Malaysia has a very large Chinese population, about 1/3 of the country, and the New Year (year of the Ram, apparently) is a big holiday. The town is lit up with those pretty red lanterns. Downtown, the main drag is strung with lights and lanterns from the spreading canopy trees in the boulevard to the shophouses lining each side. At night, it’s almost like entering a tent, the decorations are so thick. Even the Cat Statue has a chinese outfit on. At midnight, the firecrackers kicked in. My neighbors on every side lit off these 10-foot long strings of ladyfingers in unison. It was deafening.
rain vs. RAIN
It’s Tuesday the 21st now, and I was just getting ready to upload a little note I wrote two days ago about how pleasant the daily rains have been and how good the drainage system is here. As I began to get online, the sky broke open and dropped great torrents of rain, completely flooding the parking lot within five minutes time. An announcement came over the PA and everyone ran to move their cars. The rain was at door height as I motored out of the lot. I found high ground at the end of the lorong, or lane. By the time I walked back, the water was up to my knees. A friend told me my car should be safe for a few hours, if the rain doesn’t get any heavier. It’s still raining right now. From SR’s seventh floor office, I can see canals overflowing, playfields completely underwater, lorongs impassable.
Salams from Sarawak
Hello everyone. Life is still very hectic here in Kuching. I’m riding around town in a rented Proton Wira trying to set our household in order. No phone, no internet connection yet, so I’ve had to steal an hour here and there just to check email at cyber cafes ($.50 US/hour!). But I am alive and well. Inshallah I’ll be back to regular posting in two weeks or so…
Embrace Our Lifestyle
Introducing: Three Roods Farm! Those of you in greater Southeast Michigan now have a single source for a subscription garden, raw unpasteurized wildflower honey, organic free-range chicken eggs, chickens, ducks and lamb. O Muslims! Accommodations can be made for halal slaughter on-site for aqiqa or qurban. The subscription garden is based on the concept of Community Supported Agriculture. It’s a great way to get your fresh organic veggies while learning a little something about farming in the process. Those who want to learn more can also apprentice there for a season.
Hijrah
I keep promising to go away, and yet here I still am, blogging as before. How can I miss you if you won’t go away, you may be saying to yourself. Well, this time I mean it. I’m waiting for the shipping company to arrive as I type this who will pick up our 27 cardboard boxes. The boxes will go from here [Lapeer, MI] to Chicago by truck. In Chicago they’ll be shrinkwrapped and palletized and sent by train to LA. In LA they will be loaded onto a freighter and sail across the Pacific to Singapore. In Singapore they will be transferred to another ship and brought to Kuching. They tell me it will take 4 weeks.
Meanwhile, we fly at the end to week. From Lapeer, we’ll drive to Detroit where we’ll be checked and securitized and sent by plane to Newark. From Newark across the Atlantic to Dubai, Dubai to Kuala Lumpur, Kuala Lumpur to Kuching. That’ll take about 30 hours, depending on layovers.
So our bags go West, we go East. East or West, it’s all the same. You can’t get any farther away than that before you start coming back again.
I have every intention of blogging as soon as I arrive, but I imagine I’ll be shut down for two weeks or so. So to any first time visitors who may stop by between then and now, please have a look at the great selection of links down the left hand side of the page. In particular, I should draw your attention to the Islamic Supreme Council of America , the most courageous Islamic organization you’ve never heard of.
I’ve been writing about political issues quite a bit lately. I don’t intend to return to that after this break. Less Warblog, More Travelog. Have a look at the links under “Migration” to see blogs of this kind, the likes of which I can only aspire to. Hunkabutta’s got pictures from Japan, BWG has stories from Hong Kong, So Many Islands, so little time has news and more from Indonesia.
To my regular readers [yes, both of you] who I’ve never met, and more to my family and loved ones who I’ll never stop remembering, if there is anything I have done or failed to do by you, by intention or by mistake, by thought or by word or by deed, hidden or evident, please forgive me and pray Allah to forgive me. Emigration is the Blessed Sunnah of the Holy Prophet, and I intend this emigration of mine to be an imitation of that, in the way of Allah, through the example of the Holy Prophet, and in what follows that, Allah is my Guardian and sufficient is He as Disposer of my Affairs. May Allah grant this request and forgive me, bi hurmatil Habib, bi hurmatil Fatihah.
Erewhon, Utopia, Khilafa
Sheauga, that news carnivore, points to a great article by Muqtedar Khan in Salon.com. Sheauga has some good comments accompanying it that are worth reading, but I can’t figure out how to link directly to his posts! In any case, he picks out the key points which I’ve reproduced here:
It is time the leaders of the American Muslim community woke up and realized that there is more to life than competing with the American Jewish lobby for power over U.S. foreign policy. Islam is not about defeating Jews or conquering Jerusalem. It is about mercy, about virtue, about sacrifice and about duty. Above all it is the pursuit of moral perfection.
That is such an important lesson; Islam, all religion, is not about solving the ills of the world. It is about worshipping Allah. Having moral perfection does involve doing for those who have less, and improving the world around you. Jews call this Tikkun Olam, I think. But no dunya outcome can possibly be the target of worship. If my practice of Islam is for the re-establishment of the Khilafa, then to me that is hidden shirk; I am now worshipping my religion, which I’m counting on to solve my earthly problems. The preoccupation with worldly outcomes is widespread; I saw a poster for an upcoming Islamic conference that had as its topics “The Muslim Ummah, Our Community & Our Society, and Global Concerns”. I can’t help look at that and see Politics, Politics, Politics. What about Allah, His Beloved Muhammad, and How to Draw Near to Them? I’m sure it’ll be mentioned, InshaAllah.
H.N. led me to an amazing website called Living Islam. It is phenomenal resource, assembled and in some cases authored by Sidi Omar K N. He makes a related point in a longer essay called Modernism and Postmodernism :
Also have the anti-traditional ideas of an utopia and progress penetrated quite a few fundamentalist minds of some world religions. This shift of emphasis toward the materialistic (“das Grobstoffliche”) is one of the symptoms of the decadence of time as foretold by the Messenger of Allah 
. It is then not surprising that the greater the loss of true spirituality in a community, the stronger the imagination of some kind of paradise on earth.
. It is then not surprising that the greater the loss of true spirituality in a community, the stronger the imagination of some kind of paradise on earth.I want to tell you how great the essay is, but I haven’t finished reading it.
Back to the Khan article:
It is time that we acknowledge that the freedoms we enjoy in the U.S. are more desirable to us than superficial solidarity with the Muslim world. If you disagree, then prove it by packing your bags and going to whichever Muslim country you identify with. If you do not leave and do not acknowledge that you would rather live here than anywhere else, know that you are being hypocritical.
Of course, when I was younger and people would ask me why I don’t just leave if I’m not happy here, I would reply, “Because I don’t want to be victimized by our foreign policy.” [rimshot] I find it ironic that as I’ve come around to really respecting and appreciating the tremendous amount of good in this country, I’ve already charted a course to leave.
Another interesting article with muslim commentary dealing with the futility of fixating on political combat with the AIPAC, over at IslamAmerica. It [the article, not IslamAmerica] is very lefty, but there is some wisdom there.
Back in October, AltMuslim had an article on Muslims in political races. One interesting development was that in California, there was a muslim running for US Senate whose non-muslim competitor was endorsed by the American Muslim Political Coordination Committee. I can only speculate that this was because the non-muslim took a tougher stand on Israel. AMPCC pitched this as the maturation of muslim politics that they wouldn’t endorse a guy just because he’s muslim. But surely the benefit to muslims in the US, who all four member organizations of AMPCC represent, of having a real, live, visible muslim in the Senate outweighs any gain the other guy could give in Israel/Palestine matters.
Different Ethnic Enclave, Same Creeping Wahhabism
Cinderella Bloggerfeller has just translated from the French [a scholar lives!] a newspaper article about the muslim Chams of Cambodia. What a fascinating group of people; I never knew they existed. The bad news is wahhabis are already there, apparently, up to their same tricks. Read all about it here.
Cindy hit two interests of mine at once, the muslim world and obscure tribes. For obscure tribes in the US, a recent thread at metafilter is a goldmine. It deals mainly with various “tri-racial isolates”, intermixings of whites, indians and blacks, that created their own communities for a time. Some are apocryphal, some well-documented. It also talks about the various muslim groups made it to the New World one way or another. I imagine most people are aware that a considerable percentage of black slaves were muslim. But what about the Melungeons? If the theory that I have heard is to be believed, Spanish muslims fleeing the inquisition sailed to the New World attempting to find refuge. This would have been contemporaneous with Columbus. These people were identified as moors by the Spainards and were hunted and killed. But some remnants survived, most notably in the Ozarks. The link from metafilter puts forward a few other theories. What can one learn from this? I don’t know, but it sure is interesting. History is Whose Story, after all.
Libraries Are Changing
I won’t embarass myself by saying how long it’s been since I went to a municipal library, but I’m in one today. My, how they’ve changed. Here I am updating my blog and catching up on correspondence on a blazing fast internet connection and a sleek flat-panel monitor in the Ford Centennial Library. Thank you, City of Dearborn. Only one complaint, which is that www.bingregory.com is site blocked! What gives? I’ve been good, honest. Not even a naughty word since I started my blog, I think. I guess this makes me against internet censorship.