The month of Ramadan, the Hajj season, and the days of the Eids are some of the most blessed moments of our calendar, let us try to fill them with peace, compassion, and good will towards all humanity; and let us start within our community. Have a blessed Eid, and please sign this pledge:

We pledge to engage with respect and good will towards those who hold views different from ours on the calendar of our festivals. Wa Allahu Aalam, only the Almighty has perfect knowledge.

Here’s the full statement from the MPV:

Flashback:

According to the netizen’s reference of choice, the Wikipedia, the recent earthquake hit South Asia 08:50:38 Pakistan Standard Time (03:50:38 UTC/ 09:20:38 India Standard Time) on Saturday, October 8th, 2005. It was Friday night here in California and, as a lot of us are wont to do, before I turned in to sleep, I happened to glance at Yahoo! News headlines. There was mention about a quake in Pakistan. It seemed like a pretty serious natural disaster—though, at the time, we had no idea quite how serious.

For about six months, I have been working on a project called WikiPakistan (pakistan.wikicities.com), a “Pakistan Information Database” hosted on WikiCities, a system run by the same foundation that runs the WikiPedia. (The WikiPedia is a free and “Open Source” encyclopedia based on the new “Wiki” technology for developing Web sites.) Up to that point, this project had been moving rather slowly, with me trying to get people interested and entering information in between holding down a Silicon Valley day job, managing two kids both of whose parents have professional jobs, and trying to keep my blog up to date. But as I read the news about the quake, I realized that this was exactly the kind of situation that this project could address. I created a page on the site devoted to the quake. Then I sent an e-mail to several mailing lists I am on and to friends informing them and inviting them to contribute, and went to sleep. By then, it had a couple of news links, a couple of links to technical information about the quake, and some empty sections for links to personal accounts, organizations working to provide relief, governments’ response, and some other useful links. It was 2:08 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, and about 2:00 p.m. in Pakistan when I made my last edit that night. It had been a little over five hours since the earthquake hit.

By the next morning, of course, the world was buzzing with news, views, interviews and information about the quake, relief efforts, statistics, and the like. Over the next few days, I fell into the routine of following what I could from mailing lists, e-mails being sent around, news sites, and the like and adding information to the wiki site. Very soon, others joined in—not least, people on the ground in Pakistan...
You can read the whole article from a year ago in the November 2005 edition of the Siliconeer Magazine.

The Wiki pages are also still around and live, if a little stale. Please stop by and update things if you get a chance: http://pakistan.wikia.com/wiki/Earthquake_10-05 . A page has been set up for updates a year on at: http://pakistan.wikia.com/wiki/One_Year_After_the_10-05_Quake

The All Things Pakistan blog at Pakistaniat.com has a couple of posts (at least) that are worth reading on this topic--including one that went live at exactly the moment of the 1-year anniversary of the event; one about "Zalzala Khan", a kid born during the quake, so to speak, and nicknamed after the event; and a picture of the day that is just amazing (the one reproduced above).

PS: The team at Help-Pakistan.com is coordinating blogging about the anniversary at:

http://help-pakistan.com/main/2006/10/06/october-8th-2005-have-you-forgotten/

Technorati tags applicable to this post: Earthquake - Pakistan - 10/08/2005

Apathy is the bane of cultural change. Social change, too. 

 Fuhgeddabout it, I'm gonna save this one for later, but look up at the next post for something of an upper, and not a downer!

I see asholes in the ummah; they are all around me.

So, on a particular website, there is this shrill and obscenely rude and racist commenter who has a strong streak of anti-semitism and hatred towards "white trash". He assumes I'm the latter, and likes to declare me a munafiq. What to do? The editor there edits out my comments when I call the guy a supporter of terrorism and a terrorist/insurgent sympathizer but won't edit out the ad hominem insults towards me all of which I find more than mildly offensive. WTF?

I should simply disengage, but the testosterone in me (blatant sucking up to male-haters) keeps from going since it looks like I'm surrendering to his juvenille antics. There were other times when people disgreed with me, but they kept it civil so I didn't see the need to keep responding: they have a view, they were respectful about it so let's leave it at that. But, this just grates me, because I know that the moron is just one among many who are out there holding down our communities with thier venemous hatred and simplisticly ethnically chauvenist analyses. Of course, he makes childish assumptions about his "enemies" which is probably what irkes me the most, or is it the fact that as usual, other Muslims let such people get away with it? Justice? We want justice in the Middle East, but we can't even establish justice on a single website, in a single mosque. Good luck, mofos, on that there justice project. Let's see some local results first, then talk to me about fucking justice abroad. Let's see what we can do here first before we start trying to solve other peoples' problems. Doctor, HEAL THYSELF!