Two of the most frequent questions I’m asked by my non-Muslim friends are: 1) What’s the difference between a Shi’a and Sunni Muslim (like me) and 2) What happens if a Sunni and a Shi’a fall in love?  Neither question has a particularly straightforward answer.

I read a moving story about Sunni-Shi’a love in Newsweek a couple of years back. It was the tale of two Iraqi teachers, one Sunni and one Shi’a who met in 2000 when they were both studying at the University of Baghdad.

A Cautious Courtship

Sunni guy Mahir Murad, 26 and Shi’a girl, Hind al Yasseri fell deeply in love, but had to hide their three-year courtship from their friends and family.

The couple only argued once during that time, disagreeing on wodhu, the ritual cleansing before prayer, which their sects perform differently. The issue under debate revolves around washing vs. wiping the soles of the feet prior to prayer. It escalated into an ardent row, but dissolved into laughter.

“We agreed that we should never discuss such minor differences. We both are Muslims who believe in the same Qur’an and the same Prophet.” Mahir told Newsweek.

Serious Concerns

The lovebirds married in 2003, and enjoyed their honeymoon as Iraq began its. Sadly, sectarian violence took hold in 2006, with the destruction of the Shi’ite Askariya Mosque in Samarra, which was followed by the retaliatory destruction of Sunni mosques.

“We had no other choice but to protect ourselves,” says Mahir.

Both husband and wife felt that extremists and not regular members of either community were to blame for the violence, and while thier love endured the tension between their sects, it clearly troubled them.

“I could say that maybe if I met my wife now, I would not marry her,” Murad said, weeks after the conflicts started in 2006.

While Mahir and Hind’s story is extreme, it inspires me as it reveals the power of love and the unifying bond between all members of our faith. Many of my Shi’ite friends and I feel this way, and hope that there can be peace, love and respect between all the branches of Islam.

I found an intriguing and thought provoking article in Arab Times I’d love to get your opinions on:

Apparently, a Pakistani pupil has been expelled from his private school in Peshwar for secretly marrying his 16-year-old cousin. The reason? Teachers at the school believe that marital relations shouldn’t be discussed in the playground.

Age of Consent

The groom in question Ghairat Khan sports a beard and attends 7^th grade at the English-language Peshawar Model School. His peers are 12 and 13 year old boys, yet Ghairat insists he is in fact, 18. According to the Arab Times, it’s not unheard of for students to fall back a few years in some areas of Pakistan.

Khan insists he married his cousin because his father died and his mother was ill. Pakistani civil law permits boys to marry at 18 and girls at 16, but under Islamic law, younger unions with parental consent.

“After my father passed away, my uncle became the guardian of our family and he gave me the hand of his daughter and my cousin in marriage as my mother also wanted to see me get married in her lifetime,” he told AFP.

Permission Denied

Khan’s family hails from the tribal district of Mohmand, which lies outside direct government control, but he now lives in the northwestern city of Peshawar.  He claims he asked his school for permission to take time off for “a cousin’s” wedding” (which was true… although the explanation was somewhat sparse in providing relevant information).

When teachers discovered that Ghairat was, in fact the groom at the wedding, they promptly expelled him – issuing a certificate that states the school expressly forbids married students.

Every Action has a Reaction

In protest against what he perceives to be unfair expulsion, Ghairat Khan took the school to court in Peshawar, where a judge summoned the school’s principal and director on June 9th.

“There is no law in Pakistan under which a school can expel students for marrying. Under Islamic law, minors can marry with consent of their parents,” Khan’s lawyer Isa Khan told AFP.

What do you think, dear readers? Should Ghairat Khan be expelled for marrying his cousin and thinly veiling his true intentions or should he simply be seen as a son who wanted to grant his ill mother her wish to see him wed?

There can be little disputing that Malalai Joya, also known as “the bravest woman in Afghanistan”, has earned her name and reputation.

The brave and outspoken Malalai Joya

An Afghan activist for women’s rights (among other relevant issues) is presently on tour to promote her incredible book A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice.

At the age of 25, she stood up at a 2003 constitutional assembly in Kabul and denounced Afghanistan’s warlords. In 2005,  Malalai went on to become the youngest person ever elected to Afghanistan’s new Parliament. Two years later she was suspended from parliament for her relentless denunciation of her country’s warlords and drug barons.

Today, she continues to fight the good fight: the fight for the good of all her fellow Afghans. In the process, she has survived four assassination  attempts, is chaperoned by armed guards and can only sleep in designated safe houses.

Activism in the Blood

This amazing young woman grew up in refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan. The daughter of an activist, Malalai was inspired to follow in her father’s footsteps and taught in the cellars of secret girls schools in Afghanistan.

She hid her books under her burqa to stop the Taliban wouldn’t discover them and helped set up a free medical clinic and orphanage in her impoverished home province of Farah.

Malalai’s path hasn’t been an easy one – like so many of her fellow Afghans who have lost loved ones, she lost one of her orphans who was sold into marriage by family members.

A Journey Into Afghanistan

In Woman Among the Warlords, Malalai Joya takes her readers by the hand and leads us into Afghanistan,  revealing desperate everyday situations Afghans face.

She  highlights some of the many acts of rebellion that are helping to change the country. These include amazing women who bravely take to the streets in peaceful protest. And it’s not just female resistance to the regime:  men who step forward and claim “I am her mahram,” so fundamentalists won’t punish a woman for walking alone. Finally, she applauds the families that convert their basements into classrooms for female students.

I’ve been reading a fascinating article in 30-days.net about the Juba Arabs, a 900,000 strong population that live along the Somali/Ethiopian border.

Virtually cut off from the rest of the world, around 650,000 Juba live in Somalia’s fertile regions Wabi of Shebele. A further 275,000 live just over the border in Ethiopia.  Originally from the Arabian peninsula, the Juba speaks an Arabic dialect called Maay.

Hanging out with the Herdsman on the Horn

Standing proud at the Horn of Africa, Somalia is a poor nation with little industry and few natural resources. The region has been devastated by civil unrest and tribal war since 1991. Although Somalia has seemingly endless  coastline, the landscape is dry and barren with scorching year-round temperatures

Somali are traditionally nomadic herdsmen, while the Juba are mostly farmers. They grow coffee, wheat, vegetables, dates, mangoes and pomegranates.  Juba life has an in-built tradition of  daily coffee time and because wood is so scarce, the Juba burns animal-dung for their fires (and coffee pots!)

Welcome to the Juba Way of Life

The Juba is Sunni (Shafiite) Muslims and their distinct class structures are reflected in the way they dress. Juba Women wear veils at home as well as in public. When boys enter manhood they are allowed to wear a variety of headwear. Juba marriage is strictly arranged within their own tribe and children are highly valued as an asset to every family.

Village life lies at the heart of Juba culture and is more structured than among other African Arabs. Homes are typically made of mud-brick with a flat roof and most have only one room. Occasionally, the roof is made of grass thatch, which extends out to make a verandah.

Other Juban homes are similar to those of the Sudanese: a one room circular hut with a cone shaped thatch roof. Floors in these types of houses are either mud or thatch. Goats and chickens are kept in a small yard to provide milk and eggs.

While my friends in Pakistan have been keeping me up to date on the country’s Facebook ban and associated saga – I was intrigued to learn of another virtual controversy… this time in Turkey.

Thanks to my dear Turkish friend Lamia, who returned from Istanbul yesterday and tipped me off, I found an article in Today’s Zamman about the country’s ban on YouTube and some Google listings. Both the ban and the response to it are food for thought.

Banned Out of Respect

The Turkish courts have blocked access to YouTube since 2008. The measure was implemented after Greek users posted videos alleging that Mustafa Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic and its first President was homosexual.

Last week Turkey extended the ban to some Google pages that use the same Internet protocol addresses as YouTube.

Twy Saying “Tweet Tweet” in Turkish

Turkish president Abdullah Gul has voiced his opposition to the ban in a rather unique way: through his Twitter account!

Turkish President Abdullah Gul uses Twitter to voice his opinion.

In separate tweets, said he did not approve of the bans and had instructed officials to examine legal ways of reopening access.

This bid to bring back virtual freedom in Turkey isn’t Mr Gul’s first bold stand as President. The leader attracted his fair share of friends and enemies as he broke the mold by becoming the first former-Islamist President in the modern history of Turkey.

If It’s Good Enough for The President…

At the turn of this year, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe pressed Turkey to abolish or reform a law allowing it to block around 3,700 Internet sites.

By law websites can be blocked under article 5651 of the Turkish penal code for a range of offences including insulting Ataturk, child pornography and encouraging suicide.

Do any of you Turkish readers out there have anything to add to this? We’d love to hear from you!

Ok folks: random factoid of the day:

Q: How do Arab friends keep in touch and stay up to date?

A: They turn on, log in and type.

According to an article in The Guardian, there are more Facebook users in the Arab world than newspaper readers.

Out of Print

Dubai-based market research firm Spot On Public Relations reports that there are over 15 million subscribers to the mega-popular social networking site. This compares with just under 14 million newspapers sold in the Arab world in Arabic, English and French.

Facebook is dominating the world's webusers.

The survey of 17 countries revealed the largest number of Facebook members in Egypt (3.5 million), followed by Saudi Arabia.

Net Works

The world, my friends, is changing. Facebook has become a meeting and melting point for 400 million of us around the world…

Although social networks attract every kind of people at every age and stage, many of us young (ish) users find them indispensable for staying in touch with friends and keeping up with the latest news and views.

In the Arab region there are more than 300m young people and Internet use is on the rise at a staggering rate.

Redefining Friendships?

I’m truly fascinated by experts’ suggestions that social networks will eventually replace physical friendships on terra firma. It’s something to bear in mind, for me at least, it’s all about moderation.

I’m down with the privacy argument and try to be selective with what I post and how often I log on from the office or before I’ve had breakfast!!!! Still, as someone that uses FB as a social rather than business tool, it is a wonderful way of staying in touch with friends around the world.

Like anything else in life, I think it’s a matter of choice, discipline and balance. Or then again, perhaps Entertainment Weekly put it in a nutshell by including it in its end-of-the-decade ‘best-of’ list, saying:

“How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers’ birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?”

40 Bahraini women have joined a Jordanian initiative to defend the rights of Palestinian children in Jerusalem. This educational project will renovate rundown schools in East Jerusalem and was started by Queen Rania last month, in tandem with the launch of the Arab Women’s Network.

The Power of Combined Talent and Strength

The AW network is made up of women from all over the Arab world, who will organise functions and charity events to raise funds for the project.  Forty Bahraini women have taken on the task of raising awareness for the initiative and the status of education for Palestinian children in East Jerusalem.

Queen Rania is an avid speaker for the rights of people living in the Middle East, particularly those in Palestine.

Each Bahraini team member was hand picked by Queen Rania’s office, which oversees the project in accordance with the schools listed for renovation, sponsored by Jordanian Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs.

An Honorable and Inspiring Initiative

Bahraini chapter member Dalia Kanoo spoke to the Gulf Daily News about her pride in being part of the initiative:

“When I received the call to be part of the network, it was an amazing feeling because Queen Rania is an inspiration to us all,” She said.

“Everyone in the chapter is honoured to be working for this cause and they are ready to do the necessary to make the initiative a success.”

It seems that the women have a clear goal-oriented game plan:

“In Bahrain we are working towards organising events to collect donations, which will be used for the children of Palestine and to raise awareness on the condition of education there.” Dalia affirmed.

Helping Palestinian Children: Every Arab’s Responsibility

Dalia hopes all Bahrain residents will pitch in and help with the initiative to improve the lives and education of these Palestinian children, citing it as the responsibility of each and every Arab.

“It doesn’t matter what religion they are or where they live, we need to take on this cause as an Arab initiative and help those whose voices can’t be heard,” she said.

“It’s high time we stepped up and did the right thing because education for them is the most important thing… This is an issue of the Arab community as a whole and it’s our responsibility to take a stand.”

Fighting the Good Fight

The women join Palestinian, Jordanian and Lebanese counterparts who will work to inform all layers of society about the precarious situation faced by Palestinian children when it comes to education.

“People might know what’s going on in the political arena, but they don’t know the details of how children fight on a daily basis just to reach their schools and get an education in a proper environment. Despite all their efforts, they are still not receiving the education they deserve. So how can we know this fact and not do something about it?” Dalia told GDN.

FUNdraising!

The Bahrain chapter has already organized two successful events to collect donations and are planning a third, a Gala dinner on May 29^th 2010, sponsored by Royal Charity Organisation (RCO) chairman and Supreme Council for Youth and Sports first vice-president Shaikh Nasser bin Hamad Al Khalifa.

Chapter member and Jordanian Ambassador’s wife Enas Majali will host the event, and entertainment will be provided by Bahraini singer Najma Abdulla and Lebanese singer Jehad Aqeel.  An auction of paintings will be held, featuring pieces by renowned Bahraini artists, plus a raffle with the opportunity to win airline tickets, Blackberries and Tiffany’s jewellery among other goodies.

You can find more info on the initiative at: www.madrasati.org.

Go figure: Arabic is one of the world’s leading languages yet the Wikipedia Arabic portal carries less words than its site in Catalan, which is spoken by 9 million people…

In a bold move to give the language the digital oomph it deserves web addresses will now be available in Arabic. The Guardian reports on how this is part of a wider move to open up cyberspace to domain names in multiple, non-Latin scripts.

Egypt: Also Known as Dot misr.

Egypt, the most densely populated Arab country, announced in May that it’s begun registering names under the. misr domain (“Misr” being the Arabic name for Egypt.)

The first three companies to use it are TE Data, Vodafone Data and Link Registrar. Egyptian communications Minister, Tarek Kamel, has called the move “a milestone in Internet history”.

“This great step will open up new horizons for e-services in Egypt,” he said in The Guardian.

“It will boost the number of online users in the country and will enable Internet services to penetrate new market segments by eliminating language barriers.”

Out With Old, In With the New

Instead of using the old .eg domain name,  Egyptian organizations can now use .”misr”, written from right to left in Arabic script as their default country code for domestic websites.

One of the first “internationalized domain names” leads to the Egyptian communications ministry. If a browser has the correct fonts installed, the user should see an Arabic name. But of course, this all depends on the browser…

Jumping on the Bandwidth Wagon

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are also introducing the new codes: .Al-Saudiah and .Emarat.

Icann, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers , approved the use of non-Latin domain names at the end of 2009. About time too, given that half of the world’s Internet users use a Latin script as their primary language.

1% of all web content is in Arabic– though its 280 million speakers add up to 5% of the global population. Until now, Arabic web content had to be hosted under Latin addresses, creating practical problems and, as The Guardian puts it, “conveying a sense of linguistic discrimination.”

Egypt: Zooming Down the Info Highway

Internet access in Egypt is getting more and more affordable and the use of Internet on mobile devices is blossoming. The Egyptian government has said it plans to boost its broadband capacity with a $1bn upgrade in the next four years.

Microsoft and Google include Arabic in their top 10 languages most in need of attention and are hot on the case to increase access.

The Indian parliament’s decision to ban sex education has left young Indians with a conundrum: Where do they go to get advice on love, dating and sex?

According to an interesting article in The Guardian, they open the daily supplement of the Times of India, the country’s best-known English-language newspaper and make a beeline for the daily “Ask the Sexpert” column.

Ask Away…

The column features quintessential questions on sex, sexuality, matters of the heart and dating.

The Times of India’s resident sexpert is 85-year-old gynecologist and sex counselor, Dr Mahinder Watsa. The mature doctor accepts and makes it his mission to answer the concerns of India’s youth of today.

It’s fair to say that Dr. Watsa is far from shy in answering the queries and quandaries of India’s young people. His advice is upbeat and candid, and he regularly labels men “old-fashioned” for not wishing to date women or insisting that they are virgins when they marry. The doctor also counsels on learning the art of lovemaking. His buck stops at homosexuality, but any other topic concerning love, dating and sex is open to discussion in his column.

A Sharp Contrast

As the Guardian points out, The Sexpert represents the polar opposite of sugarcoated lovey-dovey Bollywood cinema and the hush hushing of such topics in many layers of Indian society.

Love or loath this newspaper column, there’s no denying that it answers questions that remain shrouded in myth within many Indian schools where sex education is glossed over or downright dismissed.  The Sexpert may be a little brash by some standards, but at the other end of the spectrum, the Indian educational system offers students little tuition on human anatomy.

A recent parliamentary ruling rejected the introduction of proper sex education in schools claiming sex education has no place in India’s “social and cultural ethos”. The committee behind the legislation insists that Indian school children should simply be taught that “sex before marriage … is immoral, unethical and unhealthy”.

According to The Guardian, some observers believe that committee members fear sex education will lead to “people having sex on every corner”.

What do you think? We’d love to hear your opinion.

If one thing’s surer than Sid Vicious’ steel toe caps, it’s that  Taqwacore: The Birth of Muslim Punk took courage, faith and fearlessness to complete. This recently released feature documentary about the revolutionary twists, turns, triumphs and travesties of Pakistan’s Muslim Punk movement sure ain’t for the fainthearted.

Basim Usmani from The Kominas

The film is based on its namesake novel, The Taqwacores, written by Muslim-convert Michael Muhammad Knight, without which the Islam punk music scene may never have existed.  The book was published in 2003 and the movement was born, screaming…

Fiction: the Furnace that Forged a Movement

The title Taqwacores blends the Arabic for “God-conscious” and adds a (hard) core suffix. Its characters form Michael’s fictitious community of Muslim radicals and are as controversial as they come: Sufis with Mohawks, burqas with band patches and skin-head Shi’as that quite literally came to life.

The author describes his work as “a Muslim punk manifesto” and constitutes a personal catharsis/cartography on Knights external and internal trajectory. At the age of 17, the author left his native Rochester and white-supremist father, to study Islam at a Pakistani madrassa. This initial “rebellion” was followed by a second; which materialized in the form of his riotous, revolutionary book.

Creating a Scene

The Taqwacores struck a real chord with young Muslim readers across the globe and before you could say, “punk is defunct”, real red-blooded Taqwacore bands began to spring up.

In 2010, the documentary: Taqwacore The Birth of Punk Islam, the film was finished after three years of work. It follows Michael and his band of Muslim punks travelling across the U.S. and Pakistan: “transforming their worlds, their religion and themselves through the spirit of Taqwacore. “

In the spirit of taqwacore/ Photo by Kim Badawi

Through the eye of the lens, Michael and the Muslim punks embark on their first U.S. tour, “inciting a riot of young hijabi girls at the largest Muslim gathering in North America after Sena takes the stage.”

The camera criss-crosses continents with the band to wind up where the movement was born, in Pakistan.  There, members of the first Taqwacore band, The Kominas, bring punk to the streets of Lahore. Michael’s two worlds collide: the strict madrassa-made Muslim and the rebel without a cause dance for a while in on terra firma Pakistani, stomping, screaming, shouting and swearing.

Love Habibi Health Warning

There’s no denying that Taqwacore took great bravery to make. If you’re modest, traditional, timid, or tame, neither the book nor the documentary is for you. However, if like me you are possessed with a strong curiosity (and stomach) for all takes on our faith, be they  unique, obscure or even obscene, it’s well worth a gander….

More info and screening dates can be found here: