A Little Piece of My Local News

Soma Newspaper---at the Chaikhana (tea-house)

On the back page of every paper, these two men have a chat about...well, everything. Their conversation rambles and jumps and rabbit-trails, never to return. But sometimes they really nail a concept or the cause behind something that everyone complains about. Here's part of one...
read the whole bit here.

JWAMER
Come on Bayiz who am I to give advice to those professional people!

BAYIZ
But I have seen school children giving advice to the government.

JWAMER
School children are advising the government?

BAYIZ
Yes and so many times.

JWAMER
Oh my God, why?

BAYIZ
Don’t ask me, ask democracy. Sorry, sorry, I think its real name is chaos.

JWAMER
Bayiz do you have a handkerchief?

BAYIZ
Yes, but it is dirty. Why?

JWAMER
I want to cry, we must all cry, cry for converting the ideal of democracy into a chaotic situation.

BAYIZ
I have no objection. I will cry with you, but it is not only us that should take responsibility. Others are responsible, too.

JWAMER
Do you mean our kind neighbors?

BAYIZ
Definitely not. I mean those who liberated Iraq. They brought us the food but they didn’t teach us how to eat it.

JWAMER
Don’t simplify the matter Bayiz, it is a multi-faceted one. But the bulk of the responsibility falls upon us. We failed in all the exams, let us cry.

BAYIZ
I hate exaggeration but since you insist on crying take the handkerchief. Here it is.

The Wierd Things I Do

So I turned off the lights last night as I brushed my hair. I know, I know... you all think I'm crazy. Maybe I am, but not for this... The dryness of the air created a lot of static electricity. I first noticed as my hairbrush shocked my head... ouch. But then I remembered that the static electricity does more than just make my head hurt and my hair stand out from my head. So I turned off the lights and had my own fireworks show. Pretty cool.

Rather Wordless...

Perhaps a better title than wordless is topic-less... I have plenty of words flowing about in my head (some of them aren't English, though), I just don't know which ones to use or what to talk about. I could say I went to the bazaar on Saturday and bought a red bedspread which is rather pretty, at least compared to the blankets that it covers up. I could say that I learned yesterday that there is no word for patience in Kurdish. They use the Arabic word, but a Kurdish word doesn't exist to their knowledge. I suppose I am saying these things--not just that I could.

I am frustrated and confused about my role as a young single female among long term missionaries. How strong ought I to stand on issues of importance and issues of little importance? I (and in God's abundant blessing, others on my team and around me) have been impacted by the importance of prayer. I love how God leads people in the same direction individually--how cool is that!

I have done a lot of grading today. I taught classes and was terrified to have a guest come in and videotape part of one of my classes as well. Wow was I freaked out. Oh well...more footage for our next training video "How NOT to Teach 101".

My feet are dirty... I understand so much better in the Middle East the concept of washing feet... the dust the dirt...it's everywhere.

Now I am becoming rather wordless... snippets in my life... and my encouragement to you all...PRAY.

A dilemma and a request

I have recently been a part of a conversation (or actually, I just listened) concerning the passage in 1Timothy 2:11-15. I know that I have distinct views on this. I also know that I approach Scripture in a certain way that only allows for a limited interpretation of most things. My first request is that you send me your thoughts on this passage.

My second request is caused by the situation behind the first request. In that conversation many other topics came up that I saw as far more important than the issue of women and yet I still disagreed with many who were there. I am a young woman... in a general conversation on a Biblical issue with older Christians how should I be? Part of me hesitates to contradict those who are older and have more experience than myself--after all, what if I am wrong? But I don't think I am wrong. I don't see how I could be wrong in light of Scripture. What then should I do? Should I approach these people? Should I ask them to clarify? Should I rebuke them (I don't feel that I could!)?

Thanks for your prayers.

My Life as a Medieval Fairy Tale

Once upon a time there was an ordinary girl. She was an ordinary school teacher drudge, but was sent on a quest across the seas to a far land where the people spoke different, looked different, and acted different. She encountered many adventures among those people but one day she went on a special mission.

After navigating a maze of roads with two trusty companions she found herself behind security lines having slipped (well, walked) through some guard posts with hardly a notice. (Yes, the companions were patted down--being men and all.) Covertly standing in line (just trying to blend in, you see) the girl and her friends made it a bit further before a violent struggle (okay, so no struggle at all) and some blood was drawn.

Escaping from there, the girl and one of her companions held cotton to the inside of their elbows and went off to scavange for some nourishment which was purchased from some kindly people nearby who had some extra food for the travelers (they ran a restaurant). During the consumption of the meal the group was notified of a princess who was locked in a porcelain room.

They rushed to her rescue and one of the most experienced companions opened the door with the secret and magical key (screwdriver) to release the princess who was quite shaken at her captivity. The young lady gave gracious thanks and the heroes returned back to the place of their origin in the educational facility which was their cover for all surreptitious activities like rescuing small princesses from rooms where the door handle has fallen off.

What an amazing day!

Magdi Allam Recounts His Path to Conversion

A fascinating letter... beautiful in many places. Worth the read...an encouragement to me. He will speak for himself.

Dear Friends,

I am particularly happy to share with you my immense joy for this Easter of Resurrection that has brought me the gift of the Christian faith. I gladly propose the letter that I sent to the director of the Corriere della Sera, Paolo Mieli, in which I tell the story of the interior journey that brought me to the choice of conversion to Catholicism. This is the complete version of the letter, which was published by the Corriere della Sera only in part.

* * *

Dear Director,

That which I am about to relate to you concerns my choice of religious faith and personal life in which I do not wish to involve in any way the Corriere della Sera, which it has been an honor to be a part of as deputy director “ad personam” since 2003. I write you thus as protagonist of the event, as private citizen.

Yesterday evening I converted to the Christian Catholic religion, renouncing my previous Islamic faith. Thus, I finally saw the light, by divine grace -- the healthy fruit of a long, matured gestation, lived in suffering and joy, together with intimate reflection and conscious and manifest expression. I am especially grateful to his holiness Pope Benedict XVI, who imparted the sacraments of Christian initiation to me, baptism, confirmation and Eucharist, in the Basilica of St. Peter’s during the course of the solemn celebration of the Easter Vigil. And I took the simplest and most explicit Christian name: “Cristiano.” Since yesterday evening therefore my name is Magdi Crisitano Allam.

For me it is the most beautiful day of [my] life. To acquire the gift of the Christian faith during the commemoration of Christ’s resurrection by the hand of the Holy Father is, for a believer, an incomparable and inestimable privilege. At almost 56 […], it is a historical, exceptional and unforgettable event, which marks a radical and definitive turn with respect to the past. The miracle of Christ’s resurrection reverberated through my soul, liberating it from the darkness in which the preaching of hatred and intolerance in the face of the “different,” uncritically condemned as “enemy,” were privileged over love and respect of “neighbor,” who is always, an in every case, “person”; thus, as my mind was freed from the obscurantism of an ideology that legitimates lies and deception, violent death that leads to murder and suicide, the blind submission to tyranny, I was able to adhere to the authentic religion of truth, of life and of freedom.

On my first Easter as a Christian I not only discovered Jesus, I discovered for the first time the face of the true and only God, who is the God of faith and reason. My conversion to Catholicism is the touching down of a gradual and profound interior meditation from which I could not pull myself away, given that for five years I have been confined to a life under guard, with permanent surveillance at home and a police escort for my every movement, because of death threats and death sentences from Islamic extremists and terrorists, both those in and outside of Italy.

I had to ask myself about the attitude of those who publicly declared fatwas, Islamic juridical verdicts, against me -- I who was a Muslim -- as an “enemy of Islam,” “hypocrite because he is a Coptic Christian who pretends to be a Muslim to do damage to Islam,” “liar and vilifier of Islam,” legitimating my death sentence in this way. I asked myself how it was possible that those who, like me, sincerely and boldly called for a “moderate Islam,” assuming the responsibility of exposing themselves in the first person in denouncing Islamic extremism and terrorism, ended up being sentenced to death in the name of Islam on the basis of the Quran. I was forced to see that, beyond the contingency of the phenomenon of Islamic extremism and terrorism that has appeared on a global level, the root of evil is inherent in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictive.

At the same time providence brought me to meet practicing Catholics of good will who, in virtue of their witness and friendship, gradually became a point of reference in regard to the certainty of truth and the solidity of values. To begin with, among so many friends from Communion and Liberation, I will mention Father Juliàn Carròn; and then there were simple religious such as Father Gabriele Mangiarotti, Sister Maria Gloria Riva, Father Carlo Maurizi and Father Yohannis Lahzi Gaid; there was rediscovery of the Salesians thanks to Father Angelo Tengattini and Father Maurizio Verlezza, which culminated in a renewed friendship with major rector Father Pascual Chavez Villanueva; there was the embrace of top prelates of great humanity like Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Monsignor Luigi Negri, Giancarlo Vecerrica, Gino Romanazzi and, above all, Monsignor Rino Fisichella, who personally accompanied me in the journey of spiritual acceptance of the Christian faith.

But undoubtedly the most extraordinary and important encounter in my decision to convert was that with Pope Benedict XVI, whom I admired and defended as a Muslim for his mastery in setting down the indissoluble link between faith and reason as a basis for authentic religion and human civilization, and to whom I fully adhere as a Christian to inspire me with new light in the fulfillment of the mission God has reserved for me.

Mine was a journey that began when at four years old, my mother Safeya -- a believing and practicing Muslim -- in the first in the series of “fortuitous events” that would prove to be not at all the product of chance but rather an integral part of a divine destiny to which all of us have been assigned -- entrusted me to the loving care of Sister Lavinia of the Comboni Missionary Sisters, convinced of the goodness of the education that would be imparted by the Catholic and Italian religious, who had come to Cairo, the city of my birth, to witness to their Christian faith through a work aimed at the common good. I thus began an experience of life in boarding school, followed by the Salesians of the Institute of Don Bosco in junior high and high school, which transmitted to me not only the science of knowledge but above all the awareness of values.

It is thanks to members of Catholic religious orders that I acquired a profoundly and essentially an ethical conception of life, in which the person created in the image and likeness of God is called to undertake a mission that inserts itself in the framework of a universal and eternal design directed toward the interior resurrection of individuals on this earth and the whole of humanity on the day of judgment, which is founded on faith in God and the primacy of values, which is based on the sense of individual responsibility and on the sense of duty toward the collective. It is in virtue of a Christian education and of the sharing of the experience of life with Catholic religious that I cultivated a profound faith in the transcendent dimension and also sought the certainty of truth in absolute and universal values.

There was a time when my mother’s loving presence and religious zeal brought me closer to Islam, which I occasionally practiced at a cultural level and in which I believed at a spiritual level according to an interpretation that at the time -- it was the 1970s -- summarily corresponded to a faith respectful of persons and tolerant toward the neighbor, in a context -- that of the Nasser regime -- in which the secular principle of the separation of the religious sphere and the secular sphere prevailed.

My father Muhammad was completely secular and agreed with the opinion of the majority of Egyptians who took the West as a model in regard to individual freedom, social customs and cultural and artistic fashions, even if the political totalitarianism of Nasser and the bellicose ideology of Pan-Arabism that aimed at the physical elimination of Israel unfortunately led to disaster for Egypt and opened the way to the resumption of Pan-Islamism, to the ascent of Islamic extremists to power and the explosion of globalized Islamic terrorism.

The long years at school allowed me to know Catholicism well and up close and the women and men who dedicated their life to serve God in the womb of the Church. Already then I read the Bible and the Gospels and I was especially fascinated by the human and divine figure of Jesus. I had a way to attend Holy Mass and it also happened, only once, that I went to the altar to receive communion. It was a gesture that evidently signaled my attraction to Christianity and my desire to feel a part of the Catholic religious community.

Then, on my arrival in Italy at the beginning of the 1970s between the rivers of student revolts and the difficulties of integration, I went through a period of atheism understood as a faith, which nevertheless was also founded on absolute and universal values. I was never indifferent to the presence of God even if only now I feel that the God of love, of faith and reason reconciles himself completely with the patrimony of values that are rooted in me.

Dear Director, you asked me whether I fear for my life, in the awareness that conversion to Christianity will certainly procure for me yet another, and much more grave, death sentence for apostasy. You are perfectly right. I know what I am headed for but I face my destiny with my head held high, standing upright and with the interior solidity of one who has the certainty of his faith. And I will be more so after the courageous and historical gesture of the Pope, who, as soon has he knew of my desire, immediately agreed to personally impart the Christian sacraments of initiation to me. His Holiness has sent an explicit and revolutionary message to a Church that until now has been too prudent in the conversion of Muslims, abstaining from proselytizing in majority Muslim countries and keeping quiet about the reality of converts in Christian countries. Out of fear. The fear of not being able to protect converts in the face of their being condemned to death for apostasy and fear of reprisals against Christians living in Islamic countries. Well, today Benedict XVI, with his witness, tells us that we must overcome fear and not be afraid to affirm the truth of Jesus even with Muslims.

For my part, I say that it is time to put an end to the abuse and the violence of Muslims who do not respect the freedom of religious choice. In Italy there are thousands of converts to Islam who live their new faith in peace. But there are also thousands of Muslim converts to Christianity who are forced to hide their faith out of fear of being assassinated by Islamic extremists who lurk among us. By one of those “fortuitous events” that evoke the discreet hand of the Lord, the first article that I wrote for the Corriere on Sept. 3, 2003 was entitled “The new Catacombs of Islamic Converts.” It was an investigation of recent Muslim converts to Christianity in Italy who decry their profound spiritual and human solitude in the face of absconding state institutions that do not protect them and the silence of the Church itself. Well, I hope that the Pope’s historical gesture and my testimony will lead to the conviction that the moment has come to leave the darkness of the catacombs and to publicly declare their desire to be fully themselves. If in Italy, in our home, the cradle of Catholicism, we are not prepared to guarantee complete religious freedom to everyone, how can we ever be credible when we denounce the violation of this freedom elsewhere in the world? I pray to God that on this special Easter he give the gift of the resurrection of the spirit to all the faithful in Christ who have until now been subjugated by fear. Happy Easter to everyone.

Dear friends, let us go forward on the way of truth, of life and of freedom with my best wishes for every success and good thing.

Magdi Allam

[Translation by Joseph G. Trabbic]

THERE IS HOPE!

More on this topic: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JC26Aa01.html

Random Event...

So... on an ordinary day...things like this happen. We were driving down the road and stopped at an intersection. A man on the street yelled out... "Hi! Bye! I love you!"

I think he must have been learning his English from the soap operas. Ugh...the things I suffer.