As my daughter nears the age when Muslims become responsible for completing five prayers every single day, I wonder if I will succeed in teaching her this discipline. My parents did it for me. They did it by positioning prayer as a prominent and permanent fixture in our lives, a behaviour worthy of weighty rewards and painful punishments and most of all a habit associated with extreme guilt if neglected.

My parents relayed to me tales of virtuous people who stayed up nights and abandoned days because they could not bear to end their connection with God, this prayer. And they told me about how even they, my parents, normal people, actually enjoyed prayer sometimes and chose longer verses to recite because they wanted prayer to last a little longer than just five minutes.

All of that made no sense to me, because when they taught me how to pray, all they did was show me the physical actions to perform and make me memorize the Arabic verses to recite and I couldn’t grasp the pleasure in this repeated action. I guess my dad tried to take a small step beyond that when he made me sit in the living room and told me not to move until I memorized the English translation of the opening verses of the Quran. “You have to understand what you’re reciting,” he said. And that was as far as it went.

My parents succeeded in instilling the prayer habit and the fear of missing a prayer but they failed to show me the true purpose and benefit of prayer and to lead me to the place where prayer becomes a source of peace and pleasure. I have not found my own way there yet, but all that I have accomplished so far is to recognize that I’m doing it all wrong, that my prostrating and bowing tens of times a day do nothing more for me than relief me of the guilt of negligence, and that I have no idea how to experience a prayer like the virtuous people my parents told me about.

Growing up, I remember hearing about this word “khushu” which in English has no direct translation, but it’s something like deep concentration, focus or what Westerners might understand as meditation. I heard about this term and all sorts of authority figures stressed its importance to me, but not once, not one person told me how to attain this state.

I struggled to maintain this habit of prayer through my teen years, through my twenties without the heart of it all. I held on to the empty shell of prostrations and bowing devoid of this magical ingredient, “khoshu,” that is supposed to make the bitter inconvenience of prayer deeply gratifying… and filled with a unique pleasure unobtainable from any other source.

Eventually, I couldn’t hold on anymore. Prayer became tedious, horribly, sinfully tedious. This is when I knew I would either have to let go of prayer or find out how the people in my parents’ stories experienced it.

And so I have set out on this mission now. I have only just begun and have little to tell you, but I hope that soon I can share some thoughts on this. I do this for me and for my children, because I dread to teach them to pray the way I was taught to pray. I don’t have the heart to nag, prod, bribe, threaten and punish for prayers completed and prayers left behind. There has to be a better way. I think it has to do with quieting our mind chatter, detangling ourselves from worldly involvements, listening to our spiritual intuitions and giving voice to our hearts.

A few days ago, I heard that voice. It spoke a very few words and I didn’t even recognize the voice as I have not given it say for a long time. It happened as I struggled to quiet my thoughts and focus on a gentle rhythm and when I heard it I knew this wasn’t the voice I usually hear in my head. It wasn’t the id, the ego or the superego. I was very well versed with all of those voices. Altogether, they made me, but yesterday, I saw that there was more to me than these three voices, a fourth voice that Freud never wrote about. How could one of the most brilliant men of our time not have known about this other voice?

This is where my journey begins. I feel happy that I have a first step to speak of, although I am not quite sure in which direction the step is pointed. I hope to have something meaningful to teach my daughter about prayer before it turns into tedious duty.

To have ambition, to aspire, to dream big, to strive for success, these are all assets in or society and I agree that they should be. But society goes wrong when it pressures people to dream about the wrong things or to set the wrong goals. Society prods us to aim for wealth, prestige and fame. Everybody knows the drill.

Too many people work too hard to get the next promotion or take on extra shifts, second jobs or extra course at school so they could get ahead or finish faster. People behave this way because they believe that once they’ve saved enough money or completed their degree or accomplished whatever stature they are aiming for, they will be able to exhale, let go of the stress and suddenly feel good.

What I know now is that most often goals are not within themselves worthy of our sweat and struggles. A degree in a field of study we feel little passion for is not worthy of our time or effort even if it brings prestige and wealth. A well paying job is not worth the best chunk of our day and most of our energy if we don’t learn and grow from the work we do or take pleasure in it.

Of course this is a very complicated matter because what we learn from a job is often a product of what we put in to it and how resourceful we are in extracting the most of whatever situation we find ourselves in. For example, an observant factory worker can learn more on the job than a lawyer working at a big law firm sifting through paper work all day. The factory worker could pick up all sorts of ideas and tips that will one day help him/her start and run his/her own factory.

But back to goals. To reword my point: no goal is worthy of our time and effort if all we are going to get out of it is an end result. A worthy goal is one that offers an enjoyable and fruitful journey, not only an end result.

I don’t believe in working hard at a job you feel no passion for so that you could make lots of money and one day retire rich and buy a yacht. I don’t believe in setting goals that will require years of your life performing tasks that slowly kill your soul, your being, your inner spark just so that you could achieve a goal, even a goal that may offer a long list of benefits. I would never sell my happiness in the present for benefits in the future. And this is not the same as being short sighted.

Here’s what I do believe. We must set goals where not only the end results bring happiness, but every step of the way will help us grow will bring good to our lives. It’s just not worth it to work towards a goal that doesn’t offer an enjoyable journey. The journey is all you got right now. There’s no guarantee that you’ll ever live long enough or keep your health or family long enough to enjoy the end results. If you set your self up with goals where you can also enjoy the journey you can win all the way. Never spend your life waiting… waiting and being patient and persevering for something that you can’t quite be sure will ever be yours.

If you’re working just for the money, when you’re done working one day, the money will be all you have. Pursue your passions. If you think you don’t have any, then you’re not thinking hard enough or maybe you’re thinking too hard and not listening, listening to your inner voice, your soul, your heart, the part of you that only speaks up when everything else is silent.

I do admit that all of this is quite idealistic and that real life is more complex and responsibilities take over and overpower our passions and aspirations. Sometimes money does matter and sometimes family can’t come first so that family can have something to eat in the evening, but I have full faith in the statement: If there’s a will, there’s a way. So scratch out all of your excuses and admit to yourself that the only reason you’re not doing whatever it is you really want to be doing it’s simply because you haven’t yet mustered up the will power to drive you.

One thing that I find sadly missing from many people’s attitudes is a little good old putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. People constantly get mad, criticize, blame, scorn and bad talk others for their faults and failings. But who are we judge another human being? Well… at least not until we’ve walked in their shoes.

Life is not like a board game where all players start from the first square and with the same amount of currency. Life starts each of us out at different places and with drastically different currencies. Therefore, where we end up is often just as much a product of these two factors as it is our own doing.

This is not to say that I don’t believe in free will; I do. I just don’t think free will is as big an actor in our lives as most people think. Where you are today, how far you’ve come and even how big you dare to dream has a lot more to do with where you were born, what genes your parents passed down to you, how they raised you and what your teachers told you you could or couldn’t do.

Even more surprising is that how nice you are to strangers, how generous you are with your wealth, how polite or rude you are or even how often you volunteer at your local community center are all also products of the same list of things. So, maybe the next time you feel the urge to criticize someone’s rude behavior or another person’s stinginess or laziness, you’ll stop and remember that maybe life started them out a few dozens steps behind you. They may actually be superior to you because maybe they have actually taken more steps forward than you have. Don’t be fooled if you appear to be ahead. Their route may be much longer than yours because of where life started them out.

Here’s an example: a man could have been born to the most terribly stingy parents who instilled this sense of doom in him at the prospect of parting with a penny and this upbringing may have been reinforced with equally miserly genes. If this man donates $100, it may require the same effort for a man with more ‘generous’ genes and upbringing to donate $500. So we can’t judge this person for donating less because in fact he is putting the same amount of effort to part with $100 as the second man is putting to donate $500. The same applies to all human behavior.

Therefore, people should be judged based upon effort not achievement. The only problem is it is impossible to know what kind of effort people put into each action. So, let’s stop judging each other and feeling superior to people who are a few paces behind us in the game of life because you never really know how much of your achievement is really yours and how many of their faults are truly their own failings.

One week has gone by and I’m still blank on my three wishes. Sure, lots of ideas popped into my head but only to be quickly squashed by that secondary voice in my head that critiques every creative initiative.

I started out with some personal wishes, but then realized how small minded it was to wish so small.. to wish for things on the individual level when I could wish to make the whole world a better place. To make the world a better place, that sounds like a good wish. I realized that would definitely be the objective of my yet unborn wish, but my issue remained that I could not decide on what exactly the world needed to become a better place, not that there is a shortage of things wrong, but how do I narrow it down to one wish or even three wishes.

Possible wishes tossed and turned in my mind. I could wish for the world powers to be run by moral and visionary people, but then what about cancer or the aids epidemic? I could wish for a cure for cancer and aids, but then what about the millions of people who go hungry everyday? And what about the mess in the middle east? I couldn’t think of a realistic wish that encapsulated everything wrong in the world and provided an all-encompassing magic pill solution.

So, after getting frustrated with my efforts to come up with solutions for the endless political conflicts that surround us, I regressed back to the level of the individual. I realized what I wish for most is to attain a state of spiritual strength and peace.
And so I wrap my three wishes into this one dream, something I`ve longed for for a long long time. The terribly sad and ironic and pathetic part of all this is that I have spent years working towards other goals but no more than short spurts of time trying to attain spiritual strength and peace. My only excuse is that I don`t really know the steps to take, the direction to turn or the milestones to expect along the way. I just don`t know.

Recently I read a book called Three Wishes, Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak by Deborah Ellis. The book is about Jewish, Christian and Muslim children who live in war torn Palestine. Ellis interviewed these children and in her book we hear their stories in a first person narrative format. We hear the voice of each child as they relay to us their hardships, feelings and their hopes and dreams for the future.

The stories include that of twelve year old Nora, who lives in a rehab center for disabled children. Because Nora gets around on a wheelchair, her mother doesn’t let her go outside alone. Nora says, “my mother thinks I won’t be able to move fast enough if the soldiers come. My mother is afraid they will shoot me for not getting out of their way fast enough. I think I could throw stones like the other children and still get away quickly but I can’t throw stones if I’m with my mother.” There’s also the story of twelve year old Salam, whose older sister walked into a store in Jerusalem and blew herself up. As she tells her story, Salam keeps repeating, “she should have told me,” expressing her disappointment with her sister for keeping her mission secret. Salam just wanted a chance to say goodbye to her sister and maybe make her a special breakfast that morning.
Ellis tries to balance the book with an equal number of Jewish and Muslim stories and so the reader also hears many stories about Jewish boys who worry about the mandatory military service imposed by the state of Israel. Some of the boys fear what they will have to do once they become soldiers; other boys look forward to serving and protecting.

Ellis asks these children to name three wishes. Some of the children named typical wishes, the kind of wishes we’d expect to hear from Canadian or American kids, like “I want to be a doctor” or “I want to meet a famous actor” but other children have shocking wishes. They wish for things Canadian kids either take for granted or never even have to consider. One Palestinian girl wished for a house that the Israeli soldiers couldn’t destroy, so she could live in it safely with her family. This little girl’s home has been destroyed three times by the Israeli army. Her family, friends and anti-settlement Israeli’s have helped to rebuild the house each time.

Another child wished to get well soon so he could go back to fighting the Israeli’s. This boy has been shot by soldiers more than once. The last time he was shot took from him the use of his two legs. An eighteen year old Jewish girl wished to study art because as she says, “through art, we can all understand the world and each other better.”

The most memorable wish for me was that of a fourteen year old Palestinian girl, named Yanal, who wished to become a professional singer. Yanal relays how her friends tease her and tell her that no one wants to hear the songs of a Palestinian singer and that no one will buy her CD’s, but she says she doesn’t agree with her friends. She says she will make people want to listen. Yanal says, “I wish the fighting would end, so that we can just make music and have fun and not hate each other. Maybe we could even make music with the Israelis one day. I liked Yanal’s wish because it reflected an amazing ambition and a strong will in the midst of chaos. It also expressed her hope for peace.
This book stirred up some major controversy. In 2006, the Canadian Jewish Congress criticized the book for presenting a flawed  image of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. They also claimed students should not be exposed to these stories without proper context. Basically, they wanted the book banned from schools. I would like to note that Ellis does a great job providing young reader with an explanatory context for each child’s story. She also start the book with an introduction to the whole conflict.

The book was eventually restricted on various levels in different school boards, particularly for middle school aged children. I find this to be unfair because middle school aged children do study similar books such as Hanna’s Suitcase and The Diary of Anne Frank, which present children’s experiences of the holocaust. Three Wishes should not be treated differently than these books. I believe Ellis did a great job at simply allowing the children speak their experiences and feelings and that these children’s voice deserve to be heard. I also think that it’s particularly important for North American children to read this book as an opportunity to step out of their sheltered lives for a bit and learn about the difficult realities other children live every day.

Fortunately, I am not a child living in war and I was not interviewed by Ellis, but if she did ask me what my three wishes are, I’d say…  I don’t know, let me think about that one. Maybe I’ll figure it out by next week.

I recently returned from a trip to Egypt, where our tour guide led us from one grand temple to another. Of course after the fifth or sixth temple, they didn’t seem so grand anymore. Many of these temples were carved from top to bottom with images of people and animals and with hieroglyphics. Our tour guide relayed to us many of the tales carved on these walls thousands of years ago and I was fascinated to discover how much in common they had with the current religions of the world. It seems some stories never die out, like the story of the great flood where the world was destroyed except for those saved on an arc, or the story of the two brothers who fought each other for their sister and one ended up killing the other.

Besides the stories that resemble what we read in the Bible and in the Quran today, there are also many themes that are recurring such as the God’s destruction of an entire civilization due to their deviance or God’s communication with great men through dreams. On the ancient temple walls in Egypt, we can even find the story of a man who was considered th e son of God, but who was later crucified. Of course according to history, Jesus was not even born when these temples were being built.
Anyhow, all this can either be evidence for the truth or various religious beliefs, if one would like to think that God has been continuously sending the same message to mankind and relaying the same stories in order to teach people important lessons and so on.. or the recurrence of these stories can be used to discredit religions as fraudulent and as having taken stories and themes from ancient civilizations to make up their holy books.

I find this topic fascinating and would like to spend more time researching it. I took some notes that contain more examples and I hope to organize those into a more detailed post for next week, but I just wanted to get the ball rolling this week since I’m behind on posting.
If you have any thoughts on this topic, let me know.

There are 192 members of the United Nations, although some say this does not precisely represent the number of countries in the world. The United Nations, for instance, does not include Kosovo or the Vatican City, which considers itself an independent state. Of the 192 countries in the UN, more than 150 use torture. Some governments endorse torture and actually enshrine it in the law. Others simply turn a blind eye to the behaviour of police and security services.

Torture is defined as the act of inflicting mental or physical pain or suffering, as punishment or revenge, as a means of getting a confession or information, or for sheer cruelty. If you’ve read Just Five Minutes: Nine Years in the Prisons of Syria, then you know all about torture and how creative police or security agents can get in creating new ways to inflict pain. Countries that use torture can be grouped into two: those who have low regard for human rights according to international standards, and those where control over police and security services is lax.

Many countries practise what is dubbed as ‘torture lite’. This can include rough treatment, stress positions or inducing fear and confusion. The Geneva Convention prohibits this. But there is a whole school of thought that justifies this type of treatment as a legitimate means to maintain security. America is one of these countries. In December 2002, an article in the Washington Post quoted CIA agents confirming that agents routinely used ‘stress and duress’ interrogation techniques.

The United States justifies what it does in Guantanamo Bay by removing mental pain from the definition of torture. America claims that it does not physically torture, as in lay a hand on the prisoners. They don’t count sleep deprivation, being stripped naked, sexually taunted, being forced from extremely cold to extremely hot environments or being forced to listen to ear popping loud heavy metal for hours at a time as torture. The Americans have always been good at twisting language for their own purposes. If you’re interested to read more about that, check out the book called Collateral Language.

Here’s a summary of the two sides of the torture story. One side believes that if you know someone is holding vital information that can save the lives of many people, then it is justifiable to use torture to extract that information. Supporters of the other side of the argument claim that a human under torture will do and say anything to make the pain stop. They will yell out what the torturer wants to hear and the torturer has no way of knowing whether the information is true or not. I know that it wouldn’t take much to get me to confess to stealing, conspiring, or even murder. So what use is torture then, when the information it extracts is so hopelessly unreliable?

If you need to torture someone for a confession, then you have no solid proof against the person for that crime. This means that many times you will be wrong about the suspect. Jim Welsh of Amnesty International notes that torture ‘strikes at the whole root of being human’. Besides the physical effects of torture, torture survivors suffer flashbacks and anxiety for years. Many never fully recover, whether physically or mentally. Can we afford to do this to a handful of innocent people in order to get two or three truly guilty people to confess?

The international community has worked hard to create human rights standards for all nations, but many more than two thirds of the world continues to resist these standards, most often in the hopes of improving security. I don’t believe that torture will help create a safer world. Do you?

Recently, I began co-hosting a radio show called Kanyamakan (once upon a time) on CKLN 88.1. It’s an Arab community radio show that airs on Tuesdays from 8-10 pm. Kanyamakan has been on air for over 12 years and is the only Arab radio show in Toronto. Their aim is to show case Arab artists, community initiatives and to broadcast news and analysis relating to the Arab world and to Arabs in the diaspora. They focus on issues often ignored and side-lined by the mainstream media.

This Tuesday, I interviewed Patrick Cockburn, who recently came out with a book on Muqtada Al-Sadr. The book is called: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival and the Struggle for Iraq. I found the book informative, yet entertaining. It read like an adventure story as it detailed the time and place that gave rise to Muqtada Al-Sadr.

The book also has a lot to say about the Shias, the Sunnis and their constant tug of war for control of Iraq. The book provides great background for anyone who wants to understand how Iraq has ended up in its current state and how a man like Muqtada Al-Sadr can, within a few years, accumulate such power in a country divided and torn by war.

Muqtada now heads his own army, called the Mahdi army, which has become a force to be reckoned with. In current news, the Iraqi government, along with the Americans are working fast to eradicate the Madhi army and it seems they have also drive Muqtada into hiding in Iran.

One section in the book struck me. Soon after the first bombs dropped on Iraq, people began raiding and looting. They wanted to assert the lack of authority and chaos that the war had stirred up. According to Cockburn, Muqtada, issued a fatwa stating that looters could hold onto to their stolen goods so long as they made a donation of one fifth of its value to their local Sadrist office.

Many people, particularly big Shia clerics found this shocking and condemned this action. I found it hard to swallow that a man of high religious standing would excuse stealing on a large scale. The looters thought they were robbing the state, but in fact they were robbing the glory of their country.

What also adds to the shock value is Muqtada’s request for donations to his office. Quite shameless, it seems to me. It may have been less appalling if he had asked people to donate to orphanages, hospitals or shelters, but to his own office?

To be fair, I have not read Muqtada’s fatwa and I have not read other sources on this topic. I only have Patrick’s book to work with. In Islam, scholars do have the right to issue fatwas that may seem contradictory to some Islamic laws. They issue these types of fatwas as necessary measures due to unique circumstances or changing times. This is one of the features of Islam that allows it to accommodate all times and places since it was intended to be the final message to mankind.

What do you think of Muqtada’s fatwa?

Last weekend I offered to drive my sister across the border to Buffalo, where she needed to catch a flight. They stopped us at the border. I knew it was because of me. I was born in Syria and anyone born in Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and a handful of other countries must stop and register with the border officials. Registration involves a long long list of questions, some so ridiculous that I don’t even know the answers to by heart, fingerprinting and a mug shot. Sounds familiar? Ya, sounds like what they do to criminals at police stations.

I want to make it clear that I don’t have a problem with security, I only have a problem with “homeland security” and the racial profiling its policies shamelessly call for. Just because I was born in Syria, I have to sit in a crowded waiting room for almost an hour and register with border officers every single time I enter and leave the United the States. I asked if there was anything I could do to avoid having to suffer this process every time I crossed the border and the officer said “ya, you could write a letter to some high official to get special permission, but he probably won’t give it to ya anyways.”

I don’t think keeping close tabs on everyone born in certain countries will prove an effective security measure. The fact that America’s homeland security policies are not rational leads me to think that they may be there simply to aggravate. Like, they’re trying to send some sort of subtle message: we don’t want you in our country. Except it didn’t feel so subtle. And if they don’t want me there, I don’t want to be there. My only conundrum is that too many people I love live in “the land of the brave and the home of the free”.

Have you had any border crossing dramas?

It’s been five years since the American led occupation of Iraq. Before this war began, I held on to remnants of the naive notion of western idealism that surrounded me when I was growing up. These ideas about the superiority of the west began to enter my consciousness while I was a young child in Syria, but they followed me when I moved to American and then Canada. I grew up believing that the west held up noble ideals, ideals they would never compromise, ideals that ensured basic human rights for each individual. I cringed at the thought of the fate of a man who ends up in a prison in the Middle East. Only in the west were people ensured the right to know the evidence against them, the right to counsel when detained, the right not to be tortured.

As I grew older and widened my circle of resources beyond the mainstream, my notions of western idealism melted into a puddle of disappointment. I watched a documentary about Guantanamo Bay, where Americans use another nation’s soil to commit crimes they know they can’t get away with on American soil. Although something tells me if they really wanted to get a way with it, they would have found a way. But it’s always easier to bloody someone else’s home. It makes it easier to walk away and leave the mess behind. Somehow, Americans can still feel clean as long as the blood isn’t staining their carpets. But it doesn’t matter where the crimes take place. Everyone knows who’s running the show.

The unbelievable crimes that took place in Abu Ghraib prison felt like salt rubbed into a wound. Although some people would like to argue that these crimes were an exception to the rule, I know that for every crime that leaks to the public, dozens more get swept under the rug.

Because I spent five years translating a prison memoir and because I’ve read many other prison memoirs, the torture methods used in Abu Ghraib stuck me as unique. Who but Americans would cook up such torture methods as forcing prisoners to engage in sexual acts and take photographs of them? And not only take photographs of the sexual acts, but also pose with the prisoners! This is a reflection of America’s sex obsessed society. You don’t get sex based torture in Egyptian, Syrian or Chinese prisons. You may find stories of rape but nothing as creative as what the Americas cooked up in Abu Ghraib.

In Egyptian prisons they may whip you to near death. In Syrian prisons they may throw you into solitary confinement with nothing but cockroaches and rats for company until you lose your sanity, but they won’t ask you to perform homosexual sex acts and take pictures of you.

Every society has its ill. I’m not saying anyone is better or worse. I’m just saying I’ve outgrown my naive notions of western idealism.