Since I've last blogged, people have been asking if I might have made up the story about the Mufti and the nipple-sucking. Sadly, I had not, I only wish I had that kind of sharp rhetorical wit. Unfortunately, the said Mufti has been forced to swallow his words and recant; no religion-sanctioned sessions with the Sec for me, but I *did* have a conversation with her. That's right, two days ago we exchanged 1.5 paragraphs worth of words. It went like this:
Me: "Uhm, hi... so, uh, you do modelling work in your spare time, right?"
Sec: "Yeah, maybe, sure... how did you know?"
Me: Mummbles (what the fuck was I supposed to say? That I worship her from across the office but haven't had the courage to say 2 words?)
Sec: "Well, yeah I do"
Me: "You know there are these people in Kuwait looking for some models for a catalogue shoot..."
Sec: "A what?"
Me: "A catalogue shoot you know... with, uhm, traditional Arabic clothes on and that kind of thing."
Silence. I turn my gaze to the corner of the room, where the bathroom is. It's only a minute before somebody walks through that door, I think, and then they're going to want to know why I'm not at my desk. They'll be wondering why I'm standing at Sec's desk, how I know she's a model. Maybe THE BOSS is a jealous freak who has his eyes on her and will kill me for even trying to make contact... SHIT!!
OK, things are good. She wants to know more...
Me: "Well, have you heard of Facebook, you see it's this thing, kind of like hi5, which I saw your photos on, but it's less smutty, you see" ....SHIT, I've just told her I think she's a smutty whore for being on hi5. FUCK. NICE ONE.
Sec: "Yeah I know, I'm on Facebook already, see here it is"
She clears off some tabbed windows of solitaire, some Arab music download portals and a few MSN instant messaging conversations. Who needs to work when you look so good?
This is not what I was hoping for. In my mind's eye, she would have come to MY desk, and I could've showed off my 40 wpm typing skills (that kind of shit impresses secretaries, right?), and my ability to distinguish social networking sites.
"Oh, you type so fast..."
"Yes, yes I do..." I say as I look into her eyes from the seat, touch-typing while melting her heart with a few twitches of my nose...and then we kiss and embrace, and get fired. SHIT! End of fantasy.
Sec: "So, yeah, where do I go now?"
Me: Long list of meaningless instructions... can't really grab her mouse and move the Facebook screen for her, can I? Who's going to understand what I just said? But she does!!
She's got it!
Sec: "Hmmm... haven't heard that name...but here's a number, thanks".
Gets back to playing solitaire.
Me:"OK, take care"
Sec: SMILES.
Ah, all in a good day's work. Yes, yes and I confirm I spoke to her 2 days later, and I asked her if she called. She said no. OK.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Cleric Tells Woman: Get Yer Tits Out...Or, What Happens When You Apply Logical Rules to an Irrational Religion
Islam gets a bad press some times... not that Islam does not occasionally deserve a bad press, that's another story, but Islam can be genuinely slanted when reported on in the Western press. Any person who is informed on Islam exclusively through the Western press would think that a fatwa can only be a death sentence, or perhaps an injunction not to cook with Danish butter. In fact, a jurisprudent at Al Azhar in Cairo, perhaps the longest-running seminary in the world of Islam, has used his position to issue a fatwa allowing men to suck on the nipples of female co-workers--even better, our man (hey, you knew he was a man, right?), Dr Ezzat Attiyah at the Hadeeth Department of Al Azhar, suggested that a session of nipple-suckling was necessary to legitimise a situation where men and women shared the same physical space without being either intimately related or married (for those Arabic boffins, this is to be muhram, or محرم).
(Unfortunately, I have only found an Arabic version of this story, here. As you can imagine though, this is spreading like wildfire, which means it will move into the English-language press soon enough; maybe I will update this post then.) The ludicrous point behind all of this is that the potentially un-Islamic arrangement of men and women working together can be avoided by getting the women to get their tits out.
Obviously, my first thought was: How do I get the secretary to go along with this? Since I started working in January, I haven't been able to get my eyes off the doey-eyed, chocolate-brown, busty, curvy 20-year-old who hardly smiles. She acts like a bitch who knows she can get away with it in an office with bad air-conditioning and packed to the brim with single, mostly inexperienced young men; she just knows that she can walk in, stop me writing an email to the boss explaining why we're a week behind schedule and ask me to scan a piece of paper because, in her several months of working there, she has had the time to chat on MSN and play solitaire, but hasn't really gotten 'round to working the scanner. Well, I'm a sucker for it; I sort of sit back, ask her what file format she wants the images in, hope she tries to make small talk and just sort of stare at her and drool until she snaps her fingers, stomps the floor and leaves without a thank-you. I figure a little bit of breast-based action is not too much to ask, no?
Now, to be fair, this kind of insane male fantasy-fuelled theology does have its foundations in Islam's principles and practice. According to the Koran itself, a bond born of breast-feeding turns strangers into siblings; a man and woman who are breast-fed by the same woman in childhood are treated as brother and sister, making any marriage between them impermissible. A similar arrangement is in place between the breast-feeder and the breast-fed. Of course, the mere fact that Islam has such embarrassingly personal loopholes says something about the preoccupations of the people who founded the religion. The breast-feeding-of-an-adult does itself have an important precedent when the Prophet Mohammed himself ordered it to solve certain issues arising from the Islamic prohibition against adoption (much on that topic can be found all over the internet; I once received death threats for writing about this on a newsgroup, so I'm going to leave it at that). It follows from a simple exercise in analogous thinking (thinking in analogies, or قياس is something of a high art in Islamic theology, for some obvious reasons of self-inflicted intellectual restriction) that men can suck their colleagues' boobs and be allowed to share a closed-door office because they would effectively be like mother and son (although this fatwa does allow a cop-out: the sucker and the sucked can later be married, how I don't know, this is the kind of thing one learns at Al Azhar, I guess).
In some situations all of this can work itself out amicably, I'm sure. The problem arises with the needless infantilisation, in so many ways, of Muslim societies. Not all the women in the Middle East's workplace will be as coquettish and dominating of the men as the lovely Sec (and yes, she will stay anonymous; it's a small country and people shouldn't know that she plays solitaire all day!). If this kind of thing were to become the orthodoxy, families would see their daughters out of the workplace and back under lock and key at home; after all, at this rate, a fatwa prescribing fellatio between teenage girls and their geometry teachers is just a few years down the line. In the meantime, I am left fantasizing about the colour of Sec's areolas. So while I would love for this to realise itself in my own little world, I think it's obvious for all to see why this fatwa at least must go into organised religion's heaving pile of bad ideas, but let this be a warning to all of you: Never apply a logical standard of reasoning to a whimsical set of mystical beliefs from the middle ages. It just complicates relations in the workplace.
Incidentally, there is a literally example of this working out in the fictional world: You all should read Samarkand by Amin Maalouf.
PS: I completely love it when people comment on the blog postings, but could you be a bit more clear about who you are? Specifically, please don't just "anonymous", put a name, that way I can at least guess.
(Unfortunately, I have only found an Arabic version of this story, here. As you can imagine though, this is spreading like wildfire, which means it will move into the English-language press soon enough; maybe I will update this post then.) The ludicrous point behind all of this is that the potentially un-Islamic arrangement of men and women working together can be avoided by getting the women to get their tits out.
Obviously, my first thought was: How do I get the secretary to go along with this? Since I started working in January, I haven't been able to get my eyes off the doey-eyed, chocolate-brown, busty, curvy 20-year-old who hardly smiles. She acts like a bitch who knows she can get away with it in an office with bad air-conditioning and packed to the brim with single, mostly inexperienced young men; she just knows that she can walk in, stop me writing an email to the boss explaining why we're a week behind schedule and ask me to scan a piece of paper because, in her several months of working there, she has had the time to chat on MSN and play solitaire, but hasn't really gotten 'round to working the scanner. Well, I'm a sucker for it; I sort of sit back, ask her what file format she wants the images in, hope she tries to make small talk and just sort of stare at her and drool until she snaps her fingers, stomps the floor and leaves without a thank-you. I figure a little bit of breast-based action is not too much to ask, no?
Now, to be fair, this kind of insane male fantasy-fuelled theology does have its foundations in Islam's principles and practice. According to the Koran itself, a bond born of breast-feeding turns strangers into siblings; a man and woman who are breast-fed by the same woman in childhood are treated as brother and sister, making any marriage between them impermissible. A similar arrangement is in place between the breast-feeder and the breast-fed. Of course, the mere fact that Islam has such embarrassingly personal loopholes says something about the preoccupations of the people who founded the religion. The breast-feeding-of-an-adult does itself have an important precedent when the Prophet Mohammed himself ordered it to solve certain issues arising from the Islamic prohibition against adoption (much on that topic can be found all over the internet; I once received death threats for writing about this on a newsgroup, so I'm going to leave it at that). It follows from a simple exercise in analogous thinking (thinking in analogies, or قياس is something of a high art in Islamic theology, for some obvious reasons of self-inflicted intellectual restriction) that men can suck their colleagues' boobs and be allowed to share a closed-door office because they would effectively be like mother and son (although this fatwa does allow a cop-out: the sucker and the sucked can later be married, how I don't know, this is the kind of thing one learns at Al Azhar, I guess).
In some situations all of this can work itself out amicably, I'm sure. The problem arises with the needless infantilisation, in so many ways, of Muslim societies. Not all the women in the Middle East's workplace will be as coquettish and dominating of the men as the lovely Sec (and yes, she will stay anonymous; it's a small country and people shouldn't know that she plays solitaire all day!). If this kind of thing were to become the orthodoxy, families would see their daughters out of the workplace and back under lock and key at home; after all, at this rate, a fatwa prescribing fellatio between teenage girls and their geometry teachers is just a few years down the line. In the meantime, I am left fantasizing about the colour of Sec's areolas. So while I would love for this to realise itself in my own little world, I think it's obvious for all to see why this fatwa at least must go into organised religion's heaving pile of bad ideas, but let this be a warning to all of you: Never apply a logical standard of reasoning to a whimsical set of mystical beliefs from the middle ages. It just complicates relations in the workplace.
Incidentally, there is a literally example of this working out in the fictional world: You all should read Samarkand by Amin Maalouf.
PS: I completely love it when people comment on the blog postings, but could you be a bit more clear about who you are? Specifically, please don't just "anonymous", put a name, that way I can at least guess.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Why I haven't been blogging... Why I will not blog about the Syria Trip
Hello chaps and chapettes... if anybody is left reading this, after my horribly slothful lack of blogging, some of you may have wondered if I was ever going to blog again. What, you were asking yourselves, were you going to do without my gentle, guiding hand in the shape of prose giving you all the insights you needed on history, the Middle East, science and new-and-upcoming technologies?
Well, since my trip to Syria, the denouement of my Syrian adventure accelerated to an end when Kay and I decided to call it off, for good. Oddly enough, we both just decided amicably enough that this was the best way to go the day after I put up my Syria Notes blog. Of course, it might seem natural to post up on exactly what happened and why, but, out of respect for Kay's privacy and my own dignity, and I'm going to limit my statements to say: I'm now single. Not quite on the pull yet, but, hey who knows?
In the meantime, there is some good news which actually comes close to making up for this personal end of era; Otto has a job. John Otto Pohl, absolutely one of the greatest guys in the blogosphere, will become a lecturer at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, the Capital of Kyrgyzstan.
Kyrgyzstan is the Central Asian country I know least about, and what I know about the others is little enough as it is, so here's to Otto teaching us all a little something...Otto, this is the point that I really regret not going with you to Beirut a few years back. Too bad you can't turn back the clock of time...
I will be blogging again just as soon as I find a topic other than my on-the-backburner love life; I need to get over this emotional grief before I believe I have anything worth writing about. I did finally buy a copy of Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery though, and quickly found out I was a bit too familiar with the arguments to not be biased. Still, it's refreshing to read a philosopher's perspective on how to tackle problems I already feel comfortable with. There is a dust storm outside right now and so visibility is about 2 m, and breathing is hard enough without going for a jog. If the weather keeps it up, you can pretty much guarantee that I will be putting something up here some time.
Well, since my trip to Syria, the denouement of my Syrian adventure accelerated to an end when Kay and I decided to call it off, for good. Oddly enough, we both just decided amicably enough that this was the best way to go the day after I put up my Syria Notes blog. Of course, it might seem natural to post up on exactly what happened and why, but, out of respect for Kay's privacy and my own dignity, and I'm going to limit my statements to say: I'm now single. Not quite on the pull yet, but, hey who knows?
In the meantime, there is some good news which actually comes close to making up for this personal end of era; Otto has a job. John Otto Pohl, absolutely one of the greatest guys in the blogosphere, will become a lecturer at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, the Capital of Kyrgyzstan.
Kyrgyzstan is the Central Asian country I know least about, and what I know about the others is little enough as it is, so here's to Otto teaching us all a little something...Otto, this is the point that I really regret not going with you to Beirut a few years back. Too bad you can't turn back the clock of time...
I will be blogging again just as soon as I find a topic other than my on-the-backburner love life; I need to get over this emotional grief before I believe I have anything worth writing about. I did finally buy a copy of Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery though, and quickly found out I was a bit too familiar with the arguments to not be biased. Still, it's refreshing to read a philosopher's perspective on how to tackle problems I already feel comfortable with. There is a dust storm outside right now and so visibility is about 2 m, and breathing is hard enough without going for a jog. If the weather keeps it up, you can pretty much guarantee that I will be putting something up here some time.
Monday, May 07, 2007
Still working Syria Part II, air raid sirens in the background
OK, I've been pretty much swamped with work since coming back--now I have more than report to worry about, because I might end up covering public utilities as well as oil and gas--but as of 10:00 AM this morning the air raid sirens went off in parts of Kuwait City. This is, I hope, just a test of the alarm system...but, God forbid, might be one big story into which we all sink.
PS: Thanks to all of you who sent in emails asking for updates, and the people who posted! It's heartening, I wish I could respond more quickly... but I'm also waiting on Kay for some photos she took with her camera.
PS: Thanks to all of you who sent in emails asking for updates, and the people who posted! It's heartening, I wish I could respond more quickly... but I'm also waiting on Kay for some photos she took with her camera.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
