Air conditioning and window screens. I miss air conditioning and window screens. Most apartments here don’t have ‘em (well rich people do, but my friends and I aren’t rich). Last night I was at a friend’s house, and since it’s summer it was a warm night. So we left the windows open … and a mosquito [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Uncategorized’
July 20, 2008
Niqabi refused French citizenship
When Faiza Silmi applied for French citizenship she was worried that her fluent French was not quite perfect enough or that her Moroccan upbringing would pose a problem.
“I would never have imagined that they would turn me down because of what I choose to wear,” Silmi said, her hazel eyes looking out of the narrow slit [...]
July 18, 2008
Fajr in the secular republic
The muezzin for the mosque closest to my home is completely incomprehensible for the fajr adhan. This is pretty sad, since he’s clearly trying very hard to do a good job. It takes him no less than 10 minutes to get the whole thing out from the (presumably) initial Allahuakbar till the Laa ilaha illa [...]
July 6, 2008
Trix are for kids
Sometimes, you just feel silly.
My team at work rotates full weekends off, so basically each of the four of us get one Sunday a month off work (we all get Saturdays off normally, that’s our ‘weekend’). My roommate also works at Today’s, but not in copy editing, so she never gets Sundays off. Anyways, so [...]
June 29, 2008
Mediterranean jellies
While I was writing this article on jellyfish population increase in Turkey, a professor I’d asked to interview sent me the following, very cute email:
“Dear Davenport,
I have no experience with the jellies in the Mediterranean Sea. Yes, I observed the same results when I participated to the cruises in the Mediterranean Sea. Please contact …”
Enjoy [...]
June 24, 2008
I haven’t updated in a while, for reasons alternating between being too lost/distracted in my own thoughts and simply being swamped with Things To Do (arbitrarily capitalizing here because I remove other people’s annoying arbitrary capitalizations in articles all day long at work and feel that I have the right to do it sometimes since everyone [...]
May 30, 2008
‘Uncontacted tribes’
It comes up in halaqas, speeches by scholars and the like, from time to time. “What about those people who never heard the message of Islam? How will they be judged?” At most halaqas I’ve been at, that idea seems so far-fetched in this day and age, that the issue being discussed turns into, “Well, [...]
May 22, 2008
Homesick
Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. It’s a few days shy of 10-and-a-half months that I’ve been in Turkey now, and I’m pretty much 100 percent homesick. But I still have no idea when I’ll be able to go home, since relocating is such a huge task in and of [...]
May 20, 2008
Reflection From a UC Berkeley Islamo-Jihadist
Mad props to Bro Bilaal for this article in the Daily Cal .
April 24, 2008
Who is your Lord? Light upon light…
“Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth; a likeness of His light is as a niche in which is a lamp, the lamp is in a glass, (and) the glass is as it were a brightly shining star, lit from a blessed olive-tree, neither eastern nor western, the oil whereof almost gives [...]
