Project 365

Alhamdulillah, I went to perform Umrah today. The mosque was too beautiful. The clock had ticked. It was magnificent. But, to be honest, I like Mekkah the way it used to be. All the old buildings. Traditional and modest.

All I could see now was extravagance and luxury. It’s too much. Too commercial. And that’s not what Islam is about. That’s not what Mekkah is about.

• Saudi Arabia has the highest car accident death rate in the world
• 17 deaths on average occurred daily because of traffic accidents
• In 2009, 6,485 died in car accidents in Saudi Arabia, while 4,644 died in Iraq because of terrorist attacks

I beg to everyone… please, please drive within speed limit and obey the traffic rules!

Read this article, titled “At The Beach With Nancy Ajram” and found some surprising facts:

• Lebanon has one of the highest rates per capita of plastic surgery in the world
• 1.5 million plastic surgeries are performed in Lebanon each year. An estimated 20% of them on men.
• Lebanon is a country where banks will give women monetary loans for plastic surgery but where up until last year women could not open bank accounts for their children
• There are more Lebanese women living in Lebanon than there are men

And I can see more fake faces on TV nowadays. I actually wrote a little bit about it in my other blog, focusing more on the Arab female singers. Al-Arabiya published a slideshow of the before and after looks of these Arab stars. Some of them looked sooooo different!

Pictures taken from Al-Arabiya.

Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.

— Siddhārtha Gautama

Let us say, alhamdulillah.

Even though I lost the one person I used to look up to, I still have You. I still have my family. I still have friends. They are the ones I turn to when I seek for help. They are the ones who can stop the stream when I bleed.

And I’m thankful for it. Alhamdulillah.

In Saudi Arabia, black people are called takruni. These people have lived here for many years and generations, that some of them do not even know their country of origin anymore. They have no idea where they come from. They speak Arabic and live mainly on the streets, searching for bottles and cans in trash bins to be exchanged with money.

My brother asked me today, where did the word takruni come from? He was so curious that he started googling it. In the beginning we searched takroni and takrooni but found none. After googling and wiki-ing (?) for a while, we found the answer.

Takruni is derived from Takrur, which was an ancient kingdom of West Africa, including much of Ghana and Senegal and the western Sahara desert. Takruni refers to the people of this kingdom. Other known forms of takruni are Takarin, Takarna, Takruri, and Takarir. It is believed that the earliest West African Muslims to be seen in the Middle East in recognizable numbers may have come from that state.

The desire to write grows with writing.

— Desiderius Erasmus*

I haven’t been so good at keeping my promise on writing a blog at amellie.net on a regular basis. I used to write a lot of things related to current affairs, women’s rights, and many more. But I realized I had stopped doing that long time ago. Master’s studies have taken away my time and have successfully dropped my writing mood. I used to write a lot in the weekends, but I never did that anymore. I preferred to do other things.

But few days ago I encountered a report published by Human Rights Watch titled "As If I Am Not Human": Abuses against Asian Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia. I read this report with anger and it really disturbed me. This report fueled me to write a blog posting about domestic workers in Saudi Arabia.

Read the full post here 🙂

* Quote taken from Rahmah

I just finished watching a TED video presentation by Sheryl WuDunn titled Our Century’s Greatest Injustice. Again, I’m not too keen on writing so I’m just going to write some interesting issues she made in bullet points.

• More girls were discriminated to death than all the people killed on all battlefields in 20th century
• Girls aged 1-5 die at 50% higher mortality rate than boys in all of India
• Women and girls aren’t the problem. They are the solution.

If you’re not fully utilizing half the talent in the country, you’re not going to get too close to the top ten

— Bill Gates, when he was in Saudi Arabia, referring to the Saudi women that were not fully utilized.

• It may well be that the highest return on investment in the developing world is in girls’ education – Larry Summers
• When you educate a girl, she tends to get married later on in life, she tends to have kids later on in life, she tends to have fewer kids, and those kids that she does have, she educates them in a more enlightened fashion. With economic opportunity, it can be transformative.
• Research shows that once you have all of your material needs taken care of, there are very few things in life that can actually elevate your level of happiness. One of those things is contributing to a cause larger than yourself.
• We have all won the lottery of life. And so the question becomes: how do we discharge that responsibility? So, here’s the cause. Join the movement. Feel happier and help save the world.

The presentation reminds me of a quote made by Queen Rania of Jordan:

If you educate the women, you educate the family. If you educate the girl, you educate the future.

So, are you ready to discharge that responsibility? 🙂

How could you reach the pearl by only looking at the sea? If you seek the pearl, be a diver: the diver needs several qualities: he must trust his rope and his life to the Friend’s hand, he must stop breathing, and he must jump.

— Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Taken from the book Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis by John R. Bradley. One of the best books that I encountered, discussing about Saudi Arabia and its society.

The Saudi Labor Law does not define any rights and duties of the employer of domestic staff, who are in effect his slaves. Of course, not all employers are deliberately cruel or abusive. Many are merely casually so. They believe what they have been told for decades: that theirs is a perfect society and that they, as a consequence, are more completely civilized than anyone else. Quite innocently, they regard their maids and drivers as lesser humans, born in filth and ignorance, who should be grateful for the opportunity to serve them.

I’ve heard too many abuse and mistreatment stories from firsthand victims. Upon reading the book, there’s nothing surprising that I found. Everything seemed to be familiar. It’s 2010 and Saudis (including other Arabs) still treat their maids like their slaves. It saddens me. How can they do such things to other human beings?!

If… the despised Asian blue-collar workers left en masse, the country would collapse overnight. Garbage would pile high in the streets, families would go hungry, restaurants would close, goods would remain undelivered and rot, and the water supply would stop. There would be no more farming the desert, no transport, no fixing and filling the all-important cars, no air-conditioning, no lighting the streets, no repairing of roads. There would be no trade in anything but sheep and camels, and the wind would whistle through deserted markets. And the sick, injured, and dying would pile up in the corridors of hospitals, if they somehow managed to make it there.

They extremely depend on us, yet they are not able to show us the slightest gratitude. Is that an example of a so-called civilized society?

The sky was lit by the splendor of the moon
So powerful I fell to the ground 
Your love has made me sure 
I am ready to forsake this worldly life
and surrender to the magnificence of your Being

— Jalal ad-Din Rumi

So beautifully written. It makes me wonder, when will I find You? Yes, you, whose love made me sure to forsake this worldly life. And whose love made me surrender to the magnificence of your Being.

Whoever you are, don’t hide. Don’t walk away. Walk slowly so I can find your footpath. And eventually find You.