Thanksgiving in the Wadi Rum - Shukran

As I'm always fond of saying, there's always another trip.  It's true metaphorically, but it also seems to be true logistically.  Recently I found myself reconciling Zanzibar receipts, putting the final touches on the India trip, and holding interviews for next fall's Jordan trip.  The Zanzibar receipts are put to bed and I'm back from India (although still a little paperwork to do on that front) and the Jordan interviews are complete.  It looks like my excellent friend, colleague and titular little sister Cyndi and I will be bringing 22 students to Jordan over Thanksgiving break, which will be the biggest Champlain trip ever. It's even more amazing when you consider that 19 of the 22 students are women, from a college which is something like 62% dude.  The Champlain female students are almost universally kick ass so this is shaping up to be a great trip.  I do love Jordan and it's all I can do to hold out until we can get on a plane next November.

We're going to be spending two days, including Thanksgiving, camping out in the Wadi Rum.  How about this for Thanksgiving day: six hour camel ride, touch football game (the Champlain Bowl), a turkey dinner cooked by the Bedouins who run the camp, and then reading Arabic poetry around a camp fire in the desert.  That is pretty epic.

Back to the Taj

As I've frequently proposed I live an inexplicably rich life - or at least more rich than can be explained by my paltry virtues.  A couple weeks ago I led yet another student trip (I seem to have settled in to two a year; no sane person should ever lead more than one), this one to India.  It was a bit more chaotic on the planning end than I would have wanted (or expected, truthfully) but it was still an amazing trip, so expect a ton of pictures. Of course, I say that every time and I'm so far behind in posting that it's bordering on criminal. I need a sabbatical just to get caught up with my international pictures. Hopefully I'll get these India pictures sorted out and posted before I head back next March for the next India trip.

And the Rising Sun, Indiana t-shirt has made it to the Taj Mahal.  It's difficult to wrap my head around the fact that this was my third trip to the Taj Mahal.

Irrational League Draft 2019

Last weekend I made my way down to Miami, Florida for the draft that began the 27th season of the Irrational League. It doesn't seem that long ago that I suggested we start a fantasy baseball league; I think it was in a Subway restaurant up by UC, on a trip back to the Natti after we have moved to Atlanta. I've told the story before about how when I was trapped in Zanzibar looking after a very sick student I received word that my great friend Gary Beatrice had passed away.  Along with Bob Sawma that now makes two members of the league who have passed.  Truthfully, I don't know if I've ever gotten over Gary's passing, and only partially because I didn't have time to grieve then (I had to get the student packed so that we could be flown to Nairobi on an air ambulance).  Anyway, it's made me value my friends even more than before. I visited Jack down in Miami last summer and told him that it was essential that we had to carry out the next draft in Miami.  I love heading back to Cincinnati every year, but it was also pretty sweet to run around southern Florida for a few days (especially if you're coming from the Yankee Hellhole). If I had not sadly drafted the worst team in fantasy baseball history it would have just about been a perfect weekend.

Here we are at a Miami Marlins game.  It's a beautiful stadium, which sadly was almost deserted.

What It Means - Day 17

"Take to pardoning, and enjoin right, and turn away from the ignorant."
Quran, 7:199

I've been working my way through Surah 7 in the Quran.  Like many Muslims I try and read the Quran every day (as is also true with people of faith no matter their religion or their holy books). I guess I hope it helps make me a better person, although, truthfully, it may also be a reflection of my general nerd-dom because I also simply find it interesting. As I said before, the part of the faith that I enjoy the most is simply quietly reading the Quran. One of the advantages of taking this very structured approach to blogging everyday is that it forces/allows me to pursue these issues in greater detail.

This is one of those seemingly simple lines which contains worlds within worlds.  Today I just want to focus on the first part.  In the Study Quran Nasr shares, "This is one of many verses encouraging forbearance toward others, including one's religious opponents or those by whom one has been wronged; see also 2:109; 3:159; 5:13; 23:96; 41:34-35; 45:14; 64:14. What is meant here is forgiving and excusing people's failings of character and deed and being gentle rather than harsh.  When this verse was revealed, the Prophet reportedly asked the Archangel Gabriel what was meant, and after consulting with God, Gabriel stated that it meant that one should 'maintain the ties of kinship with one who would cut himself off from you; give to the one who withholds from you; and pardon the one who wrongs you'. The Prophet also reportedly advised his followers, 'Be easy; do not be difficult'." Sadly, some inside of Islam will argue that these directives were later abrogated by revelations that instructed the Prophet to fight against those who were his religious opponents - and I'll have a lot to say about this later on.  Essentially, at this point, I'll just say that if this gentle, forgiving approach is not what we're supposed to be doing then why would we follow any faith? We certainly don't need another justification to give into our more animalistic violent tendencies.

2:109: "Many of the People of the Book wish to turn you back into disbelievers after your having disbelieved, out of envy in their souls, even after the truth has become clear to them.  So pardon and forbear, until God comes with His Command. Truly God is powerful over all things."

3:159: "Then [it was] by a mercy from God that thou wert gentle with them. Hadst thou been severe [and] hard-hearted they would have scattered from about thee. So pardon them, ask forgiveness for them, and consult them in affairs.  And when thou art resolved, trust in God; truly God loves those who trust."

5:13: "Then for their breaking of their covenant, We cursed them and hardened their hearts. They distort the meaning of the Word, and have forgotten part of that whereof they were reminded. Thou wilt not cease to discover their treachery, from all save a few of them. So pardon them, and forbear. Truly God loves the virtuous."

23:96: "Repel evil by that which is better. We know best what they ascribe."

41:34-35: "The good deed and the evil deer are not equal. Repel by that which is better; then behold, the one between whom and thee there is enmity shall be as if he were a loyal, protecting friend. Yet none shall receive it, save those who are patient; and none shall receive it, save those who possess great fortune."

45:14: "Tell those who believe to forgive those who hope not for the days of God, that He may requite a people for that which they used to earn."

64:14: "O you who believe! Among your spouses and your children there is indeed an enemy unto you; so be wary of them. Yet if you pardon, forbear, and forgive, then truly God is Forgiving, Merciful."

What It Means - Day 16

As I've said, I'll be blogging on whatever pops into my head, and I was sitting here in my office and caught sight of my prayer rugs stacked on the top of my bookshelf.

Here is a prayer rug that I actually bought on Amazon.  Like all Amazon shopper I read the reviews and one stuck with me, "It's so plush.  I bought it for my husband, but kept it for me."  Truthfully, it is very plush.

That said, this is the one I use on a day to day basis, at least in my office.  This is a gift from my most excellent friend Steve Wehmeyer, who bought it for me last year in Stone Town in Zanzibar after I had taken off with a sick student and ended up in Nairobi. Obviously, it hols a dear place in my heart.

Both of them get dragged into class on occasion as examples of Arabic art.

What It Means - Day 15

Following up on my plan on not really having a plan, and just blogging about what I'm thinking about the moment, I thought I'd follow up on yesterday's discussion of the pros and cons of the Muslim Pro app. One of the features of the app was Halal Restaurants, which the students thought was interesting because some of the selections - most notably Five Guys and Unos - didn't seem legitimate. Essentially, how did a restaurant get on the Halal Restaurants list for the app?  I don't really pay that much attention to Halal restrictions, but for devout Muslims being directed to a restaurant which was not Halal would be, at the very least, a major inconvenience.  Truthfully, however, most of the devout Muslims I know have something akin to a spider sense in regards to restaurants that would be Halal or Haram and wouldn't go to someplace simply because it popped up on an app.

I don't want to get into a big discussion about what qualifies as Halal, but suffice it to say that it means that the animal was killed in a ritualistic fashion that involves prayer and making sure that the animal suffers as little as possible.  Overall the rules for food preparation/consumption are much less onerous in Islam than they are in Judaism. I'll include a link to a BBC story that briefly discusses Halal and it's implications, although, obviously, in the UK. Like most folks living in the 21st century I typed "halal restaurants in Burlington Vermont" into Google to see what came up (hoping that this might explain how Five Guys and Unos (I have nothing against either restaurant, I just seriously doubt that they devote much time to Halal issues on a daily basis, and it makes one wonder how they ended up on the list) ended up on the list of Halal restaurants.  Not surprisingly a Yelp review, promising the top 10 halal restaurants in Burlington popped up, although it actually only listed one place. There was also a link to a Zabinah site, which advertises itself as "the original & world's largest guide to Halal restaurants and markets," which ended up listing three places in all of northern Vermont (none of them Five Guys or Unos). I also found a very interesting article in Seven Days which deals specifically with the challenges of buying Halal meat in Vermont, featuring an interview with the current Imam of the Islamic Society of Vermont, which probably deserves a separate post all to itself because that's an issue that transcends the more narrow issue of Halal restaurants.

So, I don't have an answer for the question of how restaurants are designated Halal for the Muslim Pro app, so I suspect I'll revisit this down the road.

What It Means - Day 14

And, no, this isn't an April Fool's Day joke, although there are some aspects of today's post which seem unbelievable.  As I've stated, there's no internal logic to this year-long journey, and I'm going to talk about what I feel like talking about on that day.  Since I often write these days if not weeks in advance it also means that often I come back and change the order of things, with posts getting bumped back if something pops up that seems more pressing or interesting.  Often I'll be focusing on something from the Quran or the Hadith, but at other times I'll be talking about something going on in my life or something I read in the media or something that popped up on Twitter (where I spend much too much time).  In this case I'm going to talk about some technology.

I shamelessly swiped this app from the Internet, but somehow I don't think the folks at Muslim Pro will care.  This is what the basic (that is: free) version looks like on an android phone, although I suspect it would look different if you paid for the deluxe version (no commercials, more on that below) or IPhone versions.

This year in my two classes dealing with Islam, my Dar al-Islam: India and my Dar al-Islam: Yemen courses, I asked the students to download the Muslim Pro app onto their smart phones. In the past I've emailed all the students in the class five times a day, essentially when it was time to pray if you were a Muslim, and I'd share a little information about that particular prayer or just generally about Islam or being a Muslim.  My only direction was: for the love of God, this is not an order to pray, so don't pray.  Rather, I just wanted them to think about a life wherein faith, no matter the faith, was that close to them on a daily basis. As Americans we tend to, grudgingly, give our faith about an hour over the weekend (as long as things aren't too crowded on the schedule), so the students have traditionally had an interesting response to the exercise.  Sometimes they found it oddly comforting, and other times they found it rather claustrophobic.

This year I ratcheted up the experiment by having them download the Muslim Pro app, which advertises itself as the "Most Popular Muslim app in the world", and Muslim prayer apps are (or at least are supposed to be) the most popular apps in the world.  Now, if any students had objected I would have quite willingly amended the assignment for them, and I also told them that at the end of the week they should just go ahead and delete the app from their phones.  My students, being pretty uniformly decent souls, all agreed to download the app.  This time I had two directions: 1) once again, for the love of God do not pray, and 2) think about the interaction between faith and technology.  My students, as most young folks today, are remarkably hyper-connected, so I was interested in their reflections on the lines between technology and faith.

They actually seemed to enjoy the experience, and several of them actually didn't delete the app because they found it interesting. I told them how to disable the sound on the prayer notification, so that instead of the call to prayer blaring out of your phone's speakers you just get a little icon.  My student John, noted for his good nature and general lunacy, left the sound notification on (or at least that's his version of the story). Some of their big takeaways: 1) they, naturally enough, found the ads disconcerting; when you log on to the site you always get a one screen ad (although happily no sound), which might be something for a Vermont tire company but it might also be an ad for whiskey - especially disconcerting to a devout Muslim; these are not a problem on the deluxe pay version of the app; 2) they liked the Qibla feature which tells you which way to face during prayer, although they found the logic of why it directs you to Mecca by way of London puzzling; 3) they thought the Mosques feature, which directs you to local mosques, including a map and directions, to be useful, although we only have one mosque in the state; 4) they found the Halal Places features, designed to tell you where to find halal restaurants, although they were deeply suspicious that Unos or Five Guys was actually halal - which in turn led to an interesting discussion on what's constitutes halal, and who makes that judgment - and how one got on the list - and, again naturally enough, my Marketing students found all of this fascinating; 5) they liked the Duas feature, although they noted the, in their minds, profound difference between folks asking for prayers for serious reasons and those asking for prayers for borderline frivolous reasons - while also thinking about similar difference in other religions; 6) they liked the fact they could use the app to send each other e-cards (clearly I need to give them more homework), and 7) they found the little feature that allows you to flip prayer beads to be well-intentioned but also very distracting.

So, all in all, I think it was a useful experiment and one I'll repeat in the future.  I don't really talk about my own personal faith in class, and especially how the app's Personal Tracker feature is a constant reminder of routinely I fail at everything (which I suppose is the point). That said, one of my goals in this process is to be more structured in my faith, so I guess the app,with all of its failings, is probably helping in the process.