Month: January 2009

You know it’s still too early for you and for some people when you drive into a shopping mall’s carpark and the security guards are still frantically trying to remove the barriers they had put up the previous night. You walk up the escalator (it was still inoperational) to find your dry-cleaners outlet dark. You walk into a Starbucks and ask for Chamomile Mee. When the cashier asks you “Chamomile Mee?”, you go, “Yes, Grande, hot.”

I don’t know what’s wrong with me but that was what I did just now. Then as I bent forward to plug my notebook charger into the socket, I inadvertently let loose a silent but killer fart. Hey, how was I suppose to know it was going to be a killer one? I blame this horrible smell on the new diet I am on. I rarely get this problem. The worse part was, the smell just lingered and refused to go. And here I was sitting in front of the notebook looking at its screen pretending it wasn’t me but was probably the guy seated in front of me, while the guy at the next table could be seen flaring his nostrils to capture untainted air.

Yesterday, I did the same thing to this couple who were behind me on an escalator in Ampang Park. You should see their face when I farted. It was a lot funnier scene than the funny look they gave me at the top of the escalator later.

What is even funnier was when I read an excerpt from this book called Contemporary Medical Issues In Islamic Jurisprudence by one Qazi Mujahidul Islam Qasmi something like:

1. It is okay for the goat’s upper front teeth to be used in the case of lost front teeth in a human being.

2. Man should use his own organs to be transplanted in his own self. This is to avoid giving the donor sin should the recepient commit one.

3. It is alright to eat the flesh of a dead prophet if there is nothing left to eat.

First and foremost, goats DO NOT HAVE UPPER FRONT TEETH! It is just one big hard gum! Secondly, if both my kidneys fail, which kidney should I use to transplant? And, thirdly, I’ll die from starvation because the last prophet was around 1500 years ago.

And they call themselves the Ulama’ (learned/knowledgeable ones) and have the cheek to write things on medical issues. If I were to ridicule this guy openly, people would brand me blasphemous as if this guy is a god.

This is, indeed, a funny world.

(image from Best Desi dot com)

I don’t know. I woke up this morning with a deep thought.

“If I die, will I get reincarnated? What will I become in my next life, if there is any at all?”

It’s just a thought. But as I sat on the porcelain throne before having a shower, I thought of exploring this thought. Yes, call it philosophical or hypothetical or whatever-have-you.

We have the vegetarians and the meat eaters amongst us. I can be both. Whether I am one or the other depends solely on my mood for the day. I have my no-chicken day and my vegetarian day sometimes. Nothing religious about it. Some vegetarians are so because of health reasons, others because of their beliefs. Some vegetarians believe that the meat we consume is from a vessel that once probably contained the soul of our departed kin, or friend; therefore it is not good to kill animals so that we can consume them.

Reincarnation does not necessarily mean that you and I will be reborn into the body (vessel) of a human being. You could be a cow’s calf where the grass is green and you have nipples to choose from to suckle – in a way, where you are as a calf describes heaven.

As in the movie Little Buddha, a good philosophical movie that is one of my favourites, the soul is like tea in a cup. The cup represents your body (vessel). If the cup breaks (the human body dies), the tea is spilt onto the floor and table where the broken cup lay. The tea that is on the table is your soul, the tea that is spilt onto the floor is your soul, and the tea collected in the sponge when you wipe the tea off the floor and table..is still tea; therefore it is still your soul in that form (tea).

Confusing?

So you may be born either as a human being, or a cow, or a tiger, or a germ, or an amoeba somewhere on this face of this earth. Several questions remain:

1) Since trees etc., are living things as well, won’t we get reincarnated as a tree, or vegetable?

2) So it is okay if I am born again as a tiger and eat you, a cow.

3) It is okay for me to kill insects that could be my grandfathers, using insecticides, to protect the vegetables and fruits.

4) When we achieved Independence, we had only 5 million people in Malaya. We now have 26 million. Since yesterday does not have enough souls to fill up so many vessels created today, do animals get reborn too? If yes, that probably explains why there’s so many crime now, and stupid drivers on the roads.

5) Wait a minute! Aren’t animals supposed to have human souls as well for them to run around in the wild? So the ones that do not have souls, are they the ones that appear dumb?

Okay, now I am confused as well.

6) Should my body stop producing antibodies since my grandma could be one of the harmful bacterium that is inside my tummy right now? (incidentally, I have been to the toilet 4 times this morning).

Okay, I am going to eat meat again today.

I often hear these terms Islamic dinar and Islamic Dirham which I, until now, cannot comprehend its practicality. I first heard of the dirham in the late Tan Sri P.Ramlee movies, especially in Ali Baba Bujang Lapok.

First and foremost, the proponents of the so-called Islamic Dinar would quote this very saying by the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh):

Abu Bakr ibn Abi Maryam reported that he heard the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, say: “A time is certainly coming over mankind in which there will be nothing [left] which will be of use save a dinar and a dirham.”
(The Musnad of Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal)

All I can understand from the above saying is, there will come a time when in the end, only money will be of use to man. Nothing more than that. In the Quran, the only two mentions of the Dirham are as follows:

And amongst the People of the Book there are those who, if you were to entrust them with a treasure (qintar), he would return it to you. And amongst them is he who, if you were to entrust him with a dinar would not return it to you, unless you kept standing over him. Qur’an (3:75)

And,

They sold him [Joseph] for a miserable price, for a few dirhams counted out [darahima ma‘dudatin]; in such low estimation did they hold him! Qur’an (12:20)

There was no Islamic Dinar prior to Omar al-Khattab’s time. It was during his reign as a Caliph that he said:

“7 dinars must be equivalent to 10 dirhams.”

Therefore, in 75 Hijriyyah (695 AD), they minted the first Islamic Dinar and Dirhams. That was 63 years after the passing of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). Which means, there was no Islamic Dinar or Dirham during the lifetime of Muhammad (pbuh).

First and foremost, for the uninitiated, the Islamic Dinar has a specific weight of 22 karat gold (917.) equivalent to 4.25 grams. For the Islamic Dinar, it is a specific weight of pure silver equivalent to 3.0 grams.

At 2.36pm on the 14th January 2009 (at the time of writing this posting), the price of gold is at RM95.12 per gram. The price of silver is around RM11.92 per gram.

So, if we were to follow Omar’s formula that 7 Dinars equals to 10 Dirhams, therefore:

7 Dinars = 7 x 4.25 grams x RM95.12 = RM2,829.82

10 Dirhams = 10 x 3 grams x RM11.92 = RM357.60

Something’s terribly wrong here. How can 7 Dinars equal 10 Dirhams? One Dinar = RM404.26 while 1 Dirham = RM35.76

If I were to use the Dirham and Dinar, just to buy me a packet of Mentos, I wonder how the cashier is going to bite a chip off the silver or gold to give me my change? I cannot imagine Wifey sitting in front of the TV watching the silver and gold market tickers instead of Friends or CSI just to wait for the right prices before going out to shop. It is just not practical.

So how is it that the Dinar and Dirham became part of Syariah? I quote:

“The Revelation undertook to mention them and attached many judgements to them, for example zakat, marriage, and hudud, etc., therefore within the Revelation they have to have a reality and specific measure for assessment [of zakat, etc.] upon which its judgements may be based rather than on the non-shari’i [other coins].

Know that there is consensus [ijma] since the beginning of Islam and the age of the Companions and the Followers that the dirham of the shari’ah is that of which ten weigh seven mithqals [weight of the dinar] of gold. . . The weight of a mithqal of gold is seventy-two grains of barley, so that the dirham which is seven-tenths of it is fifty and two-fifths grains. All these measurements are firmly established by consensus.” Ibn Khaldun, Al-Muqaddimah

Hang on, who is this Ibnu Khaldun guy? This is he:

Statue of Ibnu Khaldun in Tunisia

72 grains of barley.

Ibnu Khaldun never mentioned anything about the size of each grain. And in the context of today, whether the grain is genetically-modified grain, or just wild or peasant-grown barley, whether it is malting barley or feed barley. If it is malt barley, it is about RM636.17 per tonne while feed barley is around RM537.10 per tonne. Now, I leave it to you to calculate the price of 27 72 grains of barley. A no-brainer quick calculation will tell you that it will not even get you a gram of silver for the dirham, let alone the dinar.

And as usual, nobody quotes anything from the Quran anymore. It is Ibnu Khaldun’s writings that they use to help determine the syariah law. Ibnu Khaldun’s words, not Allah’s. And with that, Ibnu Khaldun’s words get cast in stone, while the Quran is degraded into some reading material over some Thursday night, if not only during the month of Ramadhan.

And what is so Islamic about the Dinar and Dirham?

As shown in the verse on Joseph (Prophet Yusof pbuh), the Dirham has been around, even before Islam came into existence. The Dirham derived its name from the Persian Drahm which in turn got its name from the Greek Drachma. While the Dinar comes from the Latin Denarius (plural: denarii). Both the Denarius and Drachma got to the Middle East through colonisation by the Greeks and the Romans.

I don’t know why people are so bent to make life difficult than it has to be. The Quran has never said it is the source of difficulties. As Allah said in the Quran:

“We sent not this Quran upon you that you may be put to trouble.” Quran 20:2

But of course, people no longer look to the Quran for reference, but instead declare it a sin to go against the sayings of mere mortals like the Imams and so on like they are Gods.

Well, I meant to continue writing on supernatural events but events have somehow caught up. And the other day I bumped into someone’s hubby going out for coffee with someone familiar (not the wife). Just an interlude for this post. So, while I have this long lunch break, I think I should just write about it. I know Wifey doesn’t believe in the supernatural, but I do because of several personal experience.

Outskirts of KL

Hulu Langat – back in the mid to late 70’s, Hulu Langat from the 9th Mile onwards, was a lonely and quiet place. Apart from the threat of communist terrorists from the nearby jungles bordering Pahang, driving to Hulu Langat was like doing a long-distance trip, much like going to Shah Alam and Sungai Buloh then. My father’s fruit orchards are located in several areas of Hulu Langat, and we would have to take a Land Rover to visit them. We would normally leave Hulu Langat around dusk, and there would be times when we were able to see a white figure with long hair standing in between the rubber trees on the way out.

Of course, when it got darker, you could see balls of flame flying from one house to the other. My late driver said those were spells aimed from one house to the other (in malay we call it tuju-tuju). Spells must be a common phenomenon there then; and I wonder if the same holds now. It would be scary to marry into a family that practices “black magic”…haha! Somehow this rings a bell somewhere:

“You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave!”

Klang – another place. Although I have heard of certain stories, my personal experience was along Jalan Bukit Kuda about 5 years ago. I was driving back sometime after 1am when I saw a white figure flying in front of me heading towards the bank of the Klang River across from the Connaught Bridge Power Station. I stopped and alighted from the car to have a look. And there it was, searching for something on the riverbank. I suppose what they say about this kind of supernatural being eating frogs is true.

I told a former colleague who still lives there. He’s heard of stories but had never encountered one. Until one day, at the office, he told me how the thing stood in the middle of the road as his brother-in-law was driving back to the house after returning from supper with his wife.

Puchong – they talked about a haunted house at Taman Tenaga back in the 1980s. They still do now apparently. But when I was at the Air Force’s Institute of Aviation Technology back then, Bandar Kinrara was just Kinrara Estate, and at night sometimes we’d see a white figure flying from tree to tree.

Cheras – I remember this story that was printed out in one of the tabloids, about a man who came back from the dead for 40 nights, roaming around his neighbourhood at Kampung Cheras Baru. This was in the early-80s. The story goes like this: This man died, and I cannot remember if he had a supernatural being as a pet, or he learnt some black magic during his life. Anyway, when they buried him, and when the imam was reading the talqin (Instructions to the dead after burial, also known as talqin al-mayyit), the whole congregation was seen by others living nearby as giving their back to the deceased’s grave, instead of facing it. Then he would roam the neighbourhood nightly, often knocking on his family’s house door. My cousin, whose father is the imam of the mosque there, confirmed then that the deceased could also be seen going to the mosque, sitting on the edge of the kolah a tank for storing water for ablution (mind my language), with his feet dipped into the water playfully. And my uncle would talk to this zombie asking it to return to its grave and not scare the people there. I don’t know how this episode ended, or I cannot remember.

The above incident brings me back to the mid-70s at my mother’s hometown, but that is in Pahang, and that will be covered in a later posting (if I ever get to write about it).

I know there are more, but I only want to write about what I, or my friends, or family members, have experienced. So, there you have it. I hope you can all sleep peacefully tonight.

Just don’t look behind over your shoulders or into the mirror too long 😉