its friday morning and the imams are wailing.
raving.

the holy day, the air is filled with noise from weathered speakers, certain shops are closed. notably the oddly named "Mad-dog Books" on talat harb st, the one with the colorful "greatist hits of sheik osama-bin-laden" books, is shut. stray cats play in its doorway.

some imams are repeating memorized sunnas from the koran, screaming them. i can almost see the lines of spittle arcing from their mouths, encrusting the beards around their mouth in religion-induced-foam.

i imagine that if we mixed a droplet of this foam with a particle of tammy-fay-bakers religion-induced-mascara there would be a massive explosion. i suppose we have seen these exposions already, in baghdad and new york.

i pick up a few words here and there in the graceful medieval koranic arabic that they are using. even to someone who does not understand the meaning, many sunnas of the koran just sound beautiful with their rhyming, winding beat and emphatic repetition.

muslims will tell you that the the koran is the one of the great if not the chief miracle of islam. the language in it is so rich and so complex that it could only have come from god, they say. this is why muslims from around the world to study the koran in arabic, and their native tongue. whether or not it came from god via the archangel gabriel into the hermitic prophet mohammed's ear 1,300 years ago or not, some verses just sound beautiful.

"sometimes when i hear certain verses of the koran it just makes shivers run up and down my spine." says my friend Samr as he clenches both fists and shakes, as if electrified. i imagine a SIGINT team in the pentagon turning a satellite towards us. "i understand why people are comforted in martyrdom operations (suicide attacks) - it just takes you over and you want to die for islam, or for something - you are ready to give your life - it just instantly connects you to something bigger than you."

i assume at first that he is kidding, but he is not. Samr is a well educated man, his english is magnificant and he commands french just as competely. he is the kind of man who uses words like "autocratic" and "exponential" as he sucks on filterless cigarettes - smart and honest.

Samr's words are not unlike someone who once described to me the feeling one gets when one sees the American flag - the man who told me this was a veteran. Samr's words are not unlike the last scene in saving private ryan.

my last year of highschool an english teacher told me one of the most important things a teacher has ever told me.
"my husband says that religion and nationalism are the 2 most dangerous forces in the world". when i woke up on Sept 11 to my older sister screaming through the answering machine at me to "wake the FUCK up." i immediately thought of this sentence. turning on the TV, i repeated it in my mind over and over.


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it was me that 5 years ago said that islam is not an inherently violent religion. i still believe it, but maybe not as much - something really ain't right. it was me that spoke up in class when the essay "Jihad Vs McWorld" came up in the reading, trying to explain the fact that jihad meant "personal struggle", not just holy war.

i was right. it meant. meant - past.
language evolves based on common understanding, and this word has been subverted. anyone still telling you otherwise is part of the apologist crowd to which i was once part of. chief among these people are those who have never been to the middle east and those who are married to someone from the middle-east. nearly all of these people are academics who are not accustomed to dealing with the actual world.

these days i would say something different - i know the name of the man who changed the meaning of the word, he far predated Osama. egyptian and saudi followers of his actually tried to kill Osama in Sudan in 1995 because Osama -holy shit- wasnt radical enough for them.

AK-47 girl, Sonja, put it well when she said that "..these societies are organized around one thing - a green book, the Koran. everything in life is supposed to spring from this 1,300 year old book, but there is a limit to the amount you can get from this book." Sonja is right. these societies are not moving forward- they are stuck in this book, frozen in time. you can only extrapolate so much from a 1300 year old epic poem, and its difficult to fit it around things like the internet and nano-technlogy.

it reminds me of when i was in Cuba, and i saw the daily newspaper which had a picture of Fidel and Che on the cover sharing a victory cigar after their 1960 victory. the headline said "We Won!" as if the victory was yesterday and not 40 years ago. the goverment, the people, were frozen, reliving the past over and over. contemporary non-moderate islam seems to be doing the same thing - reliving a glorious past over and over -- except this past is 1300 years old, strictly defined, and worse yet - it is a past in which its heros were expansionist. the House of War, the House of Peace. you, reader, live in the the House of War - you will one day be converted.

it is me that now agrees that islam as we know it today is a failing tradition (religions too evolve based on common understanding), it is me that agrees that it has lost its way - from SE Asia to N. Africa. its not as if muslims are evil - faaar from it - it is just that this tradition doent seem to be capable of bending or growing

i now understand Ataturk, the "Father of the Turks", who recognized this in 1916 and turned Turkey's head away from Mecca and towards Europe, who banned the fez, who destroyed the caliphate (the pope of islam) - an act that Osama and religious wackos still refer to as a major grievance. Ataturk traded religion for nationalism - the lesser of two evils. Pakistan's Pres/General Pervez Musharraf is a man who idolizes Ataturk - and thats why George W. Bush has him on fucking speed-dial. oddly, i find that Musharref and i are in the same boat. we look forward instead of back.

this boat keeps taking on water. bearded guys with goats, and men waving old books - one green and one black - are trying to destroy it. not all of them, it appears, are in the middle east.


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i woke up across town today. i was in a triple room, three single beds. one was empty, untouched. one was messed up. i was sleeping in the third. my head hurt badly. i remember Sakara 7 stars - a strong Egyptian beer, and then getting a room with an Eritrean girl. at least i think this happened, this wasnt a dream. fuck, i dont know.

we walked around talking before hand. everyone made catcalls and assumed she was a prostitute because she was black, attractive, and walking with me after midnite. Egypt, like most of the world, is a deeply racist place.

i remember our hilarious night together, i remember the morning. at 4:30 AM the muezzin calls the faithful/disciplined to prayer. at 4:30, as the beautiful and haunting "allllahhhhhu 'akbar sounded from a nearby mosque.

i looked down at the girl in the soft, blue morning light. playfully, i had tied her up with her headscarf. her veil. the symbol of her allegience to islam, her piety.

she was tied down with it. she could not move.

the dawn call to the faithful curled through the room.

i woke up alone.