Akram's Razor - Reflections on Islam, Muslims & America

Rats saving lives in Tanzania

Thanks to Mystic's Muses I just came across an organization in Africa that uses rats to not only find land mines but detect Tuberculosis.

Talk about a low-tech solutions to important problems.

No need to call PETA, either. The critters are not sent to their deaths. They're actually too light to set the pressure plates off, and the website's FAQ explains that a trained rat is far too valuable to sacrifice, too.

Didn't know they were that smart.

-- A P O P O --

APOPO trains sniffer rats to detect explosives and diagnose disease. This unusual idea has been developed into a competitive technology by a group of Belgian and Tanzanian researchers and animal trainers.

Speaking of rats, the DVD for the animated film "Ratatouille" has a very funny and informative bonus film about rats' place in history.

Buddhist fists flying in Sri Lanka

Things have been exceedingly hectic, but I think I'm approaching the point where I might be able to blog again with a  modicum of regularity.

So I give you a a strange scene from Sri Lanka that reminds us how inadequate our simplistic categories are.

A peace rally of Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus is disrupted up by a band of violent Buddhist monks!  It sounds like a New Age joke.

SRI LANKA: Pro-War Monks Turn Peace Rally Into Fracas

When saffron-clad Buddhists monks and Catholic priests and nuns in white are joined by Muslim and Hindu leaders in an interfaith rally for peace, the last thing anyone would expect is that their pacific efforts would end in fisticuffs.

Chanting 'no war, no war' the marchers, on Thursday, wended their way to a public park in the capital where their speeches were rudely interrupted by a group of fiery pro-war Buddhist monks. The peace campaigners were told to take their banners and rally to the east of the island where fighting has been raging between Tamil separatist militants and the armed forces, for over a fortnight.

The unseemly scenes that followed, in which pro and anti-war monks pushed and punched each other were, to many onlookers, of a piece with the mindlessness that has marked more than two decades of ethnic conflict that has pitted the majority Buddhist Sinhala community against the minority Tamils.

A commercial to make Rube Goldberg proud

Mozaffar's Moments was kind enough to bring this fascinating Honda Accord commercial to our attention.  It brings back fond childhood memories of wacky and ridiculously convoluted mechanical solutions to everyday problems on "Tom & Jerry" and the like.

The pioneer of this delightfully impractical intellectual pursuit was Rube Goldberg. 

You must see this amazing, real-life example, a noodle-preparation machine here, that involves fire, bowling balls and even a hamster.  Judging by the animated Howard Cossel-style commentary in Japanese, there are some people who really get into this.   

"Georgia on my mind..."

Have been meaning to share some news for a while.  Obviously, the biggest news from my end by far is the millennial advent of Raihana, our two-month old daughter and the fussy-but-adorable despot of our hearts, but there is another newsflash.  I've decided to take a vow of poverty, self-abnegation and worldly abasement.  It's called changing careers from a reasonably stable one to one that is fraught with uncertainty and flat income growth.

Yes, I'm going back to school, in the Humanities and--if that's not enough of a guarantee of penury--in Islamic Studies. 

And to maximize the economic hardship and amount of time I'll spend off the job market and accumulating debt, I'm starting with a masters instead of a PhD.  (I must do my labor twice like Jacob.)

Actually, perhaps it's less high-minded or noble than all that.    When you really come down to it, I'm doing this to avoid coming into the office at some boring job and going postal.   Bas, I've had enough.  Time to get of this monotonous train.

Even before the Bubble burst years ago, I was pretty fed up with working as an Information Technology consultant.   The increasing instability of the field--Watch your back, techie colleagues.  Unless you're reading this from Bangalore or Beijing.--contributed somewhat to this dissatisfaction, but the primary reason is my dawning realization over time of the application of what economists call "lost opportunity cost" to my own life.  When you're devoting the better part of your intellectual energy and productive time to pursuits that don't interest or matter much to you (in other words, working in a career you don't like), no matter how good the salary is its a losing proposition in the long run. 

I also came to the conclusion that I'm no polymath who can hope to juggle multiple professions and absorb huge amounts of information in my limited spare time.  I realized that if I want to have a hope of contributing anything of substance to the scholarly topics that matter to me, I need to quit dabbling in them, bite the bullet, and make those interests my day job rather than a hobby.  Even if it means living in a box.

Some people manage to make it work, somehow getting the best of both worlds as they working in the private sector by day while pursuing other intellectual or artistic vocations by night and weekend.  More power and much respect to 'em.  But I need my sleep.

So, I'll be starting a Masters progam at the Department of Religion at the University of Georgia at Athens this August, insha'Allah.  I'm very excited as it's a great program for getting started on my scholarly interests, has strong faculty, and I've gotten a generous package that will, I hope, permit us to pull this off without anyone in the family being reduced to turning tricks to pay  tuition (as would have been the case at another school I was seriously considering, Duke).

Am looking forward to ditching DC, the intellectual climate of which I find increasingly stultifying.  This is a town full of bureaucrats whose career prospects depend to a great extent on not rocking the boat, so on the issues that matter most the "debate" is more like an endless game of repackaging the same old failed policies and discredited conventional wisdom so that they look new.  Old swill in new bottles.  Contrary to what many think, I don't DC's where you go to change the world.   Quite the contrary.  Real debate and innovation rarely happen within the intellectually deadening gravitational pull of the Beltway.  (I don't think it's concidence that a lot of the best, freshest thinking in foreign policy comes from thousands of miles away, at the Independent Institute in California.  Its ability and willingness to question sacred cows and woolly thinking are generally conspicuously absent from  the Beltway thinktank circuit.)

There is something achingly tragic about a place with such a skin-deep committment to open debate and accountability being the seat of world power,  the place where vital decisions affecting the fate of millions upon millions of people around the globe are made every day by apathetic and poorly informed bureaucrats.  So much power guided by so little wisdom.

And I won't miss its cost of living, which is prohibitive onerous for mortals doomed to normal salaries.  And God help you if you're a single-salary family.

So DC's provincialism and its absurd cost of living achieved what once seemed impossible.  DC  made me, a lifelong cityslicker and urban sophisticate, into a fan of small town life.  Give me a home whose mortgage doesn't gobble up 50% of my salary, a reasonably satisfying job, a decent family environment, and high-speed Internet connection and I'll live pretty much anywhere at this point.

We ship out at the beginning of August.  Much packing to do.  Groan.

Update on the baby

Shabana reported yesterday on our jihad against the conventional wisdom in a medical establishment that seems more interested in keeping doctors' weekends open for golf than providing their patient medical care that is personalized to her needs, legitimate desires concerning her body and birthing experience, and the medical specifics of her pregnancy. 

We received the full court press, with 3 different doctors trotting out every imaginable argument to scare us into inducing labor a week before her due date, despite the fact that by the standards of their own certifying body--the College of Obstetrics and Gyncology--the is no clear reason not to allow Nature to continue to take its course until we reach the due date.

The most recent doctor inadvertantly let the cat out of the bag by admitting under our cross examination that this recommendation is based largely not on objective medical criteria but on local regional policy.  He admitted that were we in Ohio, he might be advising us differently.  So all these guilt trips about us putting the baby at risk were just hot air.  This is about bureaucracy, personal preferences on the part of doctors,  and, I have to suspect, cost-cutting rather than medicine or safety.

Shabana's cousin, who lives in the area, is 10 years her junior, at the same stage of pregnancy and free of gestational diabetes, is also being pressured to induce early!   The justification?   Similiar airy arguments about some nebulous threat posed by "unnecessarily delaying" the child's birth and waiting till the 40th week.   Funny coincidence, no?  You'd never guess that not so long ago doctors were not allowed to perform inductions without a clear threat to the baby.  (Today, some women are choosing to do inductions in order to catch the Christmas holiday season.)

It's sad that we've reached a point where an attempt to have a reasonably natural childbirth if at all possible is treated as cooky and irresponsible.   

I can't help but see the influence of Big Business here.  Doing things the way things have worked for millenia doesn't sell drugs or justify complicated new forms of bureaucracy, training and administration.  We must make the process more complex, mechanized and as remote from nature as possible in order to keep everybody employed and sales of widgets up.

P.S.  There are some juicy new developments.  Stay tuned.

When in doubt give your wife coffee

Gleaned while slowly, tenderly, nursing a big cup of joe in a bookstore:

"[Today's coffee craze, with a Starbucks on every corner is] nothing compared to the popularity it enjoyed in the Middle East during the 1500s.  In Turkey, a woman could divorce her a man who did not provide enough coffee."
(The Greatest Stories Never Told, page 31.)

In our case the scenario somehow doesn't seem all that farfetched, as Shabana's as much of a caffeine fiend as me.

Never get between either of us and a cup of coffee. 

We're different types of addicts, though.  Like a true basehead, she physically suffers with headaches when she's denied her daily dose.  I can function fine without it--or so I tell myself as I eye my mug greedily--but boy do I get frustrated when I have to, and when allowed I consume it in far larger quantities than she does.   So we're both hooked.  We both chase that dragon .

Back back to Muslims and coffee.  The book also noted that the introduction of coffee initially met fierce resistance on the part of Christendom's religious establishment, which denounced it as the drink of infidels (i.e., Muslims, who were the first to discover its miraculous properties).  Pope Clement VIII eventually tried it and gave it his blessing, saying, "Coffee is so delicious it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it."  (HT: Summa Minutae) 

The story goes that its powers were first harnessed by Sufi dervishes to stay up longer at night to do zikr (i.e., chants praising God).

It reminds me of when I visited the ancient, walled city of Harrar in Ethiopia in the spring of 1998.  I wandered around this small, winding and overwhelmingly Muslim city--which was an independent Muslim city-state until its conquest by Ethiopia's Menelic II in the mid-1890s; until its conquest it was a off-limits to non-Muslims (though a few Westerners snuck in, including the British explorer Richard Burton and the French poet Arthur Rimbaud)--with an immense branch of qat in one hand and tasbih in the other (the sight of me garned a lot of  laughs and friendly waves from drivers). 

Several times, I was accosted by passersby who earnestly undertook to  explain in broken English that qat was haram unless you were using it while reciting Quran.  I in turn tried to explain, through with a bright green, tennis ball-sized glob chewed leaves on the right side of my mouth, that as far as I was concerned it was either halal all the time or haram all the time and thanked them for their concern.  (For the record, it didn't do much to me.  It was, quite appropriately, like a really strong of coffee.  Perhaps that's because I didn't consume it after the local custom. Traditionally, one sits with friends, chewing the stuff for hours over potent Ethiopian coffee until a powerful buzz builds.  My walking probably counteracted its affects.)

The stuff's illegal in the US, though I hear it can be found in modernday speakeasies in Washington DC, which has a large Ethiopian community.

Speaking of Harrar, I still remember the bizarre sight of goats running headfirst towards our car lights in the evening, high on qat leaves that had been discarded in the market that afternoon (like finicky eaters, locals won't touch day-old qat leaves).

Here's an interesting article on how the UK is one of the few Western countries to still allow qat, though momentum is building to get it banned.

While researching qat online just now, I came across a hysterically funny observation in an otherwise dry report:

Reports vary regarding the use of qat as an aphrodisiac:  men report increased sexual performance, though women disagree.(11) 

A fun list of Muslim inventions

Independent Online Edition > Science & Technology

From coffee to cheques and the three-course meal, the Muslim world has given us many innovations that we take for granted in daily life. As a new exhibition opens, Paul Vallely nominates 20 of the most influential- and identifies the men of genius behind them

When superstition kills

The pervision and cruel irony of this problem in Malawi is stunning.

For whatever it's worth, Malawi is 75% Christian (55%, Protestant; 20%, Catholic), 20% Muslim, and 5% animist & other religions.

"Have Men in Our Land Chosen to Become Worse Than Beasts?" (IPS News Service)

In addition to their concerns about wife battering, activists say they are alarmed at apparent increases in rape, underage sex and molestation perpetrated by men [in Malawi] who believe that intercourse with a child or a virgin can rid them of HIV.

"There is (a) theory applied by the witchdoctors that people who tested HIV-positive could cleanse themselves of the virus if they slept with girl-children," Justice and Constitutional Affairs Minister Henry Phoya has noted.

The straight dope on smoking sheesha

I feel like one of those holy yet strangely unpopular people who circulate long lists of beloved foods and products that might contain an ingredient which sometimes contains an additive that can be produced using something that is sometimes derived from a pig. 

Sometimes ignorance is really bliss and you wish people would just let you wallow in your ignorance.

So it's with a heavy heart that I share the sad tidings that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, sheesha smoke is not "lighter" or more "filtered" than cigarettes.

Here's the article: "One Sheesha Is Equivalent to Smoking 18 Cigarettes"

The inspiring march of the penguins

If you haven't already seen it, you need to see "The March of the Penguins" documentary, which chronicles the incredible and moving life of the Emperor Penguin in Anartica.  This story of love, sacrifice and survival in the coldest and most inhospitable place on the globe is stunningly beautiful and touching.

They say there are no atheists in foxholes.  I doubt there are too many in movies showing this wonder-filled film.

Try to rent (or, better yet, buy--quality films like this need to be rewarded by the market) the DVD, too, as it has some great extra features.

First time I've seen a romantic nature documentary!