The Arabization of Islam

Fatemeh Fakhraieon has written an excellent article on altmuslim on the Arabization of Islam:

Since the original Muslims were mostly Arab, everything associated with them - their culture, names, and family structures - has been associated with Islam. But this presents a problem since the vast majority of Muslims in our current world are not Arab. Passing off Arab culture as Islam in this regard is inaccurate, exclusionary, and disrespectful of other Muslims' cultures.

Converts to Islam illustrate the issue even further. If a Latina converts to Islam, for example, she may decide (or those at the local mosque may urge her) to take a "Muslim" name, like Fatima or Khadija (which are also Arab names). But why can't Lucinda be a Muslim name? What makes a name "Muslim"?

I know of many non-Arab converts who have taken Arab names upon their conversion. But why? What's wrong with the names their parents gave them? There isn't anything in the Holy Qur'an that mandates Muslims to have Arab names. Changing your name from Carmelita to Khadija isn't going to get you into Paradise any quicker. Changing one's name doesn't change one's ethnicity or personality. But having an Arab name makes one seem more "Muslim," because of the way Arab culture is seen as synonymous with Islam.

Another excellent example is clothing, which mostly affects Muslim women. The niqab (the face-veil) was rarely seen outside of the Arabian Gulf until recently. Most Muslims see the niqab as a byproduct of Arab culture. It is only recently that the niqab has been interpreted as religiously authentic instead of a cultural expression. A minority of women in Canada, the U.S., and Europe now wear niqab because they believe it is religiously mandated.

...

The real danger is that Islam is getting buried under all this cultural expression. It is possible to be Muslim without being Middle Eastern, without having a name like Mohammed, and without wearing dishdashas (the long robe worn by most men in the Arabian Gulf states) or niqabs. We should reconsider why Arab-ness is, all of a sudden, next to godliness.

Fakhraieon also runs Muslimah Media Watch and contributes to Racialicious, neither of which I knew about but both of which sound very interesting.

Of Tea and Tetris

Tea and Tetris are the master keys to my life.

Let's take tea first. What do I do to wake myself up? I have a cup of tea. What do I do to relax? I have a cup of tea. What do I do when I'm tired, I've eaten too much (or too little), I'm watching TV, am on the computer, or am working? At the start and end of things? In order to celebrate? When I'm getting really to have a really good discussion with someone? Or even when I have nothing to do? I have cup of tea. Tea is a constant. Tea is everything.

Yes, coffee, Pepsi, and Coke are all valid alternatives -- and they're sometimes exactly what I need and want -- but there's nothing quite as smooth and gentle, yet strong and powerful, and as...default as tea. Meanwhile, coffee can be bitter, harsh, overly strong, really weak, or really milky while carbonated drinks can be sharp and over-carbonated. And yes, tea can be weak or milky...but, dammit, cold or hot, milky or not, tea it's tea!

Oh, and if you want something even smoother and gentler than black tea, there's green tea, other types of tea (English breakfast, Earl Grey, etc.), and many, many flavoured teas to choose from.

Then there's Tetris: the be-all and end-all of work life. What do I do to energize myself for work? I play Tetris. What do I do to relax my brain? I play Tetris. What do I do when I'm on the phone, in order to stay awake, while I'm uploading/downloading large files, while listening to a podcast, or simply to mitigate boredom? I play Tetris.

Tea and Tetris: what would I do without them?

Thank you China/Burma/India and Alexey Pajitnov.

All Corduroy Songs Now Online

From 2003 to 2004 I was in an English rock music band called Corduroy. We were pretty successful -- as successful as an unsigned, underground, English music playing rock band based in Islamabad, Pakistan can be -- and we even released an album, called 'The Morning After'.

For reasons that I've explained on this page, I still maintain the website that I made for the band. Recently, though, I've uploaded our entire album to MediaFire. The production quality isn't the greatest, but the songs are good.

More on the Toshiba M700

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the newly-launched, really exciting Toshiba M700 tablet PC. Since the touch screen version of that is due to be launched by the end of this month, no reviews of it have been posted on the 'net so far. However, thanks to GottaBeMobile.com's coverage of CES 2008, there is now a quick hands-on video of it and a brief discussion on it with Toshiba's Kevin Roberts.

A number of cool things about the M700 emerged from that discussion: (1) the optical drive has an auto lock feature that disables the CD/DVD eject button when the tablet is in motion; (2) the widescreen LCD looks really good; (3) the inking experience seems to be pretty good; (4) the weight distribution on the tablet is pretty good; (5) it is a powerful, full-featured machine; and (6) it has an excellent price point.

I can't wait for a proper hands-on hardware review of a production system. Let's hope we don't have to wait too long.

Excellent Health Advice

Some excellent health advice from Michael Pollan, author of 'In Defense of Food':

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

That's the advice journalist and author Michael Pollan offers in his new book, In Defense of Food.

"That's it. That is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy," Pollan tells Steve Inskeep.

Read the NPR article for more.

Two Good Articles on Pakistan: Fisk, Hamid

I came across two good articles on Pakistan today.

The first, 'They don't blame al-Qa'ida. They blame Musharraf' by Robert Fisk (thanks, Ayesha) talks about the ISI (i.e. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency) and about how:
...Yesterday, our television warriors informed us the PPP members shouting that Musharraf was a "murderer" were complaining he had not provided sufficient security for Benazir. Wrong. They were shouting this because they believe he killed her.

The second, 'It's Troubled, But It's Home' by Mohsin Hamid,is completely different. It's a much more personal article, written from the perspective of a Pakistani expatriate:
...As my wife and I board our flight from London to Lahore, evident all around us is a longing for home -- for the friends and family who are central to Pakistani culture in a way that many foreigners find so remarkable. (As an admiring American roommate of mine once said, "All you guys do is hang out.") This duality of Pakistan as a place both troubled and normal, a place capable of producing a large diaspora while also affectionately tugging at those who have left, is often lost on the world's media. International news outlets tend to cast Pakistan as the one-dimensional villain of a horror film, a kind of Jason or Freddie whose only role is to frighten. Scant attention is paid to the hospitality, the love for music and dance, or the simple ordinariness of 164 million people going about their daily lives.

Which then ends on a positive note:
In the United States, there will be newspaper columns and television talk shows dedicated to "loose nukes" and the "war on terror." Here in Pakistan, one can see signs of people coming together. Scare stories notwithstanding, it is possible (although by no means certain) that out of this tragedy the world's sixth-largest nation may succeed in finding its voice -- and with that the chance for a better future.

If you get the chance, do read both of them.

A Little Perspective: Defending Musharraf

Jonathan Power wrote a really good article in the Toronto Star yesterday in which he rightly defended President Musharraf:
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf gets a bad press; Benazir Bhutto a too kind one. Which of them is the real rogue?

When Musharraf, as Pakistan's top army commander, tried to engineer war with India over Kashmir in 1999, he demonstrated his roguish side. Yet even many of his opponents in Pakistan will concede that since he deposed Nawaz Sharif and assumed power he has been largely a benevolent dictator.

Read the whole article; Power makes a good point. Though, really, most of us Pakistanis didn't expect much "democracy" from Bhutto anyway. Her post-herself PPP succession plan being the ultimate case in point.

And we have no problems in conceding that Musharraf has been good for the country. I mean, can you imagine what life would have been like under anyone else? Present circumstances excepted, of course. Though, if you think about it, it's all those good years that make the present situation seem that much worse don't they? For example, had we not had a totally free press for the last five years, would we have missed not having one now? And had things not been so good in the last five years, would college students from across the nation have known enough or cared enough to actually protest the Emergency? Heck, had things not been better for the country, at least half of those students would have been in the US anyway!

My point is: all this is worth thinking about before we completely dismiss Musharraf and, in a catastrophic error of judgement, let the crooks back into the country and into a position of power. I hate to say it but, for now at least, the only way that I see us getting out of this mess is to keep Musharraf on as President. Without him -- and, really, without the military providing a constant threat and counterbalance -- our mostly corrupt and mostly useless politicians will, yet again, screw the country over and we'll be back to square one. Again.

And if not that, the only other way out is via a provisional government and the restoration of the judiciary. The real, honest, and just judiciary; not the sham one they've got in there right now. That's the key, though, isn't it? The Rule of Law. We've never really had it -- not in the last 4,000 years at least -- and until we get it and keep it for at least three generations, we'll never actually break away from our feudal, kingly, and dictatorial past.

Spiraling Downwards...

Speaking of the situation in Pakistan, things seem to be getting only worse. The Asian Human Rights Commission just published a statement on the how Asma Jehangir's daughters were assaulted and threatened that you should read [Via The Emergency Times].

The AHRC has also published a good overview on the fundamentals of what is happening on in Pakistan these days. And though it comes across as sounding a little sensationalist:
This is what Pakistan has become. It is a draconian military state and uses anti terrorism as a pretext to strengthen itself and to oust the rule of law. In essence it is a lawless place where any act of cruelty to any person at all, be it a leading politician or a chief justice, can be done with impunity. Those are the conditions under which the ordinary Pakistanis have to live and must adjusted themselves to.

Everything that the article says is, unfortunately, true.

Higher Education in Pakistan

A couple of months ago I wrote about how, as it turns out, things in Pakistan aren't going as well as we thought they were. Pervez Hoodbhoy, one of Pakistan's leading scientists recently wrote an article in Dawn that dispels the myth the the Government of Pakistan is actually fixing up our higher education system. It's an excellent two-part article of which this is the first part. I'll post a link to part two when it gets published.

(Note: You can find some of Hoodbhoy's other articles in Chowk.)

Benazir Bhutto Assassinated...

I can't think of anything to say. Besides, everyone else is already saying it -- and saying it much better than I ever could.

All political ramifications aside, though, my thoughts, prayers, and well-wishes go out to Bhutto's family. I know how hard it is to lose a loved one; especially a mother. And the more public that person is, the harder it must be for close family since any sendoff that you might want to give your loved one is inevitably hijacked by everyone else. I hope her family -- especially her children -- are hanging in there.

Why Music Production Keeps Getting Crappier

While I'm not a music producer, back in 2004 I helped produce my former band's first full-length album. Since we were doing everything ourselves (recording, producing, mastering, etc.) we basically had to teach ourselves all there was to know about small-scale music production. And, believe me, there's a lot to know.

Two of the issues that came up back then were those of overall song loudness (how loud we wanted to make our music) and of compression (which would make even the soft parts of a song loud but would compromise on musical texture and nuance). This is a big issue in music these days, with Rolling Stone magazine calling it 'The Death of High Fidelity'. I wanted to write about this back in August when Scott Rosenberg wrote his 'The Unbearable Loudness of Recording' blog post but I never got around to it. Now, thanks to the excellent Rolling Stone article, I don't have to write about it at all! So, if you're interested in music and the technical reasons for why modern music sounds so crappy, the article makes a good -- but long -- read.

In recent months I have been particularly disappointed with Bruce Springsteen's 'Radio Nowhere' which is an excellent song that is seriously compromised by it being too loud and too in-your-face. What's worse is that it's too loud and too in-your-face throughout the duration of the song. Compare that to something like Linkin Park's 'What I've Done' which is also loud -- it is, after all, a hard rock record -- but has so much more light and shade (i.e. musical variation) in it.

Linkin Park

I've always liked Linkin Park. The band's music is melodic, has a great beat, and pulls off both hardness and softness really well. The rap rock style works nicely and all of its music exceptionally well produced.

The first two singles off the band's new album, 'Minutes to Midnight', though, are particularly good. 'What I've Done' was good in it's own right but it got so much cooler when it was featured as the closing track for 'Transformers' (2007) and I really like the slightly-harder-than-U2 sound they've chosen for 'Shadow of the Day'. I guess it pays to have Rick Rubin as your producer, doesn't it? :)

I'll now have to give the whole album a listen. I'm sure it won't disappoint.

Taking Notes

I take a lot of notes. And I mean a lot of notes. I take notes for things like:

  • Planning out a report, paper, or essay

  • Brainstorming a website, business strategy problem, or a computer program/algorithm

  • Taking notes during a class lecture or conference

  • Even making a shopping list or a list of things to do


I like to think I take good notes and, since I'm a bit of a perfectionist (some would say I'm obsessive), over the years I have actively refined my note-taking technique. Here's how I take notes these days.

Note-Taking Tools

I start by making sure that I have good note-taking tools. These days I take notes with a mechanical pencil with 0.5 or 0.7mm 2B lead (i.e. softer but darker than the typical HB or #2 pencil; see Wikipedia entry on the pencil for details on gradation) on white, good quality, narrow-lined file paper. I also use a good quality eraser.

I use a pencil and eraser because I like clear and neat notes and diagrams (i.e. dark lines and no cross-outs). I use file paper because that gives me more flexibility in terms of storing, organizing, moving, and re-writing notes within subject-indexed, tab-separated file folders ('binders' for Americans).

May I geek out a bit? These days I'm using a Faber Castel Grip Matic pencil, the 2B lead that came with it, and a Staedtler Rasoplast eraser. The pencil's pretty old now so I need to buy a new one. I generally prefer Staedtler over Faber Castel -- I've been using the former's pens, pencils, lead, and erasers for about 16 years now -- but I haven't been able to find the right products in Australia so far. I guess I need to look harder. Oh, and Pilot and Uni products are good too; particularly the Uni SA-S fine ballpoint pen which I have been using exclusively for about 3 years now.

Note Organization

I organize my notes rather thoroughly: listing on each page the date, subject, page number, and, if in a meeting, the names of the participants in that meeting. To organize the notes themselves I use a series of headings and nested bullet points. Here's an example:

Note Taking 1

More recently I've started to take notes on my laptop. For that I use Microsoft Word with 12pt Georgia font and the same sets of headings and series of nested bulleted lists as I do on paper (except that those are now defined as MS Word Styles so they look a little different). This is what my electronic notes look like:

image

The Actual Notes

Then come the actual notes themselves. Since I write a lot, I've had to develop my own, mostly intuitive, shorthand to write things down quickly. For example: "this func. says nothing abt. price lvl.; dep. only on tech, labour & capital." Since I type quickly, I write full-ish sentences when typing notes, though. They may not be entirely grammatically correct, but I don't usually abbreviate words.

In the actual note-taking I try to write down as much as I can while still listening to the lecture/discussion, not missing anything going on (even at a deeper level), and participating in the discussion as well. It's not easy but I've been doing it for years so I'm used to it by now. Taking notes this way gives me a pretty accurate recording of what went on during the class (since that's what I developed my note-taking for) and, even if something isn't quite clear to me at that time, I can usually follow the logic and work it out later.

At the end of every note-taking session (e.g. at the end of every class) I try to review the notes to make sure I haven't missed anything. Then, usually while preparing for an assignment or just before an exam, I do one of two things. I either extract what is important from my notes (and in parallel from lecture slides and assigned readings) by re-writing them on a new sheet of paper or on my laptop. That is, I take notes of my notes. If not that, I make an index in which I identify what I've written and on which page that topic is located. The former helps me prepare for closed book exams and assignments. The latter helps me get ready for open book exams and meetings during which I might need to refer to my notes.

I don't follow any specific note-taking system like the Cornell system that the good folk at Student Tablet PC use [1], though that sounds like a really good methodology. Nor is my system as elaborate as Tim Ferriss' (via Kevin C. Tofel). I am interested in getting into mind maps like James Kendrick, but my note-taking style has always worked well for me so I haven't yet found a reason to change.

I do, however, use a mind map-type construction for breaking down complex problems. But, since I'm a stickler for writing things neatly, I use lists instead of diagrams. For example:

Board Notes 1

And that's about it. Oh, one last thing: storage. Since I have craploads on notes, I generally have a crapload of file folders to store all my notes in as well. And since I've been using, for the most part, the same system for about ten years now, my old notes still come in handy every now and then. The only problem is: I can't take all my old notes with me.

All of that, I guess, goes some way to demonstrate why the obsessive note-taker in me wants so desperately to get a tablet PC. I mean, seriously, how could I not want to get the ultimate note-taking tool? But, since I can't afford one now, I am so looking forward to getting one later and then scanning all my MBA notes into it so that they're ready for use any where, any time. In fact, I'm getting all excited just thinking about it now! Yes. I am a geek. I wrote a whole blog post on note-taking (with pictures and all), didn't I? :)

[1] The Student Tablet PC website has a whole category on note-taking.

Nadia Graduates!

Nadia finished her MA a few months ago but her official graduation ceremony was held at the University yesterday afternoon.

The 'Conferring of Degrees', as it is called, was held at the Wilson Hall, and if you look closely at the following photograph, you can see Nadia walking back down the aisle after having received her degree for the Chancellor (the dude sitting in the big chair in the centre of the stage):

Inside Wilson Hall

Note the Douglas Annand and Tom Bass mural, 'A Search for Truth' on the back wall -- yes, a naked man with a nicely chiseled butt (in 3-D, no less since it's part-sculpture) adorns the hall in which we graduate -- as well as the large pipe organ built into the top-left side of that wall.

Here are Nadia and Nuzhat, just before going into Wilson Hall (the lighting was harsh; it was two in the afternoon):

Nadia and Nuzhat

And here is Nadia once's she's gotten her degree. First showing off the arches of the Old Arts Centre (which was the original University central quadrangle in the 1880s):

In Old Arts Center

And then posing in front of the University of Melbourne logo (behind the logo you can see the quadrangle's lawn and similar arches on the other side of the building):

With UniMelb Logo

So that's that. Nadia is now a double MA: her first in English Literature and now this one in Creative Writing.

Next up: a PhD!

Arthur Clarke Turns 90

Arthur C. Clarke, who really needs no introduction, turned 90 yesterday (Sunday, 16 December). Reuters has a story about this and he's posted a 90th birthday message on YouTube as well:

If you're interested, also check out the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation.

[P.S. I so love Windows Live Writer. To embed this video, all I had to do was paste the YouTube URL in the body of this blog post.]

Tablet PC Benefits: Annotating Slides

Tim Berry, CEO of Palo Alto Software recently blogged about why he likes his tablet PC. In fact, he gives five reasons for it. It's a good article that echoes what a lot of other tablet PC enthusiasts have said about the benefits of this form factor.

For me, one of the biggest benefits of using tablet PCs -- i.e. being able to write on Powerpoint slides mid-presentation -- became very clear very quickly when I was first exposed to this technology in the classroom. This was thanks to John Asker who taught us Managerial Economics at MBS. John conducted his class lectures using Powerpoint slides on which he took notes (with a stylus) using his Fujitsu Lifebook convertible tablet PC.

Doing this was especially useful when explaining, for example, complex ideas that involved diagrams and areas under the curve. At the end of each class, John would save those annotated slides and then post them onto the course website as PDF files.

Here's an example...and you can imagine how much harder it would have been to explain the concept presented here without either lots of whiteboard work or more complex Powerpoint slides:

One of John Asker's slides from class

The same is true for the following slide, except that this one is even more complicated (and even harder to explain on the board...unless you used multiple colours, of course, though even then it would probably be harder to do):

One of John Asker's slides from class

In the study term that followed this one, we took a course called Economics and Public Policy that was, basically, a course on managerial macroeconomics. In that, everything was taught using the whiteboard and, at times, that got really difficult to follow. I remember thinking back than how much better the course could have been had the professor been using Powerpoint slides and a tablet PC. Oh well. Widespread adoption takes time.

[Article via GottaBeMobile.com]