It has been a while since I got banned as a commentator on All Things Beautiful. Since then I have thought a lot about what my response should be. Should I stay silent? Should I speak up? Should I insult? Should I shrug my shoulders? Getting banned this time is not the same as when […]

Sculpture, “Iblis,” Robert Hague
Introduction: Here is a novel I wrote when I was 19. It could be tighter; but it’s not boring. I will set it forth chapter by chapter. I will also have a link to the most updated version on the sidebar so you can always come back later and read it. 
Chapter 1: Bread Bugs […]

There was a  NYT editorial yesterday by the Tanzanian, Canadian, Ismaili short story writer Anar-Ali. For some reason it made me very upset. It was rife with statements like these:
I have no sense of what motivates a terrorist (except maybe as a fiction writer, since it’s my job to enter the hearts and minds of […]

Sammy (aka Comment Pimpette — she pimps more than comments) has a response to the Haifa and the Sex Kitten posts. Interesting point of view, as always.
One thing I wanted to clarify (which she analyzes in her post) is that I suffer from melancholy and sadness at the degradation of our culture too. I hate […]

Here is interesting article about sexual decadence in the Middle East, discussing Haifa Wehbi, a Lebanese pop-singer:
Raven-haired and curvy, she’s nothing like the aerobicized Hollywood blondes who normally fill the pages of People. Embarrassingly, I catch myself staring at her famously ample bosom, though only to avoid her mesmerizing genie-in-a-bottle blue eyes. She makes polite noises–in […]

As much as I enjoy studying the phenomenon of extremism and cultural irrelevance on the Muslim spirit (which remains my primary interest), I am also a close student of Western cultural developments (not that the two are exclusive). What I find fascinating in studying the West is that it seems to be questioning and re-defining […]

 
 Hieronymous Bosch, Hell. Palazzo Ducale, Venice (Been There).
In the falsehood otherwise called a fatwa of 1998, “Fatwah Urging Jihad Against Americans,” the eminent destroyer Osama Bin Laden, along with the respected doctor of death Ayman Zawahiri, and the blessed Shuyukh of chaos, the Bengali Fazlul Rahman and the Pakistani Mir Hamzah, opened their missive of […]

I was looking through Google’s archive of the old Usenet groups and I saw that the first ever piece of spam to hit an email system was from God. Apocalypse was the handmaiden of spam (not penis enlargement).
The earthquake in Los Angeles, California, the flood in Europe, the seemingly unstoppable war in the former Yugoslavia, the […]