"Nine hurt in Delhi mosque blast"

One of my holiday snaps—Muslim pilgrims at the Jama Masjid in Delhi, late August 2004.

It's such a cliché that the ones that "feel real" are the incidents that happen in places that you've been. So maybe I'm in danger of being some kind of Pico-Iyer-style globalized narcissist for posting this, but I had to register my shock at this piece of news somehow.

It's not that the Jama Masjid struck me as the most peaceful place of worship that I've ever visited, or even the most peaceful one in Delhi (that would have to be the Bahá'í Temple)... I found small but palpable traces of larger aggressions as I took the tour, starting with the black flags still hung from the previous day's protest against the American invasion of Iraq. I still recall the way that the mosque tour guide (possibly not an authorized one?) easily started in with negative references to America without even checking first to see whether I was from there! I repressed the urge to say, "I'm from Canada. We didn't invade and in fact I marched to protest against it." I guess I wanted to hear out his message without trying to deflect it.

I enjoyed visiting the shrine within the mosque to see the "hair of the beard of the Prophet," the "footprint of the Prophet," and the Qur'anic fragments supposedly written by the Prophet's own hand... But what I remember most fondly are those pilgrims.

while Rome is burning, Rona is smouldering...

Thought for the day: If child molesters can't be teachers, and drunk drivers can't have a license... how is that a self-confessed libertarian and Ayn Rand fan is allowed to be minister of the environment?

Bill over at pursuit has much more than this to say on why Canada can't meet its Kyoto commitments. Check it out.

happy birthday Mum.

It's William Booth's 177th birthday today, and that makes it my mom's 73rd. Yesterday I took her out for dinner to her favourite restaurant — Steak and Stein. She was still in her Salvation Army soldier's uniform fresh out of Sunday morning service. An officer at her corps had been speaking about experiences in Papua New Guinea, it seemed, and this had Mom (or should I say, as she would prefer, when referring to herself in writing in the third person in her imported-English way, "Mum") reflecting on global cultures and her experiences of them.

"I'm so glad we live in Canada," she piped up suddenly, as we waited to order. She seemed filled with enthusiasm, once again, for the way that people from so many cultures may freely associate together. She began abruptly to reminisce about what it was like for a 23-year-old Moncton girl to find herself in Toronto, at Salvation Army officers' college, 50 (!) years ago, evangelizing immigrants with whom she could barely communicate, at a corps the Salvationists called "Toronto One," on Queen Street West, where services were held in many languages.

She told me that, as she did her visitation rounds, she'd take with her copies of the New Testament, or just the Gospel of John, in ten different major languages. She'd studied her literature enough to be able to show people where to find key verses like John 3:16, and as for people's reactions, she seems to remember nothing but enthusiasm and gratitude for the attempt to reach out in their own tongues.

She would study a lot, she told me, in her college days. She'd study on the bus, and be mocked for it by her classmates. "But I got the grades," she told me, with satisfaction.

It's been about 40 years, now, since Mom retired from being a captain in the Sally Ann, to come out of the Army, and marry Dad. I've never detected an ounce of bitterness in her about having left the officership. But nothing made her happier than when she was able to go back to the Army as a regular soldier, some 15 years ago or so.

The chef at Steak and Stein pre-cut Mom's steak for her so she wouldn't have to wrestle with a steak knife, with her Parkinson's-afflicted shaky hands.

Later, yesterday, when I went to the Dartmouth bridge bus terminal, someone was being taken off a bus by a crowd of cops and escorted into the back of a paddywagon. A young black man and his white girlfriend walked past me in the opposite direction. "Let's go," he said to her, "before they decide they wanna pick someone else up."

the Hans Wehr

See that green book on the table? That is the bad boy right there. The "honz vair", the veritable sine qua non of Arabic study for Anglophones... The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic.

I've owned mine for about a year and a half, now, but it's only been in the past couple of months that I've proceeded far enough with my study of Arabic for it to be really useful to me. But I know that I'm going to be turning to it again and again. By this time next year, I think it's going to be seriously dog-eared.

There are two disappointments with which every beginning Anglophone student of Arabic must deal. One is that there is no really comprehensive English-to-Arabic dictionary in existence. The other is that you have to learn the art of reducing Arabic words to their triliteral roots before you can even reliably look up words in your Hans Wehr. That is to say, the first letter of the word you're trying to find is often not the letter you'll find it listed under in the 1300-page green monster.

But learning to surpass those two obstacles makes you feel like you're a member of some kind of exclusive language-nerd club. Which brings me back to the photo.

The photo is from the website of the Qasid Institute for Classical Arabic in Amman, Jordan, and they know. They know what an icon that green cover is. It's not in the picture by accident. That's a killer website they have, for Islam-o-nerds like myself. It's like porn to me, really. Qasid is the siren that calls me to the Middle East...

morning light, Lake Banook (cellphone pix april 1)