The Quran

So I have finally begun the journey I've been thinking about taking for years, that is to read all the holy scriptures of the world's largest religions. My brother very kindly bought me a side-by-side Hebrew-English Torah for Christmas, which I will have to authentically read from right to left, but realistically it will take me a long time to get to it, the Quran is not exactly light reading. I did however choose a contemporary translation so the language is much easier to digest thankfully. The only other holy text that I've read so far is my own, the Guru Granth Sahib, so my review thus far of the Quran will be a compare and contrast. The more texts I read and the more comparing and contrasting I do, the more connections I can find, and that is the ultimate goal. I'm a big believer in the idea that we are all far more similar as a species than different.

The first difference I noticed between the Quran and Guru Granth Sahib was the formatting. The Guru Granth Sahib rhymes, all 1,430 pages. It even rhymes in the English version I read, which is an incredible feat on behalf of the translators. The reason it rhymes is because all of our scripture is meant to be sung in temple. It's quite logical because rhyming music gets stuck in your head even if you don't want it to, and bam, you've memorized your religious text! It's for this reason that many Sikhs can accurately quote and refer to different parts of the Guru Granth Sahib off the top of their heads. My dad does this all the time to give me "life lessons". The Quran may not rhyme, but it certainly is poetic. However it's not musical, the Quran is chanted and never sung. Despite it being harder to memorize, many people have done it. Those who have memorized the ENTIRE Quran, let me repeat, the ENTIRE thing, earn the title of "Hafiz". There is actually a kid in our grade who has managed to do this and has the title, when he described the years it took to do so I was blown away.

The second piece of formatting difference is that the Quran is beautifully organized. It has a nice table of contents in the beginning that tells you what each chapter discusses. Chapters can be about anything from women to the Virgin Mary (yes she plays a role in the Quran in addition to the Bible, called Myriam in Arabic) to kindness. This is drastically different from the Guru Granth Sahib, which does offer instructions as to how to live a holy life, but it's woven in between about ten million reminders to keep the oneness of the universe in your mind, the whole thing reads like an insanely long ramble. But hey, at least it rhymes.

Digging into the text as I read has been fun. I've been taking mental notes, which maybe I should write down for reference later when I read more religious texts. The tone of the Quran is sort of the mirror image of the Guru Granth Sahib. The Quran mostly says what not to do, while my holy book mostly says what one should do. What's interesting is the message is almost identical, just the approach is different. For example the Quran would say don't kill an animal unnecessarily and the Guru Granth Sahib would say treat all animal lives as holy. What is also interesting is the Quran treats the principles of Christianity and Judaism as common knowledge, often referencing them, addressing them, and agreeing with them. The Sikh text on the other hand treats Hinduism and Islam in this way. It's interesting to then create a map of how time and culture have interconnected all the world religions.

Anyways this has been a pretty loaded post, there's a lot to take in when reading such influential and powerful texts. I enjoyed writing it though and think maybe an ongoing blog as I continue to read them might be a good idea! But for now, thanks for reading!

*Superfreakonomics and more

Superfreakonomics was a great read. Every chapter was fascinating, apart from the one about the "birthday bulge", which I have read about again and again in similar texts, including one of Malcolm Gladwell's. The concept is that child athletes that succeed almost always have fall birthdays. Among a grade of students, those who are born in September or October are significantly older than their peers born in July or August. For children even an age difference of eleven months can provide a significant edge in development. So let's say you take a group of fifth grade hockey players. The ones with fall birthdays may be stronger and farther along in puberty than the ones born in the summer, so they get ranked better and that causes an ongoing advantage in the sport. It is much more eloquently stated in the book, but I hope I least made some sense
My favourite chapter was on why suicide bombers should buy life insurance. It discussed an algorithm created by a British banker to detect terrorists. There are many factors that can indicate someone is a terrorist I was a bit infuriated that the main factor was whether or not someone had a Muslim name. Many terrorist organization purposely seek out people with Western names, such as David Headly who organized the Bombay attacks, so I found it a bit ignorant they didn't take that into account. As much as I hate racial profiling, I got over it and kept reading. There were other factors that people expected to have an effect that didn't, for example it didn't matter how close a person lived to a mosque. Using a wide range of variables, including one that had to remain unnamed for national security reasons, they made a very accurate algorithm for detecting terrorists. One of the factors was whether or not someone had life insurance. Now it may seem like someone who was about to kill themselves would want life insurance, but we must remember that a. insurance companies do not cover suicide bombings and b. almost all terrorists are young men with no families. If a terrorist were to buy life insurance, they could easily fly under the radar of this algorithm. Why they didn't have to keep this a secret, I do not know, seems silly to explain the algorithm in any sort of detail in a best-selling book, but it did make for a fascinating read.
Now that I am done with Superfreakonomics, I've decided to take a different turn. I will not be reading fiction, even though I do miss it a bit. Instead I've decided to embark on a journey my mother did many years ago. I'm going to attempt to read all the religious texts of major world religions. I'm starting with the Quran. Although Islam has made it very clear that the Quran should be read by followers in its original Arabic, I have not learned Arabic yet (it's on my bucket list though) and will be reading an English translation that seems to be universally praised. One thing that sets the Quran apart from the Bible is that if you read it in English, it has only been translated once and therefore retains much of its original meaning. People forget the Bible has been translated hundreds of times, and I am sure this has caused confusion and alterations.
Islam has always been an important part of my life. Many of my parents' friends are Muslim and as a child we travelled through the Middle East. I was also mentored by a Muslim vet I volunteered for, and he taught me so much about Islam and life in general. My mother's friend Lubna Al Qasimi is a member of the royal family in the UAE and the country's first woman minister. Despite breaking down gender roles found in her culture, she has remained religious. My mother has benefitted greatly from reading the Quran. She has a greater understanding of where her friends come from, and has been able to successfully shut down Islamophobic idiots by directly quoting the Quran. I can't wait to someday be able to do the same!

Superfreakanomics

I have in the past couple of week finished the Bin Ladens. I must admit I didn't read it all the way through in the assigned chronological order. It's a fascinating book, and very well-researched, but for me it was maybe a bit too well-researched. Steve Coll went into every detail that he could have possibly dug up about the past three generations of the Bin Laden family. It's an amazing feat and the book is a great source for information, but the very detailed and informative nature could get into the mundane at times. It would be a great source for any form of research however. The style reminded me a lot of Freedom at Midnight, the book I read on partition in conjunction with my Junior research paper. They both alternate between stories and narrations of facts and jump around in time a lot to propel the writing. They also have themed chapters that are organized in similar manners. 

The Bin Ladens contained an extraordinarily large amount of information to process, and I suppose I could have given my brain a break and followed it with fiction, but I'm really enjoying my non-fiction streak I've had the last few months. It's given me a lot of information on a lot of topics, and I thrive off of facts. I'm the kind of person who likes having a little bit of knowledge on any topic life can throw at me. My mom is also a statistician, so I'm used to having the world explained to me through numbers, trends, and other stats. Superfreakanomics is the follow up to Freakanomics, a book written by economists that connected seemingly unrelated phenomena and concepts using numbers. Each chapter has a different attention-grabbing title such as "How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?" or "Why should suicide bombers buy life-insurance?" The concept of the Freakanomics books is similar to Malcolm Gladwell's work, but I have a strong preference for these books. Gladwell attempts to make very over-arching universal lessons out of his conclusions he makes by viewing the world through an economist's lens, which bothers me. I think anyone who thinks they've made sense of the entire world that quickly is quite frankly full of crap. Plus his statements might be cool or shocking, but you can't apply any rule or conclusion to the whole world, life isn't that simple and neither are people. Superfreakanomics instead gives you food for thought, and is open-ended in the sense that it allows you to decide how you will interpret and use the information it provides.

The Bin Ladens Post #1

 Since I finished An Atheist in the Foxhole, I have been struggling to find a new book. I knew I wanted to read something non-fiction, because I love getting knowledge about the world from reading, but I wasn't sure what topic. My mom has read tons of interesting books about Africa, India, the Middle East, etc. I thought about reading a book I had found in my room about India, but it was written in kind of a boring manner. Finally though I found a really interesting book of my mom's, called The Bin Ladens. For most Americans the mention of the surname Bin Laden brings up an image of one of the worst terrorists of all times, Osama Bin Laden. However Osama Bin Laden comes from a very wealthy and huge family from Saudi Arabia. To put it into context, he has 53 siblings according to the family tree in the beginning of the book. Beyond just his siblings he has hundreds of relatives all over the world, most of whom are ultra-wealthy but beyond that relatively "normal" people. One of my aunts who lives in Switzerland has worked with one of his cousins, and she said that she is a completely sane person. The book is by Steve Coll, who has no connection to the Bin Ladens, so it is a fairly unbiased account based on tons of very meticulous research. I haven't read very much of the book yet but it is broken into four parts, The Patriarchs, The Sons and Daughters, The Global Family, and the Legacies. It appears to be written in a combination of third-person narrative and expository writing. The first chapter is called "We All Worship the Same God" and begins by telling the story of Lynn Peghiny, a piano player who became involved with the family after being asked to play at Salem Bin Laden's huge estate in Orlando. I think that starting with a chapter called "We All Worship the Same God" is a good move on the author's part, because it can address the preconceived notions about Islam and Saudis that a reader may have. The book is very long, almost 600 pages, but I look forward to reading it and getting an "inside" perspective on this family and their role in the Middle East. Over the summer I read a book called "The Price of Honor" which taught me a lot about the political climate of the Middle East and I am looking forward to getting an additional perspective.

An Atheist in the Foxhole Post #2

As the book progresses, Joe Muto is getting deeper and more entangled in Fox News. He has just gotten off a horrifying night shift that left him quite zombie-like, and also contributed to a slowing of the action of the book, as he spent many pages complaining about the sleepy fog he drifted through for almost a year. However, when he gets put on the regular 9-5 shift, there is a portion of the text that really stood out to me. Muto shifted from his normal humorous and snarky narration and commentary of life at Fox News, to a relatively serious issue. He goes into a monologue in the midst of the coverage of Michael Jackson's trial, he describes it as the whole world screeching to a halt until a verdict on the child molestation charges was reached, with every media network focusing on it at once. He talks about how while waiting for a verdict, a sort of "trial-party" was going on at work, and people were laughing and making jokes about how they should play songs by Michael Jackson such as "Pretty Young Thing" or "Beat It" in light of the nature of the charges. Muto points out that he feels awful for ever having joked about such a serious issue, but explains that when you work for the media, you become horribly desensitized. Beheadings, bombings, natural disasters, murders, they all become your norm. It gets to a point where people feel that the only way to cope is through laughter, even if the joke is horribly cruel. I think that this phenomenon occurs in the audience, not just those working for the media. For example, many people are desensitized to seeing the effects of war on the news, and do not think twice about where we are fighting or why. If war was on our homefront however, the situation would be taken far more seriously. He also points out that he actually began to feel that he could create a career in Fox News. This surprised me considering is initial aversion to the network and everything it stood for. He notes that even though he has to grit his teeth while watching some segments, he doesn't feel like he would agree with every segment on CNN or MSNBC either. This made me think about how bias exists on all sides, but people tend to only see it in their opposition. I think being able to reflect one one's own bias and look at an opposing perspective is an important life skill that Muto is teaching through his writing.

An Atheist in the Foxhole Post #1

     An Atheist in the Foxhole by Joe Muto is the autobiographical story of a liberal reporter that works for Fox News for eight years. When I read the cover of the book it seemed like Joe Muto was on some sort of undercover mission at Fox News, but after reading I found out that Joe actually started his journey at Fox News somewhat by accident. After graduating from Notre Dame, realizing he didn't exert himself as much as he could have during his four years of undergrad, he was desperate for a job. He sent his resume out to countless companies but got no responses. As his situation got more desperate, he ran into a classmate at a bar that suggested he apply for a job at Fox News. At first he was appalled by the idea of working for the conservative "enemy" but his classmate assured him working on the IT side was no different than working for any other company. Joe hesitantly sent in his resume, with a completely sarcastic cover letter, and much to his surprise, got an immediate response. The twist however was, Fox loved his resume so much they didn't just offer him a job working their computers, they offered him a job on the actual network. Joe was shocked that this was the first company to actually want him, and due to the fact that he had no other offers, he took the job.
     The first chapter of An Atheist in the Foxhole takes place during Joe's last day at Fox, over the last eight years he explains how he has been carefully and secretly leaking Fox's secrets to various liberal blogs and news sources on the internet. He is halfway through his work day after a majorly successful leak when his co-worker turns to him and says, "They caught the mole." Joe is in complete shock and mentally becomes a nervous wreck, but tries to maintain his composure in front of his coworker. He then realizes that his Ipad has lots of information that could prove he's the mole, so he begins a harrowing journey out of the building trying not to get caught. The rest of the story is told in flashback form from this point. Occasionally the story then flashes forward to his journey out of the building, and although he hasn't been explicitly caught at this point, it is implied that he will be. In addition to the flashbacks and flashforwards, the structure of his writing includes footnotes on almost every page, the footnotes add interesting facts, tidbits, and sometimes downright ridiculous insights into Fox News. Overall the writing is very clever and discriptive, with lots of hilarious quips and fun facts tossed in every so often. What I particularly like about Muto's writing is that he does not portray himself as a hero, or even as a special person. In fact, he can be quite blunt about himself, and especially at the  beginning he portrays himself as a lowly desperate college graduate. He's very open about the mistakes he makes, and the writing benefits from his ability to make fun of himself. So far he has only begun his job at a low level, but from flashforwards I know that he will someday be working right at Bill O'Reilly's side, so I look forward to reading about how he'll get from where he is now to that point.