6 June 2011
Update on Amina
Amina
Dear friends of Amina,
I am Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari’s cousin and have the following information to share.
Earlier today, at approximately 6:00 pm Damascus time, Amina was walking in the area of the Abbasid bus station, near Fares al Khouri Street. She had gone to meet a person involved with the Local Coordinating Committee and was accompanied by a friend.
Amina told the friend that she would go ahead and they were separated. Amina had, apparently, identified the person she was to meet. However, while her companion was still close by, Amina was seized by three men in their early 20’s. According to the witness (who does not want her identity known), the men were armed. Amina hit one of them and told the friend to go find her father.
One of the men then put his hand over Amina’s mouth and they hustled her into a red Dacia Logan with a window sticker of Basel Assad. The witness did not get the tag number. She promptly went and found Amina’s father.
The men are assumed to be members of one of the security services or the Baath Party militia. Amina’s present location is unknown and it is unclear if she is in a jail or being held elsewhere in Damascus.
I have just spoken with her father who is trying to locate her. He has asked me to share this information with her contacts in the hope that someone may know her whereabouts and so that she might be shortly released.
If she is now in custody, he is not worried about being in hiding and says he will do anything he can to free her. If anyone knows anything as to her whereabouts, please contact Abdallah al Omari at his home or please email me, Rania Ismail, at onepathtogod at gmail dot com.
We are hoping she is simply in jail and nothing worse has happened to her. Amina had previously sent me several texts to post should something happen to her and we will wait until we have definite word before doing so.
Salamat,
Rania O. Ismail
BIRD SONGS
Knowing no boundaries
Borders mean nothing
When you have wings
My heart and my soul
Long to follow and soar
Out over mountains
And deserts and seas
I have no wings
And earth presses in
Wrapped in a sheet
Forever to lie
Weighed down by dirtclods
Never to feel
Wind on my wings
Sun on my back
Soaring and flying
Freedom is coming
Here am I wanting
To know it one day
Still Sunni After All These Years
I was born to Sunni Muslim parents but that is not the full reason nor even most of it. Were that all, I would, I believe, have abandoned belief long ago. Surely, beliefs that make it harder to do whatever one wants to do and to do what, if one did not have such beliefs, would be easier would not be kept if not sincerely held. How much easier, when living in America, not to be Muslim, not to eat hallal food or wear hijab … let alone to force oneself to remain chaste …. To not fast in Ramadan and not to pray and so on …
And as I’m lazy and fearful, if I didn’t strongly believe, I’d long ago have abandoned the religion. But I did not, because I believe.
I believe firstly because of personal experience of the divine. Now, that can be explained away as magnetic fields or aberrations of the mind, if one is strictly rationalist, or as emanations of some other spirits, rather than of God.
For me, though, having accepted that what I saw and felt and experienced was real, I applied logic and reason to the world. To me, time is directional and history has a meaning. There is an end and a beginning of all things. The universe itself, we find, exists with conditions that, were they any other way, would be impossible for us. They call that the Anthropomorphic principle, if I recall correctly, and also press the idea of cosmic mediocrity. Ours is an average planet around an average star, out in the edges of an average galaxy, and so on and so forth. We are an average species in size and form. There is nothing special about us.
But we live in a universe that is not an accident. We are rational beings and we have a moral sense. I believe that there is a creator of the universe, a First force, a God of the Universe, who set the rules that make this world. I believe that the universe is vast but that God is vaster. I believe that this God set forth the Cosmos in the distance of time and made the conditions such that, in the fullness of time, life would appear and, with it, intelligence.
But I do not believe that we ourselves are the purpose for that; I see no reason to think that Earth is special nor that humans are perfect. The universe was made for intelligent and rational beings to behold but humanity is likely not the only rational intelligence in the vastness of the universe. Otherwise, there’d be a lot of wasted space.
So I believe in a rational universe; I am a deist, I suppose. But why be Muslim? Why not find another path to the divine?
For me, that is a bit more complicated. I view God as above and beyond humanity, as much greater than we are as we are to a virus, only much more so indeed. God is infinite, endless, without beginning or end. God is neither male nor female and far above any category of our minds. God is beyond our comprehension, but just and moral, compassionate, and unchallengeable. God is so great as not to be contained in a man or a woman or a tree or an animal or a rock or anything. God is everywhere.
And God does not play favorites; no special people, no special family. I reject that God begets or is begotten; I reject Holy Nations and Holy Families. I believe that God is universal, one God for all humanity, the same God for all the intelligences in all the universe. I believe in a God unchanging through time for God is beyond time. I believe in a God who cares, not just for certain people in certain places, but for all humanity, for all sophonts wherever we may be in time or space. I believe in a God who sends messages and messengers to humanity to steer us towards what is right and place the keys of our natural religion, the natural religion of the universe, in our grasp.
I reject the idea of original sin; no one is damned because of what their parents did or did not do and salvation is available for everyone, all the time, from the beginning of time until the end of the universe.
And that is also why I call myself a Sunni, not for sectarian reasons (though I bear a name that marks me as ‘damned’ by birth to some), but for reasons of my belief. I reject the idea of special people have special access to God; I reject the notions of Popes or Imams who are infallible. I reject wilayat I faqih. I reject the notion of priests and prelates needed to mediate the experience of God for ordinary people.
I believe that all of us, men and women, are capable of comprehending the divine as much as any human can. There are no special people, just humans. A priesthood of all believers and all believers priests.
And so I believe that there is no God but God, I believe in the Messengers of God and their teachings. I try to reconcile my own life to the precepts which have been given because they come as close as humanity has known to describe both my own experience of the Divine and my own rational explorations of how the universe is made.
I am a Sunni Muslim because I am a rational person who believes in God and in freedom of humanity, who believes in the equality of all people before God and in the difference between Good and Evil.
That may seem crazy but that is what I believe.
Another musical interlude
for a funny, funny take on this:
I'm American enough to want to make poor little Glen cry some more if I can!
Jaulan is in our hearts
Yesterday was June 5th, the first day of the commemoration of the Naksah. On the ceasefire lines, there were ‘clashes’, as the press will euphemistically call them. In Lebanon, in Gaza, all across the West Bank … and on the line of control between Syrian and Israeli forces. There, 23 human beings, unarmed, were killed by the occupiers’ guns and hundreds wounded.
The occupier already is claiming that all of this was orchestrated by that fiendish mastermind, Bashar Assad. From this side of the mountain, that looks frankly ridiculous. I suppose they think he also masterminded these ‘puppets’ of his in kadima
Of course, they like to believe that theirs is the world’s most moral army and all sorts of inane platitudes to their powers of loving kindness. Here’s a good example of the most moral soldiers in the world, the elite shining light to the goyim, showering their morality down on some depraved sons of Amalek:
And here is how they explain it:
They cannot admit that they are ever wrong and so they must always work to defame every Arab, every bit of our culture, our religion, everything. We are evil and history is meaningless; all that matters to them is maintaining their myth and repeating their lies ever more shrilly. Look at the images of the Arab demonstartors and contrast them with the rhetoric of the Most Noble People in the Most Holy and Most Moral Country That Ever Was as they celebrate their Holy War:
But we are violent, we are evil. As soon as I post this, I know, the defenders of the Holy Nation will come and denounce me, will ask why it is that I do not see their cause as holy and my own people, my own heritage, my own history, as nothing more than the squawkings of baboons.
Don’t laugh; I am sure they will come. And they will again and again demonstrate their arrogance and their ignorance. When not claiming that their innate superiority in all things means that democracy is not for the likes of me (after all, how else to justify their state?) or that we are all needing just a firm, pale hand to guide us, they will show their ignorance of history.
I for one know my own history. And I know my own country. I know that Jaulan was lost after the Syrians had agreed to cease fire. I know who started that war; it wasn’t us. I know that the Israelis hold Jaulan because they would steal our water and need a nice platform to keep Damascus in their gunsights. I know that there is no difference between what keeps them there and what took Saddam to Kuwait … I know of American sailors who died to keep the world from knowing … I know that their own generals admitted that all the ‘vicious wicked Syrian attacks’ were provoked by them, not us …
I know also of the ethnic cleansing that they undertook up there; 131,000 people made homeless so that Russian migrants might have a place to illegally live.
And whatever happens in Palestine, no Syrian can forget that they stole our land and made our people homeless.
And we also know who here was guilty of collusion; we know who worked closest with the Soviets then to start the war, who it was who gave the orders to pull back troops from impregnable strongholds on the Jaulan, who it was who would surrender our patrimony without a shot;
The one who gave those orders, the order that, for what it’s worth, meant the death of my father’s older brother, now has a son. And that son is called the President.
Every Syrian knows that; every Syrian knows that Traitor of the Naksa’s second son is President and that another runs his squads of killers. Every Syrian knows that Bashar has never lifted a finger to redeem Jaulan.
So when the lying liars and propagandists, the makers of hasbara and singers of paeans to the so-called Chosen claims that “Bashar tricked us into killing people (if you can call mere Arabs humans and not two-legged dogs) so as to distract fromhis own crimes”, tell them to stuff it. They lie.
Those were not government planned protests; if they had any ability to see beyond their own lies they’d know that. That is not how the regime’s propaganda works. And, when the slogans of protesters have always condemned this regime for losing Jaulan, they will not bring attention to their greatest failure.
No, this is not Bashar’s trick; this is a taste of things to come. The Arab people are asleep no more and the Arab people, not the regimes, are making their own history now. They protest on Jaulan not because the regime is strog but because it is too weak to stop them. And, when we are free, this is what you will see, every day on every frontier. Millions of Arabs chanting, Thawra hat’n Nasr!