As I’m sure is universal among muslim communities, Ramadan represents the high water mark of religious devotion, the time when the greatest number of people turn up for daily prayers. That’s followed by a Eid crash, when numbers plummet back down to, or even below, average levels, as everyone becomes distracted with the holidays. In a bid to remind the neighborhood that the musallah was still open for business, our musallah hosted a Majlis Silaturrahim or Hari Ramah-tamah, a glorified block party the week following Hari Raya. …

Shortly after Hari Raya Eid al-Fitr, I was given a lovely gift in the form of a rooster, hen, and four small chicks. The chickens are a small variety known locally as ayam katik. Although smaller and more tame, these chickens are not related to our modern poultry or egg laying machines, but are bred from semi-wild chickens similar to bantams. They are fairly self-reliant, semi-arboreal (they can nest in trees) and better flyers than the more heavily bred factory farm chickens.
The main reason I had wanted …

Selamat hari raya, Eid Mubarak to all, fashionably late as usual. Hari Raya was last week, but I’m still just getting over all the festivities. Eid in Malaysia is hugely different from Eid back home. Back home, it would be morning prayers followed by donuts outside the mosque, dinner with friends in the evening and back to work the next day.
Here it is basically a solid month of frantically running around visiting everyone on earth who you know before the cakes and ketupat run out. Many people …

I spent a weekend in Mukah, a small town along the coast of the South China Sea not far from Sibu. Mukah is the homeland of the Melanau people, one of the many native tribes of Sarawak. It is a quiet town; there is no industry to speak of beyond fishing and oil palm and sago cultivation. To fly there you have to take a tiny little plane, a Twin Otter, that holds about a dozen people. It flies below the clouds in a non pressurized …

Last month we had a special visitor all the way from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Sister Nzingha with her mother and four children on their summer holiday. Part of her visit to Malaysia was two weeks in Sarawak, during which we were able to meet with her on a few occassions. Nzingha gave a gift to my wife of one of those stylish yet modest bathing suits that you may have been hearing about.

Our children are of roughly similar ages so it worked out well as a …

My wife gave birth to a baby girl on Saturday, 26 June at 11.25pm. She and the baby are both well and have already returned home after one night in the hospital. It was a long and difficult labor but the baby was born naturally, weighing 4.0kg (8.8lbs), our biggest yet. We have named her [redacted], which means the sucessful one or the happy ending.
For those of you having trouble keeping track, and I don’t blame you a bit, that brings us up …

If I have one peice of advice for my sister who is in college right now, it is “Don’t Sell Your Books!” I regret selling off my books. I regret that in a general way; I wish I still had every book I once had, if only to have a library that resembles the libraries of well-educated people I know and admire. But sometimes, I will find myself in a situation where I need a specific particular book that I once had. It is a terrible …

After a 12-year hiatus, I’m finally taking formal Arabic lessons again. It meets once a week at night in the “basement” of the ustaz’s house who gave the talk at our surau last week. Not a basement really but a room built on the ground floor, underneath his house on stilts.
The last classes I took were two semesters of Modern Standard Arabic at the U. I stopped after two sems for a couple of reasons, but one was the atmosphere of the course. The …

This afternoon, after returning from a day at the beach, my neighbor’s son comes to the house to say his father invites me to his house. This happens all the time – a lovely part of neighborhood life here is the various kenduris: get-togethers for weddings, graduations, funeral rememberances (tahlil) or often much smaller events. The whole neighborhood shows up to eat a meal and possibly zikir a bit, depending on the occassion. For weddings there are usually invite cards, but often a representative of the household …

Now that Iwan had graduated from kindergarten, the next step for us was to find a grade school for him. We decided the best option would be the Islamic public grade school, often called the madrassah around here. Lest we hastily jump to images of rows of boys rocking back and forth over Qurans all the livelong day, let me elaborate. It is a public school, supported by the government. It follows the standard goverment curriculum, which at the first grade level is Malaysian language, English, …

Abang Long has matriculated. In November, having successfully completed the necessary requirements of kindergarten, Long was graduated from Taski Abim, Seri Wangi branch. And, as befits such an accomplishment, a ceremony was held for him and his classmates at the Dewan Pustaka dan Bahasa.
Parents are of course suckers for seeing their kids in this kind of thing, so I, my wife, and the two toddling siblings took Long for his moment of glory. Little did we know just how long they would drag it out. …

All the best in 1426! Today is the first day of the new Islamic year, marking 1426 years since Prophet Muhammad migrated from Mecca to Medina, with Sayyidina Abu Bakr as-Siddiq his only traveling companion.
This year, the hijri calendar and the chinese calendar met: yesterday was the Chinese New Year. The end result is a five-day weekend for everybody. Unlike the last two years, there has been no record flooding, no flooding at all for that matter. In fact, I’d say we’re having a drought. …