Phew. One hell of a trip. It’s been nearly five years since the last time I went back, and a lot has changed. A lot has progressed in Khartoum. Yeah. There. I said it. Even I was surprised.

I’ll be sharing my thoughts about the trip soon, just like how I did with Beirut.

I’ll also need to finish a round up post for Global Voices which you can expect, and the 7 Categories of Faith series which I got too busy and distracted to continue with.

Lastly, the journey with my book continues. Yes, it’s still happening. Although I must admit, writing it is one thing. Getting it published is a whole different story. Luckily, I’ve learned my lesson.

I should have hired a professional a long time ago. It would have spared me some wonderful headaches and lack of clear direction.

Things now are so much better. The whole writing process has been deeply therapeutic, and it’s taken the form of a memoir. Plus, given my recent career transition, I’m going to enjoy a lot of more free time.

Talk soon.

- Drima

PS: Meanwhile, watch this cool video by Mona Eltahawy about how the internet is impacting Islam. Agreed!

Cool new posts coming. Why? Because I’ve been away and busy traveling observing some fun stuff that are pretty relevant to this blog. So yes, Drima will be back, shortly. Stay tuned and don’t go away.

Cheers.

Bearded lunatic on the right asks “are we wrong?”

Wisey beard on the left replies “absolutely not, they criticized us first.”

Bailing shit out in 2009 helped save the financial system from collapsing in the United States, and thanks to globalization, elsewhere in the world.

Good, but also bad.

The American auto industry lives on, even the big portions of it which should have been allowed to fail, because you see, if America has been pretty damn good at anything, then it’s failing.

Heavy government regulation prevents that, and contributes to propping up inefficient business operations that end up wasting resources and killing real entrepreneurship.

Still, if America is to survive and flourish economically in this increasingly competitive world, there needs to be a balance and it must fail.

It must continue failing.

Failing forward.

Meanwhile, I leave you with Ayo’s sexy reggae tunes: Help Is Coming!

Two days ago, I watched Avatar for the second time. The first time, I watched it to enjoy the orgasmic cinematics in 3D. The second time, because I wanted to focus more on the in-your-face preachy storyline.

I’m not going to comment on the latter because many have already done so in great detail, and here, Citizen Obie does an awesome job rounding up some pretty interesting reviews, including this one: “Avatar: the most expensive piece of anti-American propaganda ever made.”

The best part of Citizen Obie’s post? What Heather said: “if white guilt could masturbate… Avatar.”

LOL.

Read the whole thing here.

Oh, and watch the movie.

May might Ewya bless you in 2010.

- Hugs, bitches.

Happy (or sorta happy) Independence day to all Sudanese readers. This is going to be a big decisive year for Sudan, and so will the next.

Our first elections in like a zillion years, followed by Southerners deciding in 2011 whether they want to divorce the North to finally end that lovely dysfunctional bitter marriage arranged by the British.

And then of course 2012 will arrive and we’ll be screwed anyway, so why worry about voting?

Bleh, okay, I admit, a big part of me is pretty pessimistic about the transparency of the upcoming elections, but if I allow the pessimism to take over, then I’ll simply be embracing what can only be described as a defeatist attitude.

So, in Kawther’s words… “Here’s hoping that the country doesn’t descend into even greater chaos.”

Back to slowly revamping the subtleties of this blog.

زغرتو يا بنات. هذه أول تدوينة يدونها دريمة باللغة العربية… انها لحظة تاريخية على الحقيقة

المهم… أرسل لي صديقي ناصر هذا الفيديو من برنامج الإتجاه المعاكس عن مسألة وحدة السودان. نقاش حاد وصل إلى مرحلة شخصنة تافهة للأسف الشديد بسبب أبو شنب الجالس على اليمين … كانت لديه وجهت نظر جيدة عامةً ولكن أسلوب في النقاش غبي

هدي أعصابك يا أبو شنب

This. Is. Orgasmic. Some of my favorite religious and atheist thinkers - including Sam Harris and Dinesh D’Souza - are in it, and the format is really cool.

You also have people somewhere in the middle, like Robert Wright, who are neither religious nor really atheist.

If you’re into this kind of stuff, I recommend you watch it. And this too.

If you’re looking for a scientific world-view that’s rigidly empirical, and yet strongly indicates purpose within the universe, then do check out Robert Wright’s work.

Thing is, just like religion, science is not a monolith. Yes, most scientists are physicalists, but there is a growing number of people like Robert Wright who question claims such as “consciousness is the brain itself.”

In this video, Wright challenges Dennet until he gets him to admit that there is indeed to a certain degree directionality and purpose within evolution.

Score.

My friends, the atheist God of “Sheer Chance” is dead. He’s bye bye. Yours truly is against the notion that the universe and life on earth emerged by accident.

Increasingly, a ton of empirical evidence is showing us that there is directionality within the cosmos. There is purpose, and that’s a big deal, because such a belief need no longer be merely faith-based.

But hey, don’t take my word for it. Just watch this quick debate.

Here’s the video:

Imet Wissam, author of Ethiopian Suicides at the Arab Bloggers Summit in Beirut recently, where I learned about his blog. (Here’s a video interview of him).

Wissam’s blog was featured in CNN, CNN Arabic, the L.A. Times, the Guardian, El Mundo (Spanish), Angry Arab News Service, The Daily Star (Lebanon) and Now Lebanon. It’s a great example of how citizen journalism can she light on important issues that hardly receive attention from the mainstream media.

Here’s what Wissam wrote on 24th December:

Ethiopian maid commits suicide in Ashrafieh. Merry Christmas everyone!

I just got a phone call from Nadim (HRW).
A few hours ago, an Ethiopian maid committed suicide in Ashrafieh. Her body is still laying on the road.
Ethiopian Suicides blog wishes you a Merry Christmas!

Here’s what he wrote a day later:

The Ethiopian maid “fell” from the balcony yesterday

The investigation into the death of migrant workers is taking a more “professional” approach. The death yesterday of Melomasen A., Ethiopian domestic worker, in Ashrafieh, was not declared a suicide. Investigations into the circumstances of the death are ongoing. She “fell” from the balcony of her employers and died immediately.

Al-Akhbar newspaper reported today on the incident. It mentioned that the security forces waited for the forensic team to come and remove the evidences, in case it was more than a case of suicide. This is considered a progress.

Wonderful. “Merry” Christmas indeed.

Merry Christmas boys and girls. 2009 is bye bye, and 2010 is about to dawn upon us. So here’s a question for you: what are you going to do to make 2010 better than 2009? Note down the answer, execute it, and have fun doing it.

Yippie yay.

Happy holidays and have a fabulous 2010.

Back to being drowned in the sounds of Nina Simone.

NOTE: Super long post ahead. Possible blindness might immediately ensue if you read it all. Continue at your own risk. You’ve been warned.

Phew. It’s been many years since I left the back-then very conservative Arab nation of Qatar, and my family started a new life in Southeast Asia. A lot has changed over the decade - world politics, media and myself.

And with that kind of transformation comes the desire to grasp on a deep level what really happened, what really changed, and if there was anything you lost along the way.

Or maybe whether what you “lost” has always been there within you but you’ve been too distracted to notice it, leading you to assume it’s become nothing more but a mere relic of your past.

Such an introspective exercise inevitably forces you to look within yourself and at times also induces intoxicating nostalgia.

In the case of Beirut, the experience reminded me of what it means to be an optimistic Arab, amongst warm hospitable Arabs, in an Arab city drowned in the sounds of Arabic music.

[click to continue...]

Iarrived in Beirut yesterday with a crapload of misconceptions about Lebanon and its people, but I’m glad to say that I’ve been largely very, very wrong.

It’s been a lot of fun so far.

There seems to be a certain quality about this city that I haven’t witnessed anywhere else. It’s chaotic yet elegant. Anxious with a dash of fierce frustration, yet deeply soulful. Full of cracks, yet somehow still glued together.

And in the midst of it all, the magical element, that certain quality that keeps this living and breathing oxymoron ticking - resilience.

That’s what I’ve learned so far.

The Lebanese, if anything, are a very resilient people, and it’s an awesome admirable quality I’m starting to like about them, besides their warm hospitality of course.

More to come soon, about Beirut, and the 2nd Arab Bloggers Summit.

Drima enjoys being stimulated, and he’s certainly grateful for the occasion.

So yay to stimulation - bitches.

This is what happens when an Afro-Arab Sudanese, aka yours truly, and a white English chick, aka my friend Claire, get together to talk about the recent BBC show that invited our lovely friend, Nick Griffin of the BNP, for a fun entertaining episode.

Yours truly pretty much bugged the shit out of busy Claire to write a quick guest post sharing her honest opinion on the matter after we discussed it.

Brits in the house (you know who you are), please drop your thoughts below after reading. Here it is. The blog post’s title is mine. The rest is hers.

Enjoy.

So Drima and I got talking one day about “the rise of radical Islam” in my country, the UK. Prompted by Nick Griffin’s appearance on prime time television, this huge issue has been publicly ripped opened - at last. So now the conversation can really begin…

But you know what? It’s such a huge and complex conversation, I can’t even begin to do it justice.

The one thing I will say is one of the more significant points in our conversation.

Drima was railing about how British political correctness had gone crazy and why we let that happen.

We allow the East London Mosque and its bookshop to run freely despite knowing what it sells, whilst we send innocent people to court for wearing a Cross necklace at work?!

“Simple” I said. And I know the answer because I am white, British and middle class.

We let the PC go crazy because our ex-colonial past is not in the past.

We used to take over and destroy cultures, replacing them with our own. We now acknowledge that this is wrong. Very wrong. So today, if we tell someone of an ethnic minority, “you can’t do that”, for any reason, justified or not, the auto-response is “racist! You don’t understand or respect culture. White colonialist! Shame!”

And we do feel shame. And the next time we keep quiet.

What makes this more difficult? More often that not, this shouted response is not from the minority.

It is from our embarrassed white brother.

In recent years this attitude reached special highs and the average person got sick of it - which is probably why the BNP started doing so well.

Of course they went too far, but apparently, at least they were willing to “stand up and say no, enough is enough. This is our country too and we want Christmas! Change is coming.”

The BNP is an overreaction (thank you, BBC, for allowing Nick Griffin a public platform to hang himself and his “political party”) but now the shout of “too much PC” has at least been heard.

And perhaps more importantly there is the growing voice of the home-grown Islamist recanters, speaking out against violence and promoting “secular Islam.”

Could this be the shift we’ve been waiting for?

These two voices need to be heard and they need to work together to create an environment we all can live in together.

I’m hopeful. Because there is a middle ground filled with people just like me, who are neither fascists nor jihadists. Dare I say it, we’re the quiet majority?

We must be louder.

Islam will not leave our country but neither will it become an Islamic Republic - and the scared white folk and radical Islamists both need a re-education to understand that that is OK.

Welcome to 2010.

Special thanks to Drima for sending me this article, it reveals a lot of what needs revealing in a way I could never express.