall. During a mixed gathering, men and women would use separate entrances. The two flights of stairs are on either side of the ablution pool. The stairs are withdrawn under the building, such that they enter the prayer hall in the middle. This allows women and men to both enter without disturbing each other’s sections. In a home, there would be a single stairway that would enter the living room in the front of the house. If there was a second stairway, it would be to the kitchen, around the side or back.

Unlike Surau Darul Rahman and most other modern suraus, this one was built directly by the villagers of the area without government funds. I don’t really know how this affects the nature of the waqaf; I imagine it is still held by or at least under the oversight of the religious department – maybe someone can inform me. But it is a source of pride for the village that it was built entirely by their fathers’ and grandfathers’ hands.

The village is not as heavily populated now as it was twenty years ago, with many of the young people migrating to the big cities. The bulk of the population now are older couples without children at home (not unlike the American farming heartland). Maybe because of this, the surau is not as actively used as a madrasah as it may once have been, resulting in the library deteriorating sadly.

Another element of the surau that has not aged well are the drums. There is a double-headed goat-hide drum, and an all-wooden drum that is a hollowed out log with a long narrow opening along one side. In the days before amplified speakers, these drums, or beduk, would be struck prior to calling the azan, since their sound would carry farther through the jungle and plantations than the human voice could. The drums at the Masjid Jamek Jawiyyah are still struck even now. The drums of the surau, unfortunately, have become unserviceable. The wooden log has cracked. The uncle I spoke with the day I took these photos said that there’s only one man he knows of who is skilled in making and repairing these drums, and he lives a great distance away. So the drums have been moved to below the stairs until someone is able to have them repaired. They used to hang in the prayer hall.

Madrasah al-Kamaliyya was the first surau I prayed at in Malaysia, and it remains the one most dear to me. I was struck with wonder the first time I prayed there, when, after the salat, the imam and the whole congregation recited an awrad that was virtually identical with the one I had learned from the Tariqat Naqshbandi Haqqani. I was later to learn that many of the elders who founded the community a hundred years ago were followers of Naqshbandi Tariqat, albeit from a different branch. Others held bayats with other orders. The righteous practices that they taught their children have persisted within the surau although they themselves have passed on.

Mawlid ar-Rasul: Surau Darul Rahman

Prophet Muhammad’s birth was commemorated last wednesday night throughout the muslim world. The tiny corner of it that I inhabit was no exception. Surau Darul Rahman held an evening of learning and celebration. I feel extremely fortunate to live two blocks from our neighborhood surau.

      This one does not enlarge

A surau is a prayer hall just like a masjid except that it does not hold the Friday congregational prayer. Our surau could probably hold about 200 people maximum. It is a fairly new building, about 10 years old, built around the same time that my subdivision was developed. Prior to that, the area only had a few clusters of kampung-style homes sprinkled through the woods at fairly low density. Like most suraus and masjids throughout the country, ours was built in part by government funds and its activities are nominally overseen by the religious department. Often, large planned unit developments will include a surau as part of the basic infrastructure, just like pocket parks.

You may wonder why there is no dome. Well, the traditional masajid of Malaysia were built of timber and had no dome but rather a set of square tiered roofs. The grand masjids with huge domes that have been built in recent times are often gorgeous but are not really classically malay in form. I’m not saying our humble surau was built with a hipped roof as some kind of architectural statement: it’s a fairly homely building really. It’s just that the dome is not a necessary part of mosque-building around here. But I digress.

For this special night, a guest was invited to come and speak after maghrib prayers. Our guest was an ustaz from Indonesia who has been teaching Arabic and Religion at a religious school in Kuching for the last ten years. He came to us from the pesantren of East Java, an area reknowned throughout the nusantara for the high level of scholarship they maintain and the da’is they have produced. He gave a wonderful talk, touching briefly on the the fatwa of Sayyid Muhammad Alawi Al-Maliki concerning mawlid from which he read for us excerpts in Arabic and translated on the fly into Malay. There is great good in gathering together, beautifying the masjid, remembering the Prophet and praising him to the best of our ability, though we can hardly praise him as he deserves to be praised. Our only transgression, as the ustaz reminded us, is that we don’t do it everyday.

Following the cerama, the congregation broke for a meal, to be followed by zikr and nasheed. Some of us ran off with the ustaz instead to another gathering, where we recited the Ratib al-Haddad and the Mawlid Diba’i late into the evening until our throats were raw. I can’t find translations of the Mawlid Diba’i anywhere online, but you can listen to it here.

“Falaw anna sa’ayna kulla heenin/
‘Alal ahdaqi la fawqan naja’ib/
Wa law anna ‘amilna kulla yawmin/
Li Ahmada mawlidan qad kana wajib”

“And verily though we rushed to do it at every moment/
We could see around us nothing more noble/
And verily, even if we did it every day/
For Ahmad celebrating his birth is nigh unto obligatory”

[Forgive my poor Arabic. It’s just me and Hans Wehr working alone. Corrections welcome.]

[My coverage of Mawlid Nabi, Kuching 2003 is here]

Don’t Be Fooled by the Rocks That I Got

Last I wrote, my brick and mortar wall was winding its wobbly way to completion. I finished that and proceeded to backfill it with topsoil. Now the only one who can see its flaws are my neighbor. That’s the irony of landscape work: most of the work you do lies buried, the good and the bad. The topsoil here is heavy reddish to yellowish clay with a bit of grit and almost no organic material. The rich dark crumbly topsoil of home just doesn’t seem to exist here. I considered putting a layer of subsoil down first, since I’m filling to almost a meter deep, but I just was too suspicious and unfamiliar with the soils here to take any chances. Some of the stuff sold for fill dirt is such highly acidic washed-out clay that almost nothing can grow in it. If I put it down as a base layer, it would probably be OK, but if it got mixed together with the good stuff in process, it would be a disaster. So I shelled out for a 10-ton lorry of the good stuff, about 7 cubic yards. I managed to cart it all over the course of a weekend. Not bad, thought I, for one guy. But when I looked out over the yard, I realized it would take 15 more lorries at a minimum to fill in the yard as planned. 15 lorries, one every other weekend, would mean seven months of weekends. And then there’s the stone wall. It was time to get help.

 

Wobbly wall
The wobbly wall in finished form.

I was fortunate to find a very nice handyman who was willing to do it in between his other jobs. He was very fast, finishing a lorry a day with minimal assistance from me. But after three lorry-loads, which barely filled in the brick wall, my wife and I grew impatient. She was starting to see how nice it was going to look when it was done and the slow pace was just too frustrating. A lorry can’t pass on the sides of my house, but a little bobcat could just squeeze in. Hiring a bobcat would take care of the spreading and compacting work too. I tracked down a bobcat operator. Lord have mercy, the guy was like the chinese double of the equipment operators I had to deal with back in Michigan, complete with beer gut, red nose, harsh language, and as stubborn as the day is long. He was an older guy, so I started off addressing him as encik, mister. Siapa nama encik? He had no idea who I was talking to. Huh? Siapa? Aku? Ok, awak it is then.

It's gonna be a fun weekend
It’s gonna be a fun weekend

There’s an empty field a half a block from my house. I had the lorry driver dump twelve loads. The poor bobcat had to haul each bucket load from half a block away, but that was the only way to have a continuous flow of work. He managed to finish it in three days. I had staked out the wall separating the two terraces, and he followed my line reasonably well. On the down side, I had decided to buy two grades of topsoil, just to save a bit of money, the second quality stuff to go on the bottom. Sure enough, the stuff was totally mixed up. Good thing I followed my first mind and not bought fill dirt for the bottom. Also, now that the bobcat is gone and the soil has settled, I figure I still need another three or four loads. For the record, that would make about 150 cubic yards of soil total.

Before the bobcat started  Work in progress

[sorry for the dirty pictures – I usually try to keep this a family blog.  CLICK TO ENLARGE -ed.]

I visited a local quarry and lined up some block stone. All that was available was a pretty dull grey granite. I would have preferred something with more color or texture, but what to do. I also would have preferred something squareish, but the closest thing they had was “angular”. I estimated I’d need about 10 cubic yards of stone. Unfortunately the quarry would only deliver full 10-ton lorries, which hold about 7 cubic. So I have laying in my back yard 19.8 tons of 9×12 granite block stone. I could have hired my same friend to help with the wall, but funds had become pretty low by that time. Even “dirt cheap” becomes real money when you’re dealing with soil in these quantities. And it is said that a dry stone wall is the cheapest wall to build yourself, but the most expensive to hire out. Besides, the wall is the fun part. I wanted to do it on my own. Well my friends, the wall is about half done. I was going great guns until Ramadan, during which I got nothing done, and I never really got back on track after that, especially now that the rains have come. You can see from the pictures how it is coming. It has a slightly rougher look than I would have liked, due to the irregular stone, but I can live with it. The wall has gotten deeper and thicker as I go, as the reality of how much extra stone I have sinks in. Anyone with good ideas for several ton of rock kindly let me know.

 

The wall taking shape
The wall taking shape

 

The Yard: Cekur Udang Gamit

There is a Malay nursery rhyme that goes like this:

Cekur udang gamit

Minta cekur bagi kunyit

Mothers will often sing this to small babies while holding their wrist, to which the baby will respond by opening and closing their fist. It is very cute. I don’t know how my wife managed to teach our kids at the age of just a few months. They pick it up very easily almost like it is some kind of reflex.

The rhyme means:

Cekur shrimp waving

Ask for cekur, give turmeric

Great, so that makes about as much sense as nursery rhymes can be expected to make. But what on earth is cekur, you ask? Maybe you’re not all that sure what turmeric is either, for that matter.
Cekur in flower  Turmeric/kunyit  Ginger/halia
[Click for larger images]

Well, turmeric, curcuma longa/domestica, kunyit in Malay, is a spice in the same family as ginger, zingiber officianale, halia in Malay, but with smaller rhizomes (not a root, technically). The rhizomes are orange-yellow and can be used fresh or in powdered form in a lot of asian cooking, especially curries. The leaf can also be used, chopped up as an herb or as a wrapping for baking or roasting fish. My turmeric is a sad specimen. It is forever being victimized by leaf-rolling caterpillars.

Now cekur, kaempfera galanga, probably, is a much rarer plant without a proper English name that I know of. Let’s just call it chekur. It is seldom used for cooking but is prized for medicinal purposes, including post-partum care. It is ground into a paste and applied as a poultice to the stomach to aid the uterus in shrinking and to tone the stomach. [You will be notified when my cekur herbal supplement MLM is ready to launch – ed.] I’ve written a bit more on malay post-partum treatment previously. Finding cekur for sale is not easy. There is only one man selling it in all the veggie markets in Kuching, and sometimes he’s out of stock, so I made sure to plant some of what we bought last time around. It has done splendidly, spreading all over and even flowering, which is unusual for some of these rhizomaceous types.

That guy down at the Gambier bus yard also sells benglay (sp?), which is a smaller and uglier rhizome even than cekur. It is an even more obscure gingerish plant. My wife had never heard the name before much less seen it till moving to Sarawak. Our local midwife allowed that it could be used in place of cekur if needs be, but it smells very bad when made into a poultice. If I wind up visiting that guy again after the baby comes, I’ll buy a bit just to photograph it. Which is likely since we went through kilos of cekur last time around, and I doubt if I’ve got quite that much here in the yard.

Open-Air Museum

By Adrienne Rich

Ailanthus, goldenrod, scrapiron, what makes you flower?
What burns in the dump today?

Thick flames in a grey field, tended
By two men: one derelict ghost,
One clearly apter at nursing destruction,
Two priests in a grey field, tending the flames
Of stripped-off rockwool, split
Mattresses, a caved-in chickenhouse,
Mad Loy’s last stack of paintings, each a perfect black lozenge

Seen from a train, stopped
As by design, to bring us
Face to face with the flag of our true country:
Violet-yellow, black-violet,
Its heart sucked by slow fire
O my America
This then your desire?

by Adrienne Rich, 1964
From Collected Early Poems 1950-1970 (W.W. Norton)

Reproduced from the Jewish Culture News

Henry James and Ailanthus

Ailanthus must have been widely planted by New York City in the 19th century. The great American author Henry James mentions Ailanthus in his description of Washington Square in the book of the same name (1880), excerpted by PBS.

The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the doctor [sic] built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of white marble steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble. This structure, and many of its neighbours, which it exactly resembled, were supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last results of architectural science, and they remain to this day very solid and honourable dwellings. In front of them was the square, containing a considerable quantity of inexpensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its rural and accessible appearance; and round the corner was the more august precinct of the Fifth Avenue, taking its origin at this point with a spacious and confident air which already marked it for high destinies. I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare–the look of having had something of a social history. It was here, as you might have been informed on good authority, that you had come into a world which appeared to offer a variety of sources of interest; it was here that your grandmother lived, in venerable solitude, and dispensed a hospitality which commended itself alike to the infant imagination and the infant palate; it was here that you took your first walks abroad, following the nursery-maid with unequal step, and sniffing up the strange odour of the ailanthus-trees which at that time formed the principal umbrage of the square, and diffused an aroma that you were not yet critical enough to dislike as it deserved; it was here, finally, that your first school, kept by a broad-bosomed, broad-based old lady with a ferule, who was always having tea in a blue cup, with a saucer that didn’t match, enlarged the circle both of your observations and your sensations. It was here, at any rate, that my heroine spent many years of her life; which is my excuse for this topographical parenthesis.

According to James, Washington Square was the “ideal…of genteel retirement”, full of “inexpensive vegetation”, “rural and accessible” in appearance, having a “riper, richer, more honourable look” than more tony parts of town. The Square was mostly planted up with Ailanthus:

it was here that you took your first walks abroad, following the nursery-maid with unequal step, and sniffing up the strange odour of the ailanthus-trees which at that time formed the principal umbrage of the square, and diffused an aroma that you were not yet critical enough to dislike as it deserved

I had to look up umbrage. I knew it meant offense, but that didn’t seem to make sense. The principal meaning is shade! Offensive shade – I don’t know if James intended to give that connotation, but I think it fits rather well.

Many thanks to Christine for the link.