memories, already!

just looking back through some old pics... this was one of my favorites, of raihana and musa back in august when they were a little over 4 months old...

an "endless nightmare"

this just breaks my heart. i didn't know he was on a hunger strike... i didn't even know he had struck a plea. have sort of lost touch with the case (you know, baby and all). last i remember he was acquitted of all, or at least most, charges, but they were finding some ridiculous pretexts to keep him imprisoned and the feds were trying to retry him on some of the counts. i guess that was a while ago. i have some memories of this mild-mannered man from when i was a reporter for islamonline, back when he was in DC fighting for his brother-in-law's release from detention on "secret evidence." and memories of the frustrated admiration i felt for his tenacity in making use of the system that, as his daughter says in the article below, is now "failing him." and more admiration yet for his family - for his kids, struggling and achieving the way they did despite the hell they were going through.
what does it take to push a man to this point?
i can't even begin to imagine. may Allah help him and his family find justice and peace. may Allah have mercy on them and bring him home to them at last.

Al-Arian transferred to prison hospital amid 24-day hunger strike

MATTHEW BARAKAT Associated Press Writer

(AP) - McLEAN, Virginia

A former university professor who pleaded guilty last year to supporting a Palestinian terror group was transferred to a medical prison Wednesday as he entered the fourth week of a hunger strike.

Sami al-Arian, 49, began the hunger strike Jan. 22 to protest efforts to force him to testify in front of a grand jury investigating a group of Muslim charities in Virginia. He said a plea bargain with U.S. prosecutors last year frees him from any obligation to cooperate with the government.

Nikki Credic, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Marshals Service, said prison officials have been monitoring his health daily.

Prosecutors obtained a court order late last week approving the transfer, al-Arian’s lawyer said, adding that the real motivation may have been to move al-Arian to a more isolated location.

Al-Arian’s daughter Laila said her father fainted and hit his head Tuesday, and that he has lost 30 pounds (13.5 kilograms) since beginning the hunger strike, during which he is only drinking four glasses of water a day.

“We’re definitely worried about him, but we respect why he chose to go on a hunger strike,” she said. “You understand it when you sort of feel like you’re cornered and you feel like the legal system is failing you.”

Al-Arian was a prominent Palestinian activist who met with U.S. President George W. Bush and other political leaders in the years before he was charged.

Al-Arian has said he believes the effort to bring him in front of the grand jury is merely a trap by an overzealous U.S. prosecutor.

“I think it’s just a pretext to hold me either in contempt or charge me with perjury, because whatever I’m going to say, they’re going to say, ‘You lied,’” al-Arian said in a jailhouse interview earlier this month with Democracy Now!, an independent media outlet.

But two U.S. judges have sided with prosecutors and said al-Arian must testify.

Because a judge has found al-Arian in contempt, every day he serves on the contempt charge extends his release date on a 57-month prison term handed down as part the plea for providing support to members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

Prosecutors had sought to prove al-Arian was a leader of PIJ, a terrorist group that has carried out suicide bombings against Israel. The trial ended with acquittal on some charges and a hung jury on the rest.

Al-Arian’s lawyer, Peter Erlinder, said his client’s fear of a perjury trap is valid given the aggressive tactics employed by federal prosecutors in Alexandria, who have handled numerous high-profile terrorism cases in recent years.

Just two weeks ago, prosecutors won a perjury conviction against Sabri Benkahla, 31.

Benkahla had been one of just two defendants to win acquittal among more than a dozen who faced terror-related charges at the Alexandria courthouse since Sept. 11, 2001. Shortly after his acquittal in 2004, prosecutors said he lied in grand jury testimony about his training with a Pakistani militant group and charged him with perjury. He now faces up to 25 years in prison.

The civil contempt sentence al-Arian is now serving could run through June, or until the judge decides that further incarceration is unlikely to coerce al-Arian’s testimony. But even then, prosecutors can seek another six-month term if they extend the grand jury and subpoena al-Arian again.

“It just feels like an endless nightmare,” Laila al-Arian said. “It feels like purgatory.”

everything in bytes?

found this comment posted on a live book discussion at washpost very intriguing:

"The "hooking up" approach is showing up at work -- think of all the contracting out and job insecurity. And housing. How absurd to see a house only in resale terms, and not as a place to live and put down roots. "Hooking up" is a symptom of our destructive, capitalist culture. It is not liberating for women or men. But we can't go back to the 1950s either. We need new models of mutual, loving relationships."

the discussion was about this book, "Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both," by laura sessions stepp, who happens to be the wife of one of my favorite journalism professors from college park, carl sessions stepp.

so the discussion is interesting, the book sounds like it might have some good insights too - might check it out at the bookstore - but i am interested in how this commenter extended the issue to the rest of life in our fast-paced culture. i blogged about this before, but it reminds me of the idea that after decades of mass mediation (i.e. television mostly) we are a society of people who need instantaneous gratification and grow quickly bored with what we have, wanting to move on to see if we can get something better or easier.

is "hooking up" - the practice of having short flings, usually sexual, in place of meaningful relationships - the symptom of this kind of culture? i think it's more than that - also the devaluation of hard work and commitment (i mean on a mass cultural level, i know there are plenty of hard working committed people out there). but young people, the vibrant future of the country, with each generation are focused on getting, achieving, finding satisfaction (usually materially and sexually). why is it always the older community that is wise enough to realize what is truly meaningful in life? i know plenty of young people who have the same awareness, but on a societal level it's just not there.
i can't help but feel it's the absence of God in the outlook of the youner generation. i'm not arguing for the merging of church and state or anything... i just feel like having Something else to yearn for makes life so much more meaningful. and i'm sure plenty of other people do too... i guess that's where capitalism comes in though, because the projection of the image of american youth - beautiful, thin, virile or sexy, loaded, etc, and all for the purpose of convincing people to buy things - erases the possibility of that meaningfulness on a cultural level. maybe.

i'm just babbling. musa is sleeping on my lap and my leg has completely fallen asleep, i must move...

a winter walk

so another thing i wanted to write about was the walk i took with musa a coupla days ago, out at centennial lake.
i wanted to take him out because it was 44 degrees and the sun was shining, but by the time we actually got out it was significantly colder and the sky was clouded. still off we went! the salt-bleached roads and the stillness in the air - every withered leaf frozen in place - made it feel even more wintry. there were no more than four or five cars at the park - a man with his dog, a couple of middle-aged women running. one of them balanced herself against a tree trunk in sitting-chair position - i thought at first she was sitting, but then i saw there was nothing under her.

so i took musa by the lake (face-forward in the baby bjorn, which i had to stuff him into, with fleece hat and mittens and oshkosh boots on) and pointed out to him the frozen surface, with blurred cracks on the underside and puke-green spots of frozen algae. there were arced patterns on the ice, like the water had frozen while the wind had been swirling it forward, and dustings of snow here and there, and thin puddles where the water sat still as the ice. we walked along the fence in the central part of the park, then right up to the lake in some of the fishing spots. musa gets so quiet when we go outside on walks like this - he turns into a little sponge, just soaking up everything. i love this; i am so happy he's an observer, watching and learning like that! and at one point i walked up to a mass of tangled vines - hanging from the bare trees like so much messy hair - and took off his mitten so he could touch one of the twigs wrapped in wiry tendrils: tiny crisp-orange leaves curled around the twig like a dead spider. he grasped it and shook it like babies do, smiling a little. pink nose and cheeks!!! i loved how he twisted his neck to look up at me every now and then, like he was making sure i was still there. when it's warmer i want to take him all around the lake inshallah. but he might be too big for the bjorn then... but he might be walking by then too inshallah!!

i'm going to go have a trader joe's almond croissant with a cup of honeybush and look out at the snow...

a fine balance

just finished this book a couple of nights ago, up until 2 a.m. coz i couldn't put it down in the end, which surprised me because it took me a little while to get into it.
reading suroor's most recent post reminded me of the story: a woman hires two tailors to work for her in her home, and she tries very hard to maintain a distance from them, to make sure they don't take advantage of her, but slowly she discovers some of their painful histories, and walls come down and her heart is moved...
mistry's book is about friendship, but it also paints a picture of a world we never really delve into because it's so uncomfortable in our comfortable lives - the vast world of india's poor, in the mid-1970's. living in illegal huts in a field by a railroad, taking craps in the morning in the tracks and having to jump up when the train comes, being subject like so many leaves in the wind to the heartless corruption of even the most petty officials - everyone open to a bribe no matter what suffering is caused by the injustice, yet almost all are victims of the same system.
mistry is a master at making you care about his characters though! that was what i came out of the book with - their stories and their fates lingered on after i closed the covers. one of the cover blurbs said something about how you won't look at the poor with the same eyes after reading this... oh, all of this sounds so trite, really, what i'm saying, what this blurb says. i know i live in a bubble, i know i've been sheltered all my life, time and again i feel guilty for it... but it's what my parents struggled so hard to make possible for me, so i wouldn't have to know such suffering. then why is it so hard for me to reach a hand out of this bubble and make what's in my heart sprout into something useful? when i give it's like droplets, pinches from my fingers. really, when i do anything it's like that. i'm almost 30, my whole life is passing this way. i don't know how to move myself... i'm too comfortable with being comfortable...

honeybush

i have discovered the answer to my chai prayers.
well, it's like this - i love chai, but i can't have it because i'm nursing. and decaf most of the time just doesn't do the trick.
a friend of mine has just introduced me to rooibos teas - a different leaf entirely from black, green or white teas, so it has no caffeine naturally. honeybush is a type of rooibos.

have you tried it? have you smelled it? it smells like ... imagine what samwise hamfast smelled when he woke in sweet ithilien after falling asleep in the nightmare destruction of orodruin. only sweet instead of herby.
and the taste... i have never ever tasted anything like it. it's like silk going down your throat, warm, touched with honey. so unbelievably smooth. it's not chai... but it's something entirely different. go, go, go try it! teavana has a version, honeybush vanilla, that is just divine. if i can say that. i mean, the first thing i said was "heaven in a cup." oh, thank you God...

the countdown is on!!!

Final Harry Potter Book Due Out in July
Feb 1, 8:19 AM EST

The Associated Press

LONDON -- "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the last of seven installments of the boy wizard's adventures, will be published July 21, author J.K. Rowling said Thursday.

musa let go!!

he was holding on to the ottoman, standing, then in between holding on and deciding to crawl away, he let go for a minute and just stood there, quite steady, before he slowly sat down - no hands! - and crawled away.
he's "stood" a couple of times before when we held him up and let him go, but this is the first time i've seen him let go himself. yay! mashallah...

my husband...

wants me to blog that he is making breakfast for us right now. woo hoo.... well, it DOES smell good!!!
but, just to be fair to me, while he was making breakfast, i was changing musa's diaper and putting a load of laundry in the washer!

we are going to see cousin koonj today, yayayayayay!!!

update: okay, so it was VERY worthy: french toast, spread with melted chocolate, sprinkled with chopped walnuts and topped with strawberry preserves. plus some VERY godo home fries with cheese and veggie sausage. and we are about to have mint tea!
but the REAL good deed is that he promised to clean the kitchen before we leave!!! i have the BEST hubby in the world :)

on obama being "articulate"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/01/AR2007020101495.html

(this is eugene robinson on joe biden making a remarkably ignorant comment about how obama doesn't speak ebonics like other black people do and isn't hopelessly dumb or dirty like them either)

i feel him (robinson that is). it kind of reminds me of an experience i had out in luray, WV - stopped at a 7-11 to run in and get some tylenol, and the girl at the counter seemed so weirdly happy to see me, and she asked where i was from (i was wearing hijab, but also a sweatshirt and athletic pants), and indicated that because of what was on my head she thought i was foreign, and she thought that would have been cool. so after this brief conversation, she told me, "you speak good american!" um, yes, she was white american.
she was sweet, so nice i almost feel bad telling this story. she was the epitome of southern hospitality despite utter ignorance, and i know that well because i was born and raised in fayetteville, nc.

anyway, so, yes, a brown girl with a foreign-looking thing on her head speaks good american, and a black man running for president is "articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," according to joe biden. it's funny how we buck tradition like that!! standing out from the colored masses like we do.