Your God or Mine?

So the talk is about marriage, and whether one should or should not get married to a muslim. I’d say yes, but then again, I am biased; I’m about to get hitched with an atheist Sunni. Not that it matters, we’re both products of mixed marriages (sunni-shi’a for him and catholic-protestant for me), and neither of us are very attached to any of the rituals that came with all these religions. To my Arabic teacher, a devout Sunni muslim without a veil, this is still a bit puzzling. She’s perfectly ok with different grades of religiosity, and mixed marriages are not a problem, but no religion at all? How does that work? I explain that we will do a civil ceremony somewhere, and then have it registered in our respective countries.

‘So your kids,’ she says, ‘what will they be?’ ‘Here in Lebanon they will get their (grand)father’s religion, according to the law’, I answer. ‘And in Holland?’ ‘In Holland they won’t be anything until we register them as something.’ ‘They won’t be Christian?’ ‘Unless we have them baptized they won’t be registered as such, no.’

I’ve had this conversation before, and it usually stops here, because the possibility of being ‘nothing’ is a new concept for many. But my teacher was still curious about something, and carefully asked:

‘How about… what will you tell your children?’ ‘Supposing I will have them, I don’t think I will tell them anything.’ ‘You won’t take them to church?’ ‘I don’t plan on doing so, no. I guess they will pick up enough about religion from their grandparents and the people around them, and when they are older and they want to join a religion, they can do so.’ ‘So you won’t tell them God doesn’t exist? That there is nothing?’ she asks, seemingly a little worried about my unborn, godless children. ‘I don’t think it’s up to me to decide whether he exists or not, so no, I probably won’t be telling them that.’

The answer reassures her. But then a more practical issue comes to her mind.

‘But if you don’t have a religion, who do you refer to when you say ‘nshallah’ [God willing] or ‘ya rabbe’ [oh my God]?’ she asks. I try to avoid these expressions as much as I can, because indeed, who am I referring to? but sometimes there is no other option. My answer is the first one of the day that she can really get behind. ‘All of them.’

Forget about Lebanon, worry about Gaza

And the death of the people was as it has always been:as if no one, nothing had died, as if they were stones falling on the ground. or water on the water

Y la muerte del pueblo fue como siempre ha sido: como si no murlcra nadie, nada, como si fueran pledras las que caen sabre la tlerra, o agua sabre el agua.

Pablo Neruda Canto General, 1950

Found on Hakaya, Muzna's blog.

On Repeat

The only difference, it seems, is that it is all happening a few hundred kilometers further down. The bombs, the rhetoric, the images, the dead, the wounded, the lies, the media – it is all the same. Lebanon 2006 has become Gaza 2009, and the world still argues over whether to ask for a ceasefire or let Israel play its deadly game a few more rounds. Even the flyers are the same. I remember we once found them on our rooftop: ‘Hassan [Nasrallah] is playing with fire! You tell him to stop and we will stop bombing you.’ They are having similar ones in Gaza now, complete with phonenumbers to call if you want to tell the Israelis ‘where the terrorists are’. A good example of what to do with these requests can be found here.

But those are the harmless type of flyers, pieces of paper you can laugh at, then crumple up and throw away. The ones that say ‘tonight your neighborhood will be bombed’ are a little harder to ignore. And the people in Lebanon at least had somewhere to go – although sometimes bombed on their way out of villages – but the people of Gaza, where can they go?

Moreover, why these flyers? If I tell you in advance I will kill you, is it then no longer a crime when I do?

Paper is not the only way of communicating, of course. It’s quite easy to pick up the phone and call a random number. In Lebanon, we get phone calls from Israel with pre-recorded messages in Arabic telling us to dump that Hezbollah-guy already. In Gaza, so I’ve heard, the calls are personal, telling people specifically that their house is the next one to be bombed. It is unclear whether these calls are made by the government or by zealous settlers who want to help their army hurt as many Palestinians as possible, physically or psychologically.

Of course, for every action there is a reaction, and the movements on the Palestinian side of the war are now circulating emails with the access code for Tel Aviv and how to say in Hebrew ‘there is a suicide bomber outside your house!’ The more interesting campaign, however, encourages everyone to call the people in Gaza and let them know that there are many who support and think about them in this hellish time. It can be done as follows:

You want to call a family in Gaza and give it support? 1. Dial, from a mobile, fixed, or public phone Palestine code number: 00970 2. then dial Gaza code: 8 3. dial 7 digits , given that the first 3 digits are one of the following: 213 -205 – 206 – 282- 283 – 284 – 286 4. then dial 4 other random digits

example: 00970 8 213 5678

There is often no electricity, so it might be hard to find someone who can actually pick up the phone, but I would urge you to try nonetheless. As a Palestinian currently living in Belgium says:

"I'm from Gaza but currently i live in Belgium for studying, or actually i have just finished my master, but all my family lives in Gaza. I talked today with my mother, and i was surprised when she told me that the telephone doesn’t stop ringing from people from other countries like Iraq, Saudi, Lebanon... and many many people. They dont know them and they talked for hours with them, the thing is you can’t imagine how much this raised my family morale as well as all the Gazan's familes over there, even me where i almost lost my faith with all the international community especially from the arabs. It raised me too much up."

And if you can’t get through, or if you only speak Dutch, please go to www.verhefjestem.nl and send a message to the members of the Dutch parliament. They will reply that they are on vacation until January 12th, but maybe an enormous stack of emails will prompt them to do something upon return. For many Gazans that will be too late, but for others it might be just in time.

Merry Christmas from Oosterhout

On the road to my parents' village, Oosterhout (in the east of the Netherlands), the youth group of the Catholic church has placed a big sign made of strings of lights that says:

U.T.O. wishes you a white Christmas and a sunny 2009!

I know there is always something to laught at here, so I asked what U.T.O stands for. It used to be ‘Ultra Terror Oosterhout,’ was the answer. I can only assume the name was chose in a time that no one in the village mastered the English language.

The pastor must have done some research, because he adviced them to change the name. U.T.O. now stands for ‘Uiterst Trots Oosterhout’ – Extremely Proud Oosterhout. I sure hope they didn’t get their inspiration here, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Either way, I wish you all a merry Christmas and a great start to 2009! Hope to see you here!

This Country Is Too Small And I Have Proof (bonus edition)

Currently on vacation back in the Netherlands, I am meeting with a student who would like to do research for her Master's thesis in Lebanon. I ask her if she has been to Lebanon before. She has; once on a few days with her parents while she was spending some time in Syria, and then again for a true Beiruti party-night on invitation of a guy they met randomly that first weekend. But the guy is not very useful as a contact for her research, she thinks, he seemed to be a bit too much on one side of the political spectrum. Her research is rather political and will require careful balance.

We get to the practical things she will have to arrange, and I tell her I know an international student house where a room might be available. I once lived there, but I don’t know who to contact for it now, because the friend I had in that house doesn’t talk to me anymore now that his dad has become something high up in the government. Oh, she says, that guy we went out with lived in an international student house as well. Are there many of those in Beirut?

Of course there aren’t. And of course the guy she once met on the street is the guy I shared a house with. Welcome to Lebanon, Nora!