philosufi

Hajj 2010: Eid Mubarak!

Eid Mubarak! You may recall that back on Eid-ul-Fitr we pointed you toward the annual series of fantastic photographs of Ramadan and Eid-ul-Fitr events on The Boston Globe site. The Globe has also, for the last two years, run a series of photos for the Hajj and Eid-ul-Adha, which are equally worth perusing:

• Hajj/Eid-ul-Adha 2008
• Hajj/Eid-ul-Adha 2009
• Hajj/Eid-ul-Adha 2010

The Hajj seems to get bigger every year, and more layers of complexity are added by technology and other factors of globalization. It's fascinating to contrast the photo series above with something like these photos of Hajj from a 1953 issue of National Geographic, not just in terms of what has changed but also what hasn't. And speaking of change, we found this video of proposed structural changes to the Grand Mosque (in order to accommodate the ever-increasing numbers of pilgrims) quite impressive. There will probably be a lot of resistance to such changes in certain quarters, but the problem of crowd management must be taken quite seriously. The King of Saudi Arabia and his government have a huge responsibility to both the past and future in developing the area around the Ka'aba (not one we'd personally be eager to shoulder).

   

And if you go through all these images, and are still hungry for a little more on the Hajj, check out  CBC reporter Muhammad Lila's Hajj blog that he's keeping on The Toronto Star website.

Domo Arigato Mr. Salato: Virtual Spirituality

Douglas Adams once wrote about an Electric Monk, whose job was to believe you, no matter what. It wasn’t there to take your confessional, to offer advice, or anything else. Just to save you the labour of finding someone to believe you. Adams had a unique gift for creating Chindogu characters, and the Electric Monk’s endearing desire to uncritically believe you was one of his subversive, but underappreciated, highlights. The technology required to have a humanoid robot listen to you, believe you, and act upon your beliefs is of course, far beyond us right now, but what about the AI and robotic tech that’s near-term, or already here?

There have been automatons of varying quality, for hundreds of years, some pretending to be human, and others simply humanoid. Those pretending to be human can recite a sura or bust a rakat with the best of them. But does it qualify as fulfilling a religious duty? (Let’s flip this around to make it a more familiar question – if you’re human, and recite Qur’an or perform salat without knowing the meaning or reasons, what portion of your religious duty are you fulfilling?)

If, like the students at the International Islamic University of Malaysia, you program a robot to go through the motions of salat (see video below), what does it mean? Is any of your own intention transferred to the robot? Is the robot’s salat like that of angels – duty-bound, not one of choice like humans? Constant, repetitive, and just following orders? I remember when I was a kid, learning the stories of how humans came to be from an Islamic perspective. God created Adam and blessed him with free will, like the jinn. The angels were created simply to obey. It was pretty clear that the intentional prayers of Adam or Iblis would be worth far more than the automatic prayers of the angels.

We’re less than a month away from Hajj. Imagine you had a robot capable of crowd negotiation and carrying out the Hajj duties. You can perform Hajj for someone else; my father’s done that for his own father, who never had a chance to go. Could you one day have an Electric Monk perform Hajj on your behalf (assuming you couldn’t meet the criteria for going yourself)? Could you pilot a telepresence system through Hajj, maybe have it throw a few stones for you? This idea isn’t completely without precedent. For those who cannot walk, there’s a type of porter who will carry you through the various stations of Hajj, being, in effect, proxy legs.

This conversation ultimately leads to the very definition of humanity, but from two angles instead of the traditional one. The standard millennia-old approach involves a “who are we, what are we” line of questioning. The newer one, brought on by various humans-playing-God stories like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, involves something even atheists must grapple with: What of our component structure makes us human? An artificial tooth doesn’t detract from your humanity, and neither does a transplanted lung. Replace body parts with artificially created options, some of which are engineered to be better than the original, and the conversation changes. Artificial heart, iron lung, and hyper-engineered replacement legs are only the start. Once we've uncovered the brain's Application Programming Interface, we can start tinkering with memory and storage, and we’ll be at the point where we can codify information held in the brain. The end goal of course, is to put your brain on a hard drive. (What are the moral and ethical implications of life-caching? Who cares, when you can have cool toys like this?) There is significant support in Islam for organ donation, but I’m not aware of the current discourse on alteration with the intent of improvement beyond natural functional range.

When we do get to that stage, you’d better hope someone's opened up the gates of ijtihad. Like, yesterday.

(Click here to watch the video in another window.)

Silat Kalam: A Martial Art for a Religion of Peace

When I was growing up, the martial arts absolutely captivated me. I started with judo in junior high, some jiu-jutsu in early high school, then Shotokan karate for the next few years, simultaneously practicing other martial arts with my friends. I even taught karate and basic self-defence for quite a while. A smidge of aikido and hapkido got me through the start of university, then the martial arts practice waned as my priorities changed. Quite a few years went by, and I eventually joined a Goju-Ryu karate dojo for a couple of years until priorities changed again.

One problem I had to deal with throughout all those experiences? The bowing. In Islam, of course, we bow only to God, and bowing toward anyone or anything else is considered inappropriate. In the martial arts though, bowing is the alpha and the omega of every interaction and the class itself. What to do?

A large part of it is simply perspective. The Islamic Weltanschauung (can you tell I've been in Deutschland this past week and a half?) interprets bowing as demonstrating subservience and acknowledging dependence on the other party. In the Asian martial arts, the root cultures can interpret bowing as a sign of respect, not subservience. But perception is reality, right? What are Muslims supposed to work with: their own interpretation, or that of the host environment? Go with your own, and it's seen as a sign of disrespect to the host environment. Go with the host environment, and you're perceived as disrespecting God.

All of this would have been allayed however, if I could have practiced Silat Kalam, a Muslim martial art. Silat is a full martial art, with Islam at its core, and originates in Malaysia. In a widely published piece by Antontio Graceffo, the first non-Muslim permitted to study the art, he quotes Guru (teacher, master) Mazlan Man:

Silat Kalam is a martial art where you never use a lot of force or movement, and each movement is based on the position of the prayers, the position of where you pray to God.

I breathe because of God. I drink because of God. I eat because of God. I practice Silat because of God, he concluded. This is a portion of the mantra which Guru Mazlan Man has his students recite daily. He explained his philosophy this way. We must remember that we only do things because of God. And if we only do things because of God, we will not do bad things. You cannot say, I steal because of God.

Instead of bowing to start the class, hands start in prayer positions, and a short series of dua'as (prayers of supplication) is recited. Silat is a completely defensive art, and all movements (buah) start with an opponent's attack. There are blocks, locks, throws, grappling, and inescapable holds. (Assuming you want to keep your body intact.) All blocks are followed by strikes which are designed to cause maximum pain for a brief period of time. The goal is to have your opponent lose the will to fight. To guarantee an end to the conflict, a strike is followed by a throw or lock. When that opponent is locked up, well, good-bye Mr. Chips.

Graceffo is the well-known Brooklyn Monk who quit Wall Street to travel extensively throughout the Far East and study various martial arts. He's also put quite a bit of time and effort into learning six languages and defending the people of Burma and Cambodia against their governments. His story is fascinating; do check it out, and enjoy his Martial Arts Odyssey video library too.

For those of you interested in studying Silat Kalam, there really aren't a lot of places to go. You'll have to contact Guru yourself. He takes only a few students, so best of luck on that.

I'd like to leave you with a quote from the video below. When Graceffo, a Catholic, asks Guru whether he can study under him, Guru (who is Muslim) responds "we don't talk about religion, we only talk about God. If we talk about God, everybody's happy. It's only when we talk about religion people get angry." Now there's a guy who gets it. (If you're having trouble with the Flash below, click here instead.)

 

Eid Mubarak!

 

Eid Mubarak everyone! Since we are taking the day off to celebrate Eid-ul-Fitr, we're just going to share with you a few links to one of our favourite features on the web: the Boston Globe's "The Big Picture" series, a fabulous collection of photojournalism. For the last three years they've covered Ramadan around the world in all its diversity. We always look forward to seeing each year's installment. Most of these are quite stunning and some are simply spectacular. Don't even try to look at these on some teeny-tiny screen on a handheld device: get thee to the biggest monitor you can find, and really savour them.

• Ramadan 2010
  
• Ramadan 2009
• Ramadan 2008

Enjoy these photos and the end of another month of fasting, and we'll be back next week with our new T-shirt! Look for it on Monday...

iMama: Amina Wadud's 100-day blog

One of this Ramadan’s indisputable delights for me has been discovering that Muslim feminist scholar Amina Wadud started keeping a blog on Religion Dispatches, which is one of my favourite online magazines on the subject of religion. Every morning, after fajr, I eagerly check my blog reader looking for the latest entry.

Even if you’re not in academia, you’ve almost certainly heard of Wadud, or about her. In addition to being the author of the very important Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective and Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam, she achieved worldwide fame (or notoriety, depending on your perspective) a few years ago for publicly leading a mixed Friday prayer in New York City. (Note: world still spinning on axis.) Despite the global uproar over this, it was neither the first time in history that this had ever occurred (though some claimed it was) nor was it the last time. This controversy has overshadowed Wadud's many contributions, in my opinion.

Qur’an and Woman is one of the key texts that helped me get beyond patriarchal interpretations of the scripture, something that was absolutely essential to my conversion. (Several other scholars also deserve props, but I should especially mention Asma Barlas and her book "Believing Women" in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an.) So I owe some of my Islam to Wadud.

Anyway, the blog: Wadud is planning to make hajj this year for the first time, and is keeping this blog for 100 days, from the beginning of Ramadan until Eid-ul-Adha (the end of hajj).

What I am loving about her blog is that it offers many glimpses into her personality and her spirituality. Yes, there is plenty that reflects her normal erudition, but it’s the mix of chatty informality and substantial scholarship that engages me. What makes it even more compelling is that she is sharing a lot of her insights as they are unfolding for her, and giving me a great deal to contemplate. I think her blog provides a wonderful window into not just the head and heart of one of the foremost Muslim scholars of our time, but also into the life of one Muslim, in all its fullness and complexity and texture. It's written so that both Muslims and non-Muslims can find things to appreciate and understand (not an easy task, as I am finding out with this site).

One interesting aspect of following this blog: having heard her speak in person, I constantly hear her distinctive, memorable voice in my head as I read each post. I can so easily imagine her saying out loud everything she is writing. This is intensifying the sense I have that we are having a conversation, even though we’re not. (Well, in my head we are.)

The blog rambles a bit in places, but I can assure you that it’s a fair bit of work to produce daily blog entries, especially of the length Wadud is posting, and with all the extra praying this month, there’s only so much time to edit things until they’re tight enough to squeak. Plus, she’s composing entries on an iPad, for reasons to do with her planned travels, but it strikes me as a suboptimal tool for creating material of this length. So I won’t nitpick, because I’m finding every entry is a gift of some sort. Also, as far as rambling is concerned, I live in a very shiny, transparent house myself.

A few of my favourite posts so far:

• The Queen is Coming: Preparing for Ramadan
  I love her notion of Ramadan as the queen, and hajj as the king.
• The 99 Names: Allah is Not He Nor She
  Just because language is gendered doesn’t mean God is. How I wish more people (especially Muslims) understood this! She explains this better than I've ever heard it explained.
• Shukr: Gratitude
  A beautiful entry on one of my favourite subjects

I look forward to following this blog each day as her journey toward the Ka'aba (both literal and metaphorical) unfolds. My days are starting to feel incomplete without it. And please: Somebody collect and publish these blog entries!

(Want to know more about Wadud? Here's a good interview: "The Koran Cannot Be Usurped")

Wakeup Call: Using Qur’anic Verses as Ringtones

Here’s a cool problem: You’re a devout Muslim with an awesome mobile phone--a BlackBerry, of course. You’re smart and aware, not just because you have a BlackBerry, but because you’re conscientious enough to silence it long before salat (prayer).

But one day, you’ve got a lot on your mind, you forget to silence it, and you get a call. Your ringtone is, cleverly enough, the adhan (call to prayer). Suddenly--mass confusion! Did someone actually start the adhan? Some people stand up, some remain sitting, and the imam looks mildly annoyed. Oh, the humanity!

Or what if you’ve got an ayah (verse) as your ringtone, but answer the call before the ayah is complete and it meaningfully changes the message? Ouch.

We’ve come a long way--thankfully--since Für Elise. You’ve been able to choose your own ringtones for more than a decade now, and in the last few years most mobile phones allow you to use an MP3 or other arbitrary file as a ringtone. Of course, when the phone goes off, hilarity often ensues. Or at least eye rolling.

Back to the point. Does it make sense to use the adhan or an ayah as a ring tone? Let’s see…

1. Does it help your taqwa (God-consciousness)?
   
2. Are you performing ibadat (worship)?
   
3. Are you being respectful to the ideas represented by the adhan or Qur’anic verse?
   
4. What if it goes off while you’re taking a dump? (Don’t pretend it hasn’t happened.)

Now, you’re the one who’s answering these questions, but the mufti who lives in my mind says:

1. Maybe.
   
2. Questionable at best: see A Look at the Qur'an Ringtones Fatwa.
   
3. Umm…not really.
   
4. Mortification. Especially if it’s a touchscreen device. (See Fatwa on Cellphones: No Koran Verse Ringtones in the Toilet)
   

It’s not often that I agree with a range of right-of-spectrum muftis (scholars), but it really seems inappropriate (not to mention unnecessary) to use the adhan or an ayah as a ringtone, especially when there are more ringtones than you can shake a Sony Ericsson W910 at. And you know at least one of them will help you will keep you taqwacore (although you probably don't need that going off in the mosque, either...)

What do you think? Am I totally off my meds? Should al-Azhar University actually ask Egypt’s cellular companies to ban the ringtones? Do you use Qur'anic ayat or the adhan as your ring tone? What about the other kinds of material some muftis have suggested as alternates? The Egyptian fatwa suggests "religious songs or poems that praise the prophet" -- but some of these could still be problematic. What would be a good choice of ringtone if you wanted to be reminded of God?

Islamic Prayer Technology

 

Ramadan Mubarak! I thought I’d do a quick Philosufi roundup of some technology designed to make life a bit easier if you’re Muslim. Most of these solve hurdles that are unique to Muslims, although there’s certainly value to be found in a few even if you’re not one of the lucky one-point-something billion. My area of focus was electronic items, partially because they’re fun, but mostly because this is what we associate with technology today. Islamic cultures have historically developed a stunning range of innovative technologies during their prosperous times (see 1001 Inventions for a great overview).

El Sajjadah 1426
by SO::PDS/// Soner Ozenc Product Design Studio

If the world of Tron had a mosque, these would be its prayer rugs. It uses DuPont’s electroluminescent phosphor (“EL”) –technology – for its embroidery. (It behaves like glow paint, but it’s electronically controlled.) From designer Soner Ozenc (the last paragraph’s my favourite):

A prayer rug is a small and portable carpet that Muslims put on the floor when they perform their prayers. Its main function is to provide a clean and isolated platform for the prayer. With the specific patterns on its surface, it also aims to bring the atmosphere of a mosque to wherever they take it.

Muslims pray five times a day. The only product they need to perform their prayers is a prayer rug. And there is one thing they need to be careful about: the holy city of Mecca -the direction towards which they should perform their prayers.

It indicates the direction via the data coming from a compass module embedded inside it. The closer to the direction of Mecca it is turned, the brighter the patterns illuminate.

Next time you’re at a rave and it’s time for Tahajjud, how more perfect could it get?

eRug
by Wael Aboulsaadat

We read about this totally cool prayer rug in The Toronto Star a while back. Wael Aboulsaadat is a PhD student at the University of Toronto, looking at computer UIs in a religious practice context. His prayer rug can show you Qur'anic verses to help you recite and memorize, let you know when it’s time to pray, and help you find Mecca with its compass (future releases will have a 3-D Kaaba). The best part? The embedded sensors that watch your posture and movements. If you make a mistake, a gentle buzz goes off – just enough to alert you, but not enough to break your flow.

The same technology could easily be used for other religions that have prescribed actions and content. (We can see this technology applied in other narrow range-of-motion situations too, like a manufacturing line, or for a martial arts n00b.)

iTaskinator
by Productive Muslim

A task manager made by ProductiveMuslim for the iPhone, with a uniquely Muslim twist. It uses time-blocking (creating a block of time for your task and putting it into a calendar instead of just a list) and since it’s aware of local prayer times, it schedules work around them. (Shokran to Product Muslim for the pointer!)

iPray Lite
by Guided Ways Technologies Ltd.

One of thousands of apps and devices to help you find qibla and let you know it’s time to pray. All of them have some extra features of various sorts, like recitation, local time zone awareness, etc. There are so many of these it’s hard to understand, and I’m really not sure how one decides which prayer program to get. Got one you like? Let us know in the comments.

iQuran
by Guided Ways Technologies Ltd.

From the same company as the iPray Lite, “iQuran offers its users the Complete Quran in the Uthmani Font along with verse by verse translation and recitation. iQuran offers excellent usability options and extreme ease of use.” Like the prayer navigators, there are just thousands of ways for you to carry the Qur'an with you, everywhere you go.If you put one of these on your iPhone, does it change the nature of your device? Is it halal to put it in your pocket? If you get a phone call in the middle of recitation, does the ring cut off the verse and potentially change the meaning? What about bringing it into the bathroom with you? Since swiping your finger lets you jump to a particular verse, are you touching the Qur'an? Do you have to make wudu before using your iPhone? Does the presence of the full Qur'an with translation mean you need to think different?

Holy Quran Read Pen
by The Mission Technology (HK) Ltd.

Okay, now this is truly cool. I know it is, because Deborah said so. The Holy Quran Read Pen needs a better name, but despite that, I was seriously impressed with the product promise. This handheld pen-format device has 2GB memory in which it contains five complete voice recitations of the Qur'an, English & Urdu voice translations (plus optional Persian & French). It also comes with a Qur'an in Othmani script. But that’s not teh awesum. Here’s what is: The Read Pen can recite any page, surah or ayah by just touching the appropriate area in the Qur'an. Seriously.

They point out multiple benefits of this approach, two of which particularly stand out for me. For people with reading difficulties, learning disabilities, or dyslexia, they get immediate word support during recitation. For those who want to learn how to recite the Qur'an, but do not have a teacher, you can listen to it, and record your own recitation voice! You can compare your recitation with the pros.

Read Pen can even read your own Qur'an. Ship it to them, and they provide a transparent overlay with embedded code for the Read Pen to understand.

Note from Deborah: she totally thinks this product should be called the BIQra -- BIC + iqra ("read")!

Got cool stuff we should know about? Tell us!