Me, Sean, Chris, Sandhya, and Nick

Head Shot

This commercial was directed by none other than Detroit native Sam Raimi, at a pivotal time in his career. It was after Evil Dead II, but before he went to Hollywood and made Darkman, the best comic-book movie adaptation ever, except it wasn’t based on any existing comic-book. It launched the career of Liam Neeson and led the way to the neverending cascade of superhero movies, none of which beat Darkman in my opinion, including Raimi’s own Spider Man in 2002. Fast-forward to 2011 and Sam Raimi is now Hollywood royalty.

The other person in that commercial who went on to fame and legend was …

… Simon, the hero of the video game. Castlevania II, I am only just now learning, was an innovative videogame in the way it introduced role-playing and non-linear quests into the side-scrolling platform-type game, and heralded a stream of similar “metroidvania” games. Castlevania went on to become the single longest-running videogame title in history, and although Castlevania II was the weakest seller of the series, it is venerable enough now to be the subject of (semi-)serious study by scholarly videogame critics. If you are older than I am, you may be shocked to learn that there even exist scholars and serious students of videogames. But in fact Simon beat Sam in a way because the videogame industry is now larger and more profitable than the movie business.

As for me, well, that was it folks. That was as big as I got. I could have been the next Brad Pitt. Or maybe more of a John Turturro. Didn’t happen that way. Instead, as the residuals money trickled in, I wound up with an unsmall amount of discretionary funds for a 15-year-old. I could have saved it to pay for two or three months of university expenses. I could have squandered it on comic books and other habitual pursuits. Instead, my parents put me on an airplane to sunny Sri Lanka, then very much in the middle of its 30-year civil war. There I traveled on foot from Trincomalee to Kataragama and learned vital wearing-a-sarong and eating-rice-with-my-hands skills that serve me well to this day.

  

If you’re wondering about the halal-ness of stir-fried sago grubs, I can only say that the muslim melanau I know all say it is halal, and quite delicious besides. I have yet to be offered any, so I can’t speak for the deliciousness. There is a giant grasshopper that is eaten in West Malaysia, and a locust of the desert that is eaten by the Arabs if I’m not mistaken, likely the same one that the Bani Israil ate while lost in the desert. So there are grounds for halal entomophagy. I think the ruling for the permissibility of an insect to be eaten has to do with the diet of the insect; maybe someone can shed more light on the subject?

On the subject of Islamically risque dining, a kind of snail is also for sale in the market. It is presumably entirely aquatic and therefore halal, but I have even less confirmation of that beyond the vigorous head-nodding assurances of the salesman, who is far from impartial.

The last item for your cautious consumption is a variety of crab very popular here. My brother-in-law from West Malaysia refused to eat it, saying that it was a dua-alam creature, that is, inhabiting water and land, rendering it haram. Some time later, I was invited to lunch by a dear friend who is a lawyer in the sharia courts here. He took me to a restaurant, run by a Chinese convert to Islam, that specializes in that very crab. The restaurant had a large full color display showing the natural history of the crab, which appeared to be entirely aquatic. My friend explained to me that the crab was in fact once widely believed to be haram by the two-environments rule, but the crab was later studied in detail and our mufti declared it to be halal. Thus, to demonstrate our obedience to the superior learning of our mufti, we forced ourselves to eat a fantastic crab-in-chili-sauce lunch. Amin, and pass the pineapple steamed rice.

[Update: A detailed explanation of the Shafi'i position on eating crab by Sidi Muhammad Afifi al-Akiti]

Madrasah al-Kamaliyya was built in the 1920′s. It is built essentially the same as a traditional Malay house, entirely of timber on stilts, with the prayer area one full floor above the ground. It was not uncommon for homes in those days to be built entirely without nails, as was the home my late father-in-law built. Instead, the posts and beams are assembled using a mortise-and-tenon system, with the beams leveled and tightened in place by wooden wedges. The forests of Malaysia and Indonesia have some of the best timber in the world for building, and the Malays certainly make good use of it.

The design of the surau does have some differences with a house. It has two stairways leading to the prayer hall. During a mixed gathering, men and women would use separate entrances. The two flights of stairs are on either side of the ablution pool. The stairs are withdrawn under the building, such that they enter the prayer hall in the middle. This allows women and men to both enter without disturbing each other’s sections. In a home, there would be a single stairway that would enter the living room in the front of the house. If there was a second stairway, it would be to the kitchen, around the side or back.

Unlike Surau Darul Rahman and most other modern suraus, this one was built directly by the villagers of the area without government funds. I don’t really know how this affects the nature of the waqaf; I imagine it is still held by or at least under the oversight of the religious department – maybe someone can inform me. But it is a source of pride for the village that it was built entirely by their fathers’ and grandfathers’ hands.

The village is not as heavily populated now as it was twenty years ago, with many of the young people migrating to the big cities. The bulk of the population now are older couples without children at home (not unlike the American farming heartland). Maybe because of this, the surau is not as actively used as a madrasah as it may once have been, resulting in the library deteriorating sadly.

Another element of the surau that has not aged well are the drums. There is a double-headed goat-hide drum, and an all-wooden drum that is a hollowed out log with a long narrow opening along one side. In the days before amplified speakers, these drums would be struck prior to calling the azan, since their sound would carry farther through the jungle and plantations than the human voice could. The drums at the Masjid Jamek Jawiyyah are still struck even now. The drums of the surau, unfortunately, have become unserviceable. The wooden log has cracked. The uncle I spoke with the day I took these photos said that there’s only one man he knows of who is skilled in making and repairing these drums, and he lives a great distance away. So the drums have been moved to below the stairs until someone is able to have them repaired. They used to hang in the prayer hall.

Madrasah al-Kamaliyya was the first surau I prayed at in Malaysia, and it remains the one most dear to me. I was struck with wonder the first time I prayed there, when, after the salat, the imam and the whole congregation recited an awrad that was virtually identical with the one I had learned from the Tariqat Naqshbandi Haqqani. I was later to learn that many of the elders who founded the community a hundred years ago were followers of Naqshbandi Tariqat, albeit from a different branch. Others held bayats with other orders. The righteous practices that they taught their children have persisted within the surau although they themselves have passed on.

The 13500 block of Dolphin Street, Detroit, MI 48223

Looking south down Dolphin Street with the freeway to my back.

Looking northwest across the Jeffries Freeway, I-96

Behind the facility that pumps water off the freeway into the river

The spillway for discharging stormwater from the freeway

The riverbank south of the pump house

The bridge where Outer Drive crosses the Rouge River

Looking east down Outer Drive with the bridge at my back

Bounded by I-96 on the north, Outer Drive on the east and south, and the Rouge River on the west.

A billboard in Klang for the new Port.

So what’s the fuss about? Well, the people raising the alarm are concerned not about English in Malaysia, but about English in Malay. They are alarmed by the large number of English words that are in common use in the Malay language. RTM has even banned some Malay songs that contain English lyrics, and the newspapers frequently contain letters from people upset by the use of English words in Malay TV and radio broadcasts. It is true that the average conversation between Malays will likely contain several English words, or at least words that are derived from English. Here’s a very short list of some common words:… Read the whole thing here.

There’s no such thing as a pure language, as he points out. English vocabulary is half Latin. BM had equal parts Arabic and Sanskrit before the flood of English. When I first visited Malaysia, I didn’t know any BM. But between my rudimentary Arabic vocabulary and my father’s Hindi, we could decipher a good deal of what we saw. So I don’t find anything inherently wrong with English entering now. It’s just a little too rapid, and perhaps a little too eagerly adopted. I submit for your consideration this photo I took a while back while driving through Klang. It’s a billboard for the new shipping port set up to challenge Singapore. Any non-Malaysians want to hazard a guess about what it says? Yu tu ken spik Malaysian… [Click the picture for a larger image.] ]]> http://www.bingregory.com/archives/2004/05/31-hau-tu-spik-malaysian/feed/ 10