Sunday, October 30, 2005

 

why i love osama

immediately following 9/11 you see many muslims in many parts of the world CELEBRATING the event...many wears t-shirts with handsome osama proudly displayed on their chests.... some even named their newborns osama... ask any muslims and not one says that osama is a bad man...everybody loves osama...at last here's a man who's willing to stand up against the big bad usa.... the great shouts in Iran is ...amrika marakbar!!!...amrika the great satan....still do albiet softer tones now...

and then america responded....showed great resolve and still do...to get all the 'perpetrators of this henious crime' to book...amerika not only hunt osama and anyone associated with him down but also CONQUERED and colonised (there are no better words for it) Afghanistan and Iraq...and still hunting down the elusive osama...

and suddenly most muslims viewed osama differently...osama is a bad man... a terrorist!!..giving bad names to Islam!!...so what has changed?..Osama has NOT changed...he has showed continued resolve to fight america same as before...so ONLY US THAT HAS CHANGED!!! why??

As for me...i HAVE NOT changed...i still love osama...now don't get me wrong...personally i can't even kill a cat let alone a human being...loving osama does not mean that i agree with the WAY he and his organization fight america...just the same as me loving the american way of life (democracy , freedom of expression and opportunity for all...kfc…) does not mean that I agree with amerika going to war in vietnam or dropping bombs on hiroshima and nagasaki...yes, osama chose the unfortunate method of war against amerika...but then again amerika have done a thousand times worse...the untold miseries and number of iraqis who died due to american led sanctions after the FIRST iraq war - before 9/11 lest we forget...makes 9/11 looks like a small car accident on a lonely road...and amerika still continue to perpetrate untold miseries on the people of afghanistan and iraq...and the rape of iraq is continuing even as we speak now....

an interesting article in one of last year's harper's magazine explained how paul bremner at one swoop fired 500,000 iraqi civil servants (many were soldiers)..and made the country as wide open as a whore's legs to let american multinationals and corporations to suck all the blood out of iraq...depressing read...and the crime of putting up puppet regimes in these countries… and this is the worst thing… making fellow afghanistanis and iraqis fighting and killing each other!!.. (it is safe to say that the puppet regimes in both countries will not hold for a day if the US leave these countries now)

So am i wrong to love osama??
osama's raison d'etre is simply to rid of the unjusts that he believes the US perpetrates on islam...leave the holy land of saudi arabia, give palestinians their due rights and freedom...stop meddling in other people's affairs...leave afghanistan, get out of iraq....if this happens ...it is safe to say that osama will be the first one to kiss george bush's cheeks...and I’m willing to kiss his feet too…will it ever happen?...no?...than osama in his own ways will fight on...i will feel sad because more miseries and tragedies will be bound to happen... but america has a way to describe this, to lessen the pain.....they call it collateral damage...

Thursday, October 20, 2005

 

Theory on Dog...err GOD

In this month of Ramadhan, the month of introspection & devotion one’s mind ought to be tuned to spirituality but in the age of easy gratification and materialism it’s a very hard thing to do… but I always am very interested in religions and religious writings not least because most of these belief and writings are truly macabre and out of this world in more ways than one…

I have a respectable collection of Islamic books in my personal library and a growing number of books on other religions too…. with occasional additions of bibles and Buddhist texts nicked from hotels …I’m convinced that Gideon is more than glad anybody at least steal their untouched bibles in hotel rooms… so I don’t really feel guilty doing this…the most recent one I ‘borrowed’ ( as Huck Finn would call it ) was “al-kitab” from a hotel in Jakarta a couple of weeks ago..…interesting to note that the translation uses mostly Islamic terminology for important words such as god (translated as Allah) etc….so Christian god is Allah too afterall….at least in this part of the world….

I'm always fascinated by how human view god or gods....primitive people and animists sees gods and ghosts in everything that looks forbidding...big trees, megaliths, stones, rocks, owls, other animals....Hindus see gods in all kind of menifestations...vishnu, shiva, brahma,krishna ....and the female counterparts ganesha, kali, saraswathi, kalki, etc...and can even be manifested in animals...and sometimes even movie stars.... not an uncommon idea actually… Christians see Jesus as god…Chinese believe great ancestors were transformed into gods…the most famous being the ‘nine gods’ whose festival is still celebrated every year…If I were to worship a human being the most likely candidate I think anybody should bow their heads to would be Bill Gates…he’s done so much…we ought to worship him….wouldn’t it be interesting if we all worship Bill Gates as a god of wealth & knowledge, George Bush as god of war and destruction, Paris Hilton as god of love etc….

When it comes to the argument one god or many?...looks like one is winning…even in Hinduism…the most interesting pantheistic religion in existence today… ultimately philosophically all the various and highly imaginative versions of gods and goddesses are nothing more than manifestations from one single godhead...Balinese call this single godhead 'Sang Yang Widi'...Indian hindus call it brahma...

Christian sees god like an old man ... if religious paintings are any indication christian god looks very much like Charles Darwin and Jesus has a rather confused role as partime god, sometimes son and sometime a failed jewish lad...Buddhists do not view god(s) very highly...mere beings ..at least lower than Buddha...that begs the question who created the original Gautama?...

Islam admits that it does not know what on earth god is like (as described in surah al Ikhlas) but in a different verse stated that god sits on an “arash” (the throne)...so does this means that 'physically and mathematically' the throne has bigger dimension than god?...Islam says do not question those things that are 'ghaib'....so we leave it at that....Everytime I think about this verse I have a mental picture of Christian triumvarate of bearded Jesus looking like a rock star sitting beside Charles Darwin with a white dove fluttering above …

Agnostics feels that human intellectual capacity are not good enough to fanthom this thing called god...there may be a creator (s) but certainly not as imagined by the formal religions which are all human centric....…and atheists believe that this is all bosh...nonsense...what we need is just basic physical laws...laws of physics explains everything…..is it?....try putting plane parts in a barrel and ask a monkey to shake it till it assembles into a functional aeroplane…

An ex-nun Karen Armstrong wrote a fascinating book called 'history of god'...and she was very well versed in Islamic cosmology and ephistemology and wrote with good understanding how christian, jews and muslims view god over the ages...fascinating read...the way she wrote about Islamic mysticism makes me think that she must have studied under some great sufi sages in some remote morroccan madrasa or somewhere but on reading her autobiography “spiral staircase” looks like her knowledge is basically from reading books…

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

 

Ramadhan Read

As usual.... I'm very poor at keeping my promise... just like new year's resolutions ...before the first month is out I break every one of them....

I promised to reread AlQuran translation and finish the “Travel of Ibn Jubayr” (trans from Arabic by Roland Broadhurst)...that was on the first of Ramadhan...now it's half way gone and I've not even started any of these yet...the blame this time goes to "Life of Pi" the 2002 Booker prize winner by Yann Martel....

The moment I read the first few pages I got hooked.... the improbable adventure of 16 yr old tamil boy from Pondicherri Piscine Molitor Patel aka 'Pissing Patel' or as he wanted to be called Pi as in 3.014 who professed to three religions (Islam, christianity & hinduism) , ship wrecked in the middle of pacific ocean and bopping on a lifeboat with a zebra with a broken leg, a hyena, an Orang utan and finally alone with a ferocious bengal tiger for company is simply irresistible...may be it is not so inappropriate to read this novel in this holy month as the first part of the book is quite introspective and how he came to be muslim christian hindu is downright hilarious....

...and now that I've finished reading this novel i can get back to my original resolution right?...wrong...... for the past few days I 've been reading another travel book "Trans Siberia:Inside the grey area " by Paddy Linehan and the first 20 pages or so of a biography of Artatuk. (Ataturk by Patrick Kinross)....Trans siberia- a travel by trans siberian train which I actually took in Feb this year (Moscow -Beijing) - is not a terribly good book but the subject matter is very interesting whilst Artatuk is a very good book but about a man I despise...

Looks like my original intention is going to fail...but there's another 15 days to go before Ramadhan is gone and i still have time to keep my promise....it's hard but I'll try. It's said that satan is kept on a a leash in this holy month but seems like mine is tied on a very long rope.....

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

 

What I was reading during the second Bali bombing

Ooo what a terrible thing to happen!!....of all days I picked last Saturday 1 Oct 05 to have a quick stop over in Bali....I was in Acheh doing a bit of volunteer work for tsunami victims at Banda Acheh and i tought why don't i just take a few days to relieve all the sadness and go to Bali?

It is the peak season at this time of the year and it was terribly difficult to get hotels but finally managed to get a good 3* hotel beside Hard Rock Cafe right in front of kuta beach...aneka beach hotel... and just about 10 minutes walking distance from Raja Restaurant that was bombed....well thank god... i was lucky ...I was all the way up in Ubud having dinner at the time of the bombing (around 7.00 pm or so)....

Interestingly enough i carried "Galapagos" by Kurt Vonnegut for my reading at this time... a pessimistic dark satire on what bad things our human 'big brain' make us do... and about how humans became extinct & a million years after the extinction of human being as we know it ... now the human species have 'evolved' into tiny brained furry animals without hands but flippers instead and swimming and catching fish all day long....not a bad idea…..

And oh hey…strangely just like over here where people crowd over car accident scenes, I saw a lot of people milling about at the scene of the Kuta bombing at around ten p.m or so... nobody seemed afraid of follow-up bombs...

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