Sulayman’s Stories

American Muslims, we have a potentially serious problem.

Eid-ul-Fitr is going to fall on September 10 or 11 this year. The problem that is worrying many US Muslim groups is that if it falls on 9/11 or near it, many people will see Muslims celebrating on the same day that many Americans are mourning or commemorating 9/11. Given the sudden thickening of the anti-Muslim climate this year, this could be extremely bad for us all. CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said, “The issue I can sense brewing on hate sites on the Internet is, `These Muslims are celebrating on September 11.’” Hate crimes against Muslims or property is possible if not likely, Islamophobic bigots will try to make a shrill fuss about Muslims being so happy on 9/11, and likely showing photos of Muslims at carnivals and setting off fireworks.

In 2009 a shia perfume store owner in Houston put up a sign that he would be closed on 9/11 to mark the “martyrdom of Imam Ali” and he was the victim of hate crimes, death threats, all continuing to this day thanks to a chain email that falsely said that Imam Ali was the name of a 9/11 hijacker. The false accusation continues to spread.

Eid is determined by a lunar calendar, so there’s not much we can do to change it. It seems like next month will be an inevitable mess, with a worst-case scenario of incidents like that all over the country.

Yes, this is worrying, but let’s look at the positive here. We have nearly a month to prepare. Honestly, that’s an awesome break for the community; did we have a month to prepare for the Danish cartoon controversy? New York Muslims were caught off guard when the WhyIslam.org subway ads during Ramadan suddenly became controversial because Congressman Peter King claimed it was deliberately offending people by showing up around the time of 9/11 (and I’m sure Congressman Peter King will make political hay about this year’s festivities too). We have about 25 days before Eid, so time is for once on our side.

Time is a great asset here; let’s use it to our advantage by getting the word out ahead of time. Talk to your friends in other religions and interfaith networks. Explain to them what Eid means and how it is by coincidence likely falling on September 11th this year. Let churches know by giving them a call, they’ll likely mention it in their Sunday Missalette (like a weekly church newsletter). Tweet it and post it on facebook.

Tell everyone. Rather than have the Muslim community feel blindsided, start preparing people to anticipate misunderstandings and let them know what to say and how to be safe in case hate crimes spike. I’m not calling for canceling Eid or any celebrations, but to do it with awareness and simple precautions like letting your neighbors know ahead of time. Also, by telling non-Muslims, then they too will be aware of the situation. That way, if chain letter emails like the one above demonizing the poor Houston shop-owner start going around, those in the know will either break the chain or reply to the group with corrections.

We can defuse this crisis before it even starts. Let’s be pro-active and spread this idea to local Muslims and community groups. I didn’t write a description of what Eid is, but I’m sure groups like CAIR will likely have a good one and should take the lead in coordinating. I’d hope to see word spread through mailing lists and mosques.

People are worried, but we can turn this crisis into an advantage if we plan for it right now.

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Here’s the books I’m reading this summer. I need to pick the order, any recommendations?

• Native Son, by Richard Wright
• In Contempt, by Chris Darden
• Without a Doubt, by Marcia Clark
• Kaffir Boy, by Mark Mathabane
• Runaway Jury, by John Grisham
• Crisis, by Robin Cook
• Intervention, by Robin Cook
• Learn Objective-C on the Mac
• Beginning iPhone 3 Development:Exploring the iPhone SDK

You oughta see my movie list:

• Highlander
• Beverly Hills Cop
• Blade: Trinity
• Taxi Driver
• Family Guy: Something Something Something Dark Side
• Airplane!
• Willow
• Inception
• Dinner for Shmucks
• Scott Pilgrim versus the World
• Salt
• Khuda Kay Liye
• The Big Lebowski
• Death Note
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• The French Connection
• No Country for Old Men
• Coming to America
• The Best of the Colbert Report
• No End in Sight
• The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
• Toy Story 3
• The Last Airbender
• The A-Team

Did I miss any?

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Proposal:
I was using the RedLaser iPhone app, which lets you scan barcodes using your phone, when I had a sudden realization; why can’t there be a smartphone (iPhone, Android, blackberry, etc.) app that lets you scan a food and find out if it’s halal?

Such a system would be simple to setup; you have an iPhone app that uses the camera to scan a barcode of a product label, the app looks it up via a database and identifies if it’s on a whitelist or blacklist of halal standards.

The technical challenges are pretty much gone by this point; newer iPhones have auto-focusing cameras, there are GPL barcode scanning algorithms, and RedLaser even put out a barcode scanner SDK to build your own apps.

The only hurdle I see is the backend. There were a few companies earlier in the decade that published databases of halal ingredients, and in 2007 there was even a jailbreak iPhone app for it, but I’m having trouble finding them now. There are several websites with halal/haram (allowed/forbidden) ingredient lists, but they only encompass a few dozen items each. sample ingredient list 1 and sample list 2, and list 3. I was going to recommend starting from scratch and creating a new product database of popular consumer goods, but I’m pleased to see that Muslim Consumer Group and IFANCA have both been making their own listings and putting an M symbol on halal products (similar to the K for kosher foods).

Classifying items is fraught with logistical difficulties. Some ingredients listed on packaging can come from vegetarian or meat origins, and it requires contacting the manufacturer to determine which. Such items are classified as “mushbooh,” (unknown or doubtful) and Muslims are advised to avoid such products. In addition, there are slight variations in what can be deemed halal by the different schools of thought in Islam. For example, some people will eat only zabihah, and will even avoid cheese which may use enzymes, while others will eat any non-zabihah meat as long as it has no pork or alcohol. Some consider shrimp halal, others will say it’s makruh (disliked). It’s going to be hard to make such distinctions in an app, unless the user is presented with some sort of scale of preference.

App roundup:

Combing through the App Store for iPhones, there are some 17 apps involving halal food. Zabihah is a popular app that locates the closest halal restaurant, market, or mosque. Halal does that and also checks the status of products certified by the Malaysian Halal Certification, but it only works in Malaysia.

iWantHalal is one of the closest things I could find to what I want, but it isn’t enough. It is a listing of ingredients to see if each one is halal or not, but having a person painstakingly enter each of the two-dozen ingredients on a package is tedious and a huge inconvenience. It would be more convenient to use an interface like Lose It!, which lets you type in a food or product name and it shows the amount of calories, fat, and protein per serving. They have tens of thousands of food items in their handheld database from popular mainstream brands and restaurants to home-cooked meals. Halal Scanner Islamic has a clever solution; you take a photo of the ingredient list and it uses text recognition to compare the ingredients to the database. This sounds the most promising, but I have not tested it.

Other companies have tried making similiar apps, like Buyer Angel, Fooditive, and Foodstuffs, all of which are simple additive databases showing if something is kosher, vegetarian, or halal.

These all seem to miss the mark. The closest app I can find to what I envision is an app called ScanAvert, which scans the barcode of a food box and will tell you if the food is compatible with a kosher diet or not. It’s $2 to buy plus a $2 monthly subscription to the database.

If someone were to make a halal food checking app with barcode scanner, I’d pay more than any other app on my iPhone for it.

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Airport
changing rooms at the mall
bathtub (I don’t recommend)
on top of my mattress (long story)
on the beach (my favorite)
on a train platform in grand central station
behind jungle brush in rural Honduras, Central America
elevator (sometimes you can pull emergency stop switch and you have a few minutes of privacy)
sidewalk in NYC
apartment building roof
seated in the audience at Broadway show
on an off-Broadway stage
on a highway offramp (closed with detour sign)
under an escalator
in a pharmacy’s drug aisles
hallway of a movie theater
office in the Department of Homeland Security
airline seat while trying to face backwards
on top of the road lines at West 4th Street Manhattan (closed to traffic for a protest)
Emergency exit stairwell
behind the wheel of a parked car
in a barn’s hay loft

(Not me praying but now I wanna try)

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I was at work when I noticed the Austin terror attack on the news. Andrew Joseph Stack III apparently snapped after being burdened with tax debt, burned down his family’s house (they escaped), and piloted his private 4-seat propeller plane into the Austin IRS building, where 200 employees worked. So far the death toll is 2, not including him. He wrote a lengthy suicide note online, railing at a bunch of things and saying ‘violence is the only solution.’

Somewhat quickly, CNN said it did not appear to be terrorism. Uh, blowing up a government building and killing people is pretty much considered the definition of terrorism. The Muslim blogosphere is pretty ticked that this guy is getting a pass on being called a terrorist, seemingly because he’s not Muslim. He’s a white Christian who turned to violence against an apparatus of the government over what he felt was injustice. (Mr. Stack did denounce the Catholic church in his suicide note, but he is nominally Christian) Many on the left have compared his rhetoric to that of the “Teabagger” movement that is coincidentally holding its meetings the same week.

The real definition of terrorism used by the US Code is

“any activity that involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life that is a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State, and (B) appears intended
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government and by assassination or kidnapping.”

With apologies to Professor Cole for plaigarizing his idea, here is what else you will not see in the media:

Thomas Friedman will not write an op-ed for the New York Times about what is wrong with white southern Christian males that they keep producing these terrorists. He will also not ask why Sarah Palin and Pat Robertson are not denouncing Andrew Stack every day at the top of their lungs.

Daniel Pipes will not write a column for the New York Post suggesting that white southern Christians be put in internment camps until it can be determined why they keep producing terrorists and antisemites.

Retired Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney will not go on FOX News and claim that Christian males need to be “strip searched” before boarding airplanes.

The Transportation Security Administration will not announce new, “enhanced screening” tactics at U.S. airports, with a renewed focus on travelers from Southern Red states.

Steve Doocy of morning FOX & Friends will not call for racial profiling of Christians, because “all of the people who try to blow airliners out of the sky pretty much look alike”

Right-wing talk show host Laura Ingraham and FOX News’ Brian Kilmeade will not question whether Christians should be in the army or serve in government. They won’t say Christians “have to understand” being profiled because of “the war that was declared on us”

No reporter will interview frightened Iraqis about their fears at hearing that there are 138,000 armed Christians in their country belonging to the same faith as the bomber, Stack, many of them from his stomping grounds of Texas.

Barack Obama will not issue a statement that “Christianity is a religion of peace and we will not allow the Andrew Stacks to hijack it for their murderous purposes.”

Frank Gaffney will not write a column for the Washington Post castigating the Republican Party for appeasement in surrendering to the terrorist threats of radical Christians and tea party protestors, by now supporting greater tax cuts.

Max Boot will not point out that if the United States could only keep the Philippines in the early twentieth century by killing 400,000 Filipinos, than that was what needed to be done, and if the US can only beat back radical Christians by killing 400,000 of them, then that may just be necessary.

Professional hate-monger David Gaubatz will not call for a “professional and legal backlash against the Muslim community.”

Jim Quinn will not suggest we need to “broom the Christians out of the military” or government, or defend internment as a strategy that “worked” during WWII.

George Stephanopoulos will not lead ABC News’ broadcast with the idea that Christians are a “special challenge” in the military and inside government.

FOX News’ Eric Bolling won’t insist that Scott Roeder (who murdered abortion doctor George Tiller in 2009 and insisted he knew others who would do more) should be waterboarded.

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Sometimes I wonder why I have to answer such silly questions, but after hearing a coworker, a Florida Republican on TV, and a BJP worker interviewed on video in Gujarat all say the same phrase “all terrorists are Muslim,” I have to again debunk the silly falsehood.

First of all, I feel like the people who believe this have a pitifully short memory. 11 million people died in the Holocaust, with Hitler and the Nazis often bringing up Christianity as justification. The word terrorist itself even came from the French Revolution, with mass killings. Bill Clinton went on TV to condemn the senseless murders by Slobodon Milosevic’s regime.

Going now to modern times, we have a long list of terrorists in America; Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the KKK, and Timothy McVeigh for starters. If you want Christian terrorists, well there’s Eric Rudolph, Scott Roeder, and Seung-Hui Cho (who compared himself to Jesus in his suicide video). There’s others, like Jewish terrorist Robert J. Goldstein who had an arsenal bigger than David Koresh and 50 Muslim targets in Florida before he was caught.

Outside of America, it’s not like all terrorism is from Muslims either. Come with me to Latin America and you’ll see more terrorist groups than the Middle East has. FARC, The Shining Path, MRTA, and Colombian ELN are some of the big players. When I was in Honduras, I saw armed guards even before the political upheaval. The Morzanist Patriotic Front in Honduras is small but probably not gone. Europe still deals with groups like ETA and the IRA, which has killed more people than 9/11. Serbian war criminals murdered tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in the 1990’s, is that not terrorism? Africa deals with so-called-Christian terrorist groups like the Lord’s Resistance Army, which employ child soldiers among their other heinous acts. India has been dealing with terrorists from places like Assam and Sri Lanka, as well as Hindu and Marxist and Sikh extremists, and is still dealing with the aftermath and reprecussions of attacks like the Gujarat massacres in 2002 that killed thousands of innocent Muslims. Israel has been dealing with terrorism from alleged followers of Christianity and Judaism for decades.

There’s an annoying tendency for people to assume that maybe so-called-Muslim terrorists do a certain tactic; which then becomes an accusation that Muslims do it (oh, many people like Giuliani’s former spokesman don’t even bother to make the distinction between “terrorists” and “Muslims”). When you have a somewhat-smart-looking commentator on Fox News saying that Christians don’t bomb planes, then you know that people are not thinking properly here. If you name any specific terrorist attack, I can show you examples of it happening elsewhere.

• I’ve been asked if Beheading is somehow Islamic since it seems to happen in Iraq. No, it’s just a grisly murder meant to shock people. That’s why it happens in Colombia and Mexico.
• Throwing acid on people, which gets a lot of bad press in South Asia (and is based in culture and not religion), is anongoing crime wave in Hong Kong
• Trying to blow up a plane; well where to begin? When Sikh terrorists blew up Air India 182? I don’t trust profiling at airports ever since Anne Murphy tried to smuggle a bomb onto a plane.
• Suicide bombing, the LTTE carried out more attacks than Hamas. Heck, there’s even been atheist suicide bombers such as the Salonica Dynamiters.
• Female Circumcision, a pre-islamic practice that is condemned by religious scholars of all faiths, is still practiced by some African and Egyptian christians.

I know that this should be common knowledge, but terrorism is universally accepted as wrong; it is condemned in every religion.

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I love NYU. This is a safe place. A place where I don’t have to worry about hatred like anti-Semitism, homophobia, or islamophobia. This sense of safety makes it all the more shocking that an NYU professor would breach such decorum and say something hurtful to a group of its students.

On Monday, NYU Stern professor Tunku Varadarajan wrote a column in Forbes called “Going Muslim.” Rather than the colloquial American phrase “Going Postal,” in which a worker guns down his coworkers in a fit of rage, the professor decides to coin a new phrase “Going Muslim.” Obviously this is based on the tragedy of the violence at Fort Hood last week, but the professor decides to paint a broad brush that casts typical Muslims like myself into a suspicious light. It also singles Muslims out in a way that’s unacceptable by this insulting phrase. Can you imagine the outcry and offensiveness if someone labeled a Bernie Madoff-style crime “Going Jew?”

Let me quote the professor on what it means to “Go Muslim” from his article: “This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American–a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood–discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans.” Muslim groups all across America publicly condemned the shooting, ICNA, ISNA, MPAC, MANA, and CAIR all put out press releases or called a conference within hours to denounce the killings. The religion does not need “vindicating” by terrorists, as imams around the country loudly stated that the murders were flatly against Islam.

The difference between “Going Postal” and “Going Muslim,” he suggests, is that rather than someone snapping suddenly, they undergo a “calculated discarding of camouflage–the camouflage of integration.” I dislike this sort of fear-mongering; it only brings back the dark times of 9/11 where people were suspicious of their Muslim neighbors. The professor implies that Muslims in general, and not just the Major involved in last week’s shootings, are camouflaging themselves to fit into society. I am a Muslim-American who was born in this country and do public service work on Long Island; the implication that I and other Muslims are actually something non-American deep down is highly offensive to me. There are thousands of Muslim-Americans who currently serve in the armed forces, and they strongly condemned the murders of their fellow soldiers as well.

Professor Varadarajan goes on to claim that Muslims are more extreme than any other group “because their religion is founded on bellicose conquest, a contempt for infidels and an obligation for piety that is more extensive than in other schemes.” This is just a naked form of Islamophobia and hate speech. It’s certainly not the Islam any of the thousands of Muslims at NYU follow. He goes on to call President Obama “craven” because of his efforts to avoid a backlash against law-abiding Muslims like myself. Such hysterical statements put innocent people in harms way to be further victims of retaliation.

Let’s consider the facts; Out of several thousand Muslims serving in the military, one became violent. That is horrendous enough. The professor only hurts us all by hatefully overgeneralizing an entire religion and equating the actions of one to millions of American citizens. The professor is right in that we need to focus on finding people whose opinion is extreme, regardless of religion in the military, but singling out Muslims for such scrutiny and castigation is simply wrong. CNN reports of White Supremacist gang activity slipping into the army’s ranks, graffitti from the Latin Kings is popping up in military bases in Iraq, and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation reports dozens of cases of anti-semitic acts such as vandalism, swastikas, and insults. Charles Grainer, the leader convicted in the Abu Ghraib scandal, beat Iraqis to make them “pray to Jesus” according to court evidence. I’d like to see all extremism curtailed, but the Professor does a disservice to everyone by singling out minority Muslims. Such intolerant statements above bashing Islam weaken the resolve of our Muslim allies and those Muslim-Americans who courageously serve. Don’t compound the loss of our soldiers with intolerance and more vilification against the wrong people.

I hope that the NYU administration repudiates these hateful remarks that Professor Varadarajan made, and reaffirm their commitment to keeping NYU a place of open discussion and debate safe from hate speech against any of our diverse communities. Since the administration has not commented on current events, then this incident should compel the administration to come out openly in defense of Muslim students.

____

Are you outraged too? I wrote this up and sent it to NYU President John Sexton, as well as Dean Cooley of NYU Stern. I ask that everyone also writes to these people and asks NYU to repudiate the disgusting remarks.

Addresses:

john.sexton@nyu.edu

tcooley@stern.nyu.edu

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Shaykh Abdul Hakim Murad has a blog of Contentions. They’re one-liners and quite deep. Others have tried the same, like Haroon Moghul. I decided to try making some of my own.

1. It was never a War on Terror, more like a War on Some Terror

2. Terrorism is a tactic, trying to fight it is like a War on Ambushes

3. If you want good egg salad done right, you have to make it yourself

4. Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Oman, UAE, and sometimes Yemen

5. We aren’t really a “free” country. A truly free country would be called Anarchy, and I wouldn’t want to live there.

6. If the phrase “Islamic crime” is an impossible oxymoron, then why does the phrase “Islamic terrorism” go unchallenged?

7. There are three things I’m fiercely loyal to; my religion, my family, and my choice of Operating System

8. An amateur built the Ark.

9. Things happen for a reason. Santiago Ramon y Cajal, Nobel Prize Winner in Medicine, failed his first two jobs in barbering and shoemaking, and medicine was his fallback career his father got him into.

10. One million New Yorkers have quit smoking. That’s 1 in 10, and you can do it too.

11. Israel and Pakistan are like cousins that have similar roots; founded nearly the same time on the basis of religion and as a homeland of refuge. And yet like relatives, they hate each other.

12. Throughout the world, lawyers have been the movers and shakers of history, founding new countries and making revolutions. In America, it’s the doctors that do that; 5 signed the declaration of independence.

13. If you need a Cliff’s Notes summary of the 1980’s, watch Back to the Future, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and Wargames.

14. The Russians made Chess a required class in school. Rather than do that, America needs to add Critical Thinking and Ethics as required high school classes.

15. It’s hard to take critics of the Muslim world seriously when they don’t even know what a lota is, much less use one.

16. The meek shall no longer inherit, so long as the media covers the loudmouths instead.

17. Fads never last. Radio stations played Macarena every 15 minutes, and people begged for more.

18. Be like Atticus, the same integrity in private as in public

19. Les Miserables is an awesome book after page 600. Maybe the author made the first half boring to get rid of the riffraff.

20. Don’t train your kids to say outrageous stuff as a baby. Sure, it’s funny at family gatherings, but that’s how Ann Coulter got her start.

21. Becoming a doctor is a great childhood dream. That and being a ghostbuster.

22. If your parents are a different religion than you, then having a last will is necessary.

23. You know you’re truly in New York when the baseball stadium sells sushi

24. Are fortune cookies Halal?

25. New York milk tastes the best, maybe it’s something in the cows

26. If alcohol was so much fun, there wouldn’t be any need to advertise it so heavily

27. Let’s do some organic chemistry; my fist is the nucleophile, your teeth are the leaving group, and I’m going to do a SN2 reaction

28. NYU is charging $50,000 and 2 years of my time to add 3 letters to my name

29. Why are crocodile-skin shoes made in Italy? I thought crocs were only in Egypt or Florida

30. Twitter is going to trigger a panic; the false 2004 rumor about HIV in ketchup is circulating from a few hours ago

31. Robocop would have been much funnier with a mustache.

32. Months later, I still watch the news and realize “Dude, the presidents middle name is Hussein. Isn’t that awesome?”

33. Patrick Bateman inspires me to clean my apartment.

34. Never get sick and go to a teaching hospital in July (all the fresh graduates from med school begin)

35. Guantanamo’s slogan “Honor Bound to Defend Freedom” is about as hollow as Auschwitz’s “Arbeit Macht Frei”

36. Hitting page 1200 in a textbook is like hiking to the top of a mountain.

37. Being proud of your ancestry is one thing, living up to it is another.

38. Usenet (remember Usenet?) used to be like Twitter…The Web used to be this way too…Twitter’s time will come. Just wait.

39. Objectivism is to objectivity as Scientology is to science

40. When you use a credit card in a taxi, keep in mind that $1 goes to the CC company, plus a commission. I recommend tipping $1 extra to help the cabbies.

41. If you go to a Bengali-Arab wedding, wear a suit

42. Islam continues to impress me; so intricate. What other religion encourages you to brush your teeth?

43. Philly is a fascinating place; like a black version of Boston, or more like Albany with less white people

44. Seder and Seyonce sound the same, don’t blame me for confusing them.

45. Six years in the service sector retail will be enough to make you start to hate the public.

46. Meclizine, a pill to treat vertigo, motion sickess, and dizziness, may cause dizziness. Self-perpetuating.

47. When people say “no homo,” I think of Tobias from Arrested Development

48. Subway booth attendants are a nasty bunch, would it kill them to smile?

49. You too can build your own Soxhlet extractor, and bend the rules of thermodynamics yourself

50. Why does every teacher I get a crush on turn out to have horrible teaching skills as the semester progresses?

51. Studying organic chemistry is like listening to Vogon poetry

52. Is it just me or does Tim Geithner remind me of the villain from Billy Madison?

53. People don’t realize the luxuries people have in America; you can safely drink the water in the shower

54. Keep your friends close and your enemies on Limited Profile

55. Slapping someone across the face with an iPhone is so bourgeois.

56. If you want really vivid dreams, take malaria pills and marvel at their side effects.

57. Fighting on facebook is like fighting on a school playground; you win or lose in front of everyone and your friends can get drawn into it when you don’t want them to.

58. Sometimes the only way to cope with the injustices in this bizarro universe is through comedy. The Daily Show is a Godsend sometimes.

59. Muslim organizations need to rethink scheduling their conventions for Easter, 4th of July, and Christmas, when everyone has work or school off. It really inconveniences people of mixed families

60. If you’re wondering why you’re always so tired, maybe its because iced teas are strongly caffeinated

61. Oil companies make billions in revenue from pumping oil resources out of the poorest populations, but those same people only got half that money back in aid

62. Sufis get respect from me for dressing like something out of a history book

63. You don’t realize you’re a lonely bachelor until you find yourself sewing your pants at 2am in your apartment. 

64. Bobby Jindall is like a brown John Edwards with an accent like Kenneth the Page from 30 Rock

65. Now that Slumdog won, can someone tell me what Jai Ho means?

66. I think I’ll find the girl of my dreams at a university protest; someone smart and passionate about Social Justice

67. I feel like Harry Potter sometimes; All the other Muslims seem to know sahaba stories and words I never grew up with

68. Somewhere out there is a guy in a straitjacket muttering to himself, “It’s not lupus”

69. I’m not sure what’s more unhealthy and decadent; baconnaise or a dating website for married people who want to have a secret affair

70. When your friend needs to buy a mattress, don’t go into the showroom together; people will assume you’re a couple.

71. Everyone should learn how to swim.

72. Orange soda somehow magnifies the effect of spice and makes curry burn a lot more

73. Braveheart is still an incredible movie. If they could make a movie about Scots and Muslims I would camp out in front of the theater to watch it

74. I’ve been waiting for a “normal” day since last year. Will that day ever come?

75. One day, the Ferguson name will be as mighty in the Muslim world as the name Khan is today

76. Be weary of who you give money to on the street. If he’s not homeless, you’d better beat it quick.

77. I wonder how many calories you burn when your hair grows

78. The one time I don’t look both ways on a one-way street, I nearly get hit by a car traveling in reverse.

79. Why is cheese delicious on Italian food, but disgusting on most other ethnic foods?

80. At every presidential inauguration, the vice president gets sworn in first. For 15 minutes, Joe Biden was Bush’s VP

81. People react poorly when I say I was a Politics major. The look on their face is like I majored in Corruption

82. By my calculations, I could take on 14 five-year-old kids in a fight before they overpower me as a swarm.

83. Israel reminds me of a teenager’s mindset; everyone’s against me, I feel so unpopular, and it’s never my fault when something goes wrong.

84. I have a theory why Jews traditionally drifted to the political left in American politics, because the right was so anti-semitic and still is. I see Muslims trending the same now

85. Trying to learn in a class during winter break is like trying to take a drink out of a fire hose

86. Photoshopping yourself into another ethnicity will give you nightmares

87. Winning or losing is not the most important thing of a war. God judges people by their conduct and whether they obeyed His rules.

88. Sabr (patience) is truly one of the hardest things to do, and consequently it’s one of the best good deeds.

89. I wonder how many people have been killed by letter-openers

90. There just has to be a Halal Arby’s somewhere in the world, and I will find it

91. Nothing says I Love You like an xmas gift from the dollar store.

92. There’s something subtly racist about Newsweek translating Arabic words except for “Allah .” It makes people think Allah is different than God. Do they translate Spanish speeches except for “Dios?”

93. I don’t understand the phrase “See you in Hell.” You mean you’ll be looking down upon them suffering or you’ll meet them there?

94. Are emoticons halal?

95. Saying you’re an epidemiologist sounds way cooler at a party than saying you’re a doctor. Gotta be the extra syllables.

96. Muslims are like X-Men. There’s good ones and bad ones and they fight each other, but the normal people fear/hate em all

97. Do NOT pat people on the back if they are choking, it usually makes the food go further down

98. For once I’d like to read about an Islamic group in the newspaper without reading the word “radical” or “extremist” in it. Thousands of them out there and they all go ignored.

99. I’d feel weird if I was Obama, the White House was built by slaves

100. We will never have a president named Bruce. Yelling his name will sound like Booing him

101. If I can find a woman who cries during all the same movies I do, like The Message and Lion of the Desert, I’ll propose to her

102. The word “Behold!” needs to be used more often in conversation.

103. 37,000 people in the US die each year from the flu. We oughta focus more money on that than terrorism.

104. I hate when people ask “does it wash off?” Of course, it’s facepaint. No I am going to permanently mark your child to look like a cat.

105. It’s very hard to keep halal at an Italian restaurant. The foods either have wine or meat sauce.

106. If you ever want proof that racism is still alive and well, check YouTube; the best source of raw stupidity is their comments section.

107. Public health is to medicine what macroeconomics is to microeconomics

108. In 2004 I said it will only get worse from here. In 2008 I realized I wasn’t that imaginative to predict how bad things actually got.

109. Take a shower in Peshawar.

110. I’m majoring in something I can’t describe in a single sentence. I think I’m scared.

111. Theres something I cant describe: fasting for a day and then breaking that fast with a sweet, sweet Date

112. There should be a law against losing your job on a Friday; you spend all weekend wallowing.

113. Why have the hardest interviews with politicians been from comedians?

114. Irony is when the Professor starts a lecture on racism and when a black man walks in during it, she says “Oh are you here to fix the projector?”

115. Barack Obama could hold a rally of hundreds of thousands of people and Fox News would whine about how he’s destroying the grass

116. Stacking your 4 years of textbooks to a pile taller than you really makes you feel accomplished.

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Thank God, summer has finally arrived. I’m still decompressing.

I have a very long to-do list for this summer. 1696 unread emails, 79 unread facebook messages, a Netflix Queue of 489 DVDs, applications to medical school, a summer class July-August, and a humanitarian medical trip to Honduras the day after the final. Add to that my need to fix the sailboat, visit the beach, and save up some money by working longer hours at the CVS/Pharmacy on 14th Street. Further plans include exploring Brooklyn and Queens, and Manhattan south of Houston St.

I’d love company for all of these things. Summer seems lonely because everyone moves hours away in the summer, so keep in touch.

My summer reading list:

Flowers for Algernon
The Godfather
The Kite Runner
Angels and Demons
Ghost Wars
Gifted Hands, the Ben Carson Story
Nahjul Balagha
The Road from Mecca: Muhammad Asad

Top 30 slots in my Netflix Queue:
Paradise Now
Harold and Kumar…Guantanamo Bay
The Darjeeling Limited
MythBusters: Collection 1
No End in Sight
2010: The Year We Make Contact
MythBusters: Collection 2
Blade: Trinity
The French Connection
American Desi
No Country for Old Men
Coming to America
The Best of the Colbert Report
Blazing Saddles: Special Edition
Willow
Exit Wounds
Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut
The Punisher
Baghdad ER
Dave Chappelle’s Block Party
Death Wish
Grosse Pointe Blank
CSI: Season 2
Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary
The Hurricane
Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar
The Whole Ten Yards
Ordinary People
Downfall
Arrested Development: Season 3
Hellboy II: The Golden Army

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