Me… Unplugged

In just a moment I am going to disconnect my personal computer from the internet; I am going to unplug the network cable from the back. In the Qur’an we read that there is good and bad in alcohol, but the harm outweighs the benefit. Just now, at this moment in time, the internet is my wine. Its harm is outweighing its benefit to me.

Protestant Christians—brought up on Paul’s appeal to Grace and his sustained condemnation of legalism in his letter to the Galatians—are sometimes heard lamenting the Muslim’s insistence on living by the letter of the Law. Grace sets mankind free from all that, they will argue, but surely the state of the world around us bears witness to the fallacy of that view. Some people are indeed blessed with great self-restraint, but isn’t our Sunnah really just being realistic about the strength of individuals and communities?

Yes, some people are just good folk. And yes, some people can become good folk with the promise of reward. But it is true too that some of us must be deterred from deeds which are harmful to us and others. In truth it is few that live by Grace; like donkeys, most of us will only respond to a carrot or a stick, or both depending on our state of mind. I appreciate this. I appreciate possessing a faith which is realistic about human nature. I appreciate possessing a faith that doesn’t simply tell me that mankind is born in sin and can do nothing about it except rejoice that a ransom has been paid on my behalf. I appreciate possessing a framework through which I might overcome what holds me back.

I sometimes feel sad that I do not have the pure, beautiful, sound heart of some of my fortunate brothers and sisters in faith. Sometimes we meet people whose whole being oozes kindness. I envy such people a lot, but I also recognise that all is not lost for me. The Sunnah, the Law, this noble framework for our lives, is a blessing for those of us who need a little more help. In our lives we sometimes deprive ourselves from certain pleasures, for which we are often derided by those around us, but we do so because we know that in the long run it is good for us. At other times we expend our efforts on tasks which we may find a burden, which we may even dislike, but we persevere nevertheless because we know that it is good for us, our family or our community.

I doubt that disconnecting myself from the internet is a prescription of our Sunnah, but depriving ourselves of that which brings harm upon us most certainly is. My first step—of promising myself not to spend too much time on the internet—failed in rather spectacular fashion. I have great self-restraint in many spheres, but this is not one of them. To unplug is my next step. If that doesn’t work, then I may just have to cancel our service altogether, although that would deprive my wife of her online training, Turkish news, video conversations with her family and www.reciter.org (she manages to obtain all the good of it). Perhaps that won’t be necessary if I can get her to hide the network cable from me—I can’t imagine this being a problem because she already does it with the cakes.

In a moment or two I am going to disconnect my personal computer from the internet, not for an hour or two, or a day. For quite some time I hope. At least until I have achieved everything I need to. I can’t say I have high hopes, for I know myself too well and I know I have been somewhere like this so many times before. But I am going to unplug the network cable now, so let’s see how I go. And God help me, and us all.

Poison

A realisation dawns that is not really a new realisation at all. It is something I already knew. Something I knew three months ago, a year ago and seven years ago. Much of the content on the internet is poison. The internet is just a tool and we make of it what we will, but that’s the problem: what we make is invariably pointless at best and toxic at worst. Now would be the time to overcome the pretense–to get over ourselves–that our presence in cyberspace is somehow useful and necessary. That’s what everyone believes, but the fitna provides the alternate narrative.

There a numerous ahadith that put this into perspective for us. Such as the following:

A believer will not be able to perfect his faith unless he forsakes arguing and debating matters with others.

and

The one who shows the beauty of his character and manners in an atmosphere of controversy by staying quiet has won a place at the highest point in Paradise.

Now is the time, and tomorrow will be the time, and a month from now will be the time. Every moment will be the time. The time to stop. To disconnect.

Spinning a web for ourselves

Four and a half years ago we disposed of our television because we found it eating up our evenings after work. Indeed, in the wake of the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York, we felt we had to sit glued to every news broadcast… the end of the Six O’Clock News, all of Channel Four News, the 10 O’Clock News and most of Newsnight, with the light entertainment of Scrap Heap Challenge in between. I am glad my wife agreed with me when I suggested we rid ourselves of the black box in the living room. Freedom! Time!

But what replaced it? Work when I was self-employed, and now — too often — the Internet or random tinkering with computers. Technology, they say, is altering our horizons, bringing the world closer together and making our lives much easier. Yes, I can talk to my friend in Bahrain for free using voice-over-internet telephony. Yes, my wife can have a conversation with her sister in Turkey on MSN — and see her at the same time. Yes, I can collaborate with colleagues across three continents using Yahoo Groups. Yes, all of this is true. But I can — and do — waste my time with greater ease than ever before, just doing, well, nothing.

Recognising my lack of self-restraint, I have tried all sorts of solutions over the years. I have put Content Advisor into action on Internet Explorer and deliberately forgotten the password, but found that annoying when I wanted to access the web for legitimate reasons. Nowadays it is possible to put an invisibility cloak on Firefox which turns websites blank before an hour of my choosing and limit the availability of the internet to a length of time of my choice. I suspect the only real solution — short of me discovering immense self-control — is ditching the modem as we did the TV, though that may require greater justification. The Internet connects us across borders to family overseas and provides the language link for my other half.

Using the Internet is eating away at the short time between my birth and death. I have so much to do, but still squander the wealth we have in seconds, minutes and hours, and all that is left is regret. Last night I sat down to do some typesetting, but never even got as far as starting Quark Xpress. Two hours later there was just that sense of regret again. So here I am now, evaluating my reading — or looking — as well as my writing. What are those things we will be asked about? How we used our youth before our old age?

If I can, if I can generate the will and the self-control, I may just fast the Internet for a while. While I will treat myself to Reciter, excepting this great aid, I can see myself trying to give up the World Wide Web, to pull the plug and quit. Time is of the essence. Reaching the end of this post, how do you feel? Was it worth spending 2 minutes reading down to here? Did you learn anything new? No, I only told you what you’re already certain of: the clock is ticking, our time is short and we’re wasting it away surfing the Internet. We need to learn how to live as those before us lived. Progress, change: these are only good for us if we know where we are going. And we don’t seem to have a clue.

Reciter Website

I came across this some weeks back, but thought it was not working because there was no sound – turned out to be a computer problem. Fulaan ibn Fulaan helped me rediscover it after my very long and boring post entitled Hatim – may Allah reward him. And now Ann and my friend Tariq from my class have reminded me that it is a tool too useful to keep to myself.

If you’re trying to learn the Qur’an and you want to do so properly, this may be the tool that helps you. While it is easy to download MP3 recordings of the Qur’an these days, the advantage of this is that it allows you to select single verses, set a range of verses, repeat a verse more than once, pause after playing for its duration to allow you to repeat or pause for a set period, all whilst highlighting the verse in the manuscript. So go ahead: visit www.reciter.org and tune in to Mahmood Al-Hosari’s recitation.

In detail, this is what you get:

• Scan of the entire Quran, displaying two pages with headings to mimic exactly the Madena Quran style (Huffaz).
• You can select from six recitations: Abdulbaset, Ali Al-Hodaifi, Mahmood Al-Hosari, Abdullah Basfar, Ibrahim Al-Akhdar and Mohammed Ayoub.
• There are four books of tafseer to read from – I haven’t got as far as looking at any of these.
• It provides translations in six languages: English, French, German, Turkish, Indonesian and Malayu.

Go on, have a look, you know you want to. You’re on the internet already. All you need is to have Flash installed on your computer. Wouldn’t that be better for you? Here, let this send you on your way…

Reciter

Let the Qur’an be the light of our hearts and our means to success.

Changing Times

Weblogs have come under quite some fire recently in the newspaper I regularly buy. Janet Street-Porter’s comment last week was followed a day later by an article by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. In both cases their generalisations are quite amazing. For me and many others this medium is a mere tool.

Around 1993 my introduction to the world of publishing began with a desk-top publishing (DTP) programme on my brother’s Amstrad PCW. I used to produce a newsheet – “TIM’S”. A couple of years later I initiated two student magazines linked to my interest in development and human rights, “Modern Times” and “Circulation”, which I produced on my own first PC, a 486 machine running Serif PagePlus. Other publications followed. I self-published my first novel with its miniscule circulation using that same machine with Word 6, my trusty HP Inkjet and a binding machine.

At university I spent my second year laying-out the student magazine using Adobe PageMaker. While doing my Masters in 1999, I added Quark Xpress and Adobe Photoshop to my portfolio. Then in 2001, I discovered the internet as a publishing medium and so began a website called “My Journey”, which later became “Our Journey” when I got married. “Euromuslim” and “AlienNation” were two group efforts I toyed with for a while.

You see, for over a decade I have been interested in publishing and writing, and the weblog is just the latest tool in this process. I am really not interested in “blogging” per se, but in communication media in general. I read only two weblogs on a regular basis, one which provides media analysis and one which encompasses matters of the deen. I occaisionally browse other Muslim blogs to get an idea of current thought in western Muslim communities, and a couple of private novel blogs belonging to fellow writers who wish to share their work in progress, but this is the entirety of my engagement with the “blogosphere”.

I write and publish because it is a hobby of mine, as the years have shown. Is there something special about a weblog? Not really. I use the software provided by Blogger because it is more convenient than the FTP method I used when I first discovered the Internet and the DTP adventures before that. I have had so many people coming up to me recently, telling me that they read my “Blog” and I find it quite embarrassing. I’m somehow ashamed to find myself part of this great global trend. But then I remind myself of the same condescending criticism of DTP ten years ago. “Real Publishers” turned their noses up at these upstarts, just as “Real Commentators” mock those who use the medium of weblogs today. No doubt the internet is awash with detritus, but please: so is TV, Radio, Magazine Publishing, Book Publishing and the Newspaper Industry.

I can understand the snobbery on one level: the media and publishing are industries which are intensely difficult to enter. Despite my job interviews with all the big names in publishing I never got my foot in the door given all the competition… so I can appreciate why those on the inside are so protective of their position. But times change. The traditional printing industries died with the advent of the Apple Mac and digital repro in the 1980s. The men who created plates with lead characters protested in their time. And many a small press cried when the DocuTech arrived, whilst others thrived. Times change and media come and go. Newspapers have seen their circulations diminish in recent times, perhaps with the advent of the internet. It is still possible that they might all but die out, newspapers becoming the realm of enthusiasts alone, just as the skills of the calligraphers and copiests of old petered out.

For me, IT has always been a tool, a mean to an end and not an end in itself. No doubt I could have established for myself a great career by now, with great wealth in the bank, had I viewed IT differently some years back. Instead I saw software as a means to achieving my goals, as tools to help in the creative process. Just as a wordprocessor helped me to write, the software of the Weblog now helps me to publish. It is a tool, not an end in itself. A newspaper is a tool too, aiding communication. Those who have let it become an end in itself will awake one day to find it dead. Those who see a tool for what it is will move with the times and adopt whichever gives them the edge. Flint tools gave way to bronze and bronze to iron. This is the way of man.