I’ve become interested recently in history as it is told versus history as it has happened. Obviously, this topic might have popped up in the mind of anyone that watched the opposing viewpoints about Israel’s conduct in the Gaza genocide and the double standard reporting and obnoxious delaying-of-justice and all of that noise.

What’s weird about allowing this slow, double-standard, wishy-washy reporting style is that it reveals the writing-hand of Empire as it conspires in its own favor. Taking this and applying it across history, it casts doubt on any foreign reporting that was done in the name of any prior empire. So the obvious conclusion is that we can’t believe 100% of what was said by the British, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and on and on, especially when it comes to reporting about their own crimes. All of this is standard fare, of course.

My interest narrows down, however, to the Arab Empire. A sprawling thing, it was the dominant force in every aspect of living for a remarkable 600-800 years, depending on where you stop the clock. That’s an incredible amount of time for a lot of things to happen. Putting aside that this history is practically erased from contemporary memory through the deception of the empires that followed, there is yet another more narrow area of development that is of even more interest to me: Religion.

The Arab Empire, in its many forms, was, and in some ways still is, a great beneficiary of its central and incredible location; An economic monster. And one of the primary reasons for its success was Islam. Not because Islam is the be-all-end-all of monotheistic religions (that came later, excuse the blasphemy) but because it set up the best form of taxation and economy that the world had seen up to that point. The economic system was also likely a reason for many people’s conversions. Paying a hefty protectorate fee is not attractive to poor Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians. Paying 2% of your stagnant wealth, however, is practically peanuts. And calling that tax a zakat and assigning it to helping poor people would have certainly proven to be a popular idea if you could put yourself in the shoes of a peasant looking out for themselves.

The majesty of the religion would come later, to be sure. As literacy surely rose and interest in the majesty of Islam spread around, the now-already-Muslims must have become more devout over time. Seeking education, the great academic houses that took Islam as their major source of insight would have cemented further the belief system of the masses that they already attribute themselves as being devoted to. And in that way, you can spread a religion far and wide and place the Noble Quran in the hearts of millions who would become billions. This does not discount the importance, correctness, or essence of the religion. In a way, it confirms that this religion truly is the last and final word in monotheism. It succeeded! God placed a system in our hands that guaranteed the spread of Prophet Muhammad’s message. There might have never been a better way to spread this message. It is telling, to me, that many Arab Christians are generationally wealthy. They must have figured that the protectorate fee was worth maintaining their ability to openly practice their faith in their communities. And compared to the persecution of more traditional branches of Christianity by the Romans during the same period, this likely seemed like the best deal to them.

To be clear, I’m not saying that Islam succeeded because of economy alone. Without a powerful and unifying underlying message, I doubt it would have made it very far. A hallmark of the Pagan period was the mixing of many religions and anyone in those days could start practicing a new school of thought. But where all the religions used to mix, for whatever divine reason, Islam is the one that exploded out of the Arabian peninsula. And once the message had been completed and transmitted, it was up to whoever came next to put in the work, to spread it, and to bring us to where we are today. What I am saying is that in addition to the themes of equality and mercy and the new beautiful imagery, we also had a system of governance that could be easily applied wherever the empire spread to that would reveal the beauty and simplicity of the religion. After all, it takes a very long time to truly learn about and embody the spirit of the sacred text.

But with Empire comes management. And with management comes… Concessions. Adjustments. Fixes. Flourishes. Interpretations. Schools of thought. Areas of study. Expertise. Dogma. And many more of the sorts of seemingly-harmless actions that can build up over time to create a near-unrecognizable beast.

I have heard for many years that Islam is the religion that respects women the most. Okay. Yes. This is correct. The Qur’an, in its majestic language, places women on a pedestal that must be protected and provided for and allowed complete freedom and entitles them to every sort of right that we fight for today. It also mandates the protection of their dignity and to, in no uncertain terms, be extremely gentle with how you treat them.

Is this what we do? You only need a small table of broken-hearted women that will blame a lot of their hardship on the treatment of a man. And that bad treatment comes in many different forms. And is all supposedly justified by sayings of the Prophet. The Prophet who, it needs to be said, did not take another wife until the death of his first. That action alone should be one of the first enshrinements of sunna in the hearts of men. And yet.

Another strange aspect of living, especially moving eastward, is segregation. When in human history has segregation been a benefit to any society? I was most surprised to learn that Arab armies used to travel from battle to battle with their women. A bizarre idea given that this act is unthinkable today. To say that a woman can have a place in war, to make her equal, is unthinkable. But somewhere down the line, all these examples of early Islamic feminism have disappeared, replaced with mandatory clothing, segregation, shame, and an erasure of a woman’s name. Reducing her to Mother of Eldest Man. I don’t want to paint myself as some activist. I just think this is an area of life that is important to consider when we sit and look at the anthologies of thought about what God meant when He said unto us to be modest, for example.

Muslims have always been proud to say that our sacred text is an unchanged sacred text. That is absolutely true. But the anthologies of text around it, I argue, burden it. If I wanted to change something about the Qur’an, I don’t need to change the verse, I’d just need to have a very particular interpretation of that verse. And in that way, a simple and generic command that could apply to the whole world can turn into a strict set of guidelines that dilutes the simple essence of the original command. Be modest becomes don’t show anything beyond your two hands. Those are two very different commands. The words really really matter here.

Islam is a religion for all mankind. But it seems that Arabs are all mankind as they are the only people that can truly stomach the degree of modesty and compromise required to execute the religion in its evolved (?) form. 

My favorite new example of something bizarre is that apparently, the Arabic calendar used to have an important feature built into it, which is similar to other lunar calendars: A leap month. An extra lunar month must be added every roughly 32 months to align the lunar months with the seasons. If we did this, Ramadan would always fall within the fall season; A season where the time of day is approximately the same as the time of night. Everywhere. It would be a time of balance for all mankind. And also, during the first four lunar months, the months of animal mating, you should not hunt. They should be allowed to mate and grow their population, especially important in a desert region.

And there’s a historical record here as well. Key battles against the Romans, recorded by both themselves and the Muslims, when calculated against the Hijri dates reported, reveal that Ramadan really did always fall in the Autumn season for the first 10 years of Islam. They reveal that there really was a consistency to be maintained in the lunar calendar. And they reveal that there really is a meaning to every month’s name in the Hijri calendar. I mean how is it possible that Rabi’ 1 and 2 (literally, Spring 1 and 2) could ever fall outside of the Spring season? The Pagans might have been a bit loosey-goosey but they weren’t stupid. They knew that these month’s names had to mean something. And this calendar is only called Hijri because of what it counts from. But the calendar’s features are entirely Arabic. We had been using this exact calendar, leap month included, prior to Islam and leading up to and including the revelation.

So then… What happened? Where did it all go wrong? Was it gradual? Was it immediate? In a time where the world’s conspiracies are turning into truths… in a time where our seemingly endless sea of knowledge can be subject to conjecture, what else have we taken for granted? I guess I’m in a spot now where I’m trying to figure all of this out for myself…

Happy New Year.

References:

Video 1 on the leap month (Arabic)

Video 2 on the leap month (Arabic)

Video 3 on the leap month (Arabic)

Full Book Download – براءة النسيء

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The first most obvious thing to get out of the way: The Arabic sustainable standard cannot be the same as the European sustainable standard. While Europe might be grappling with increasing temperatures, our temperatures have always been high to begin with. The intention should be to better the overall quality of air, life, and to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels for most energy generation. Maybe even all, if it can be helped. And so, when I think of sustainability, I don’t think about net-zero, not for our region.

One of the more obvious things after my dad’s passing that I’ve had to grapple with is basically taking over all of the stuff and ensuring that everything’s well-managed and provided for. Like we live in a villa, of course, and all the air conditioning has to work and the electrics have to stay on and the water’s gotta keep flowing and so on. And one thing that’s been bugging me in the back of my mind are the failure points of all the related supporting devices, the quality of the water, and the dizzying DEWA bill that, during the summer, crosses the 6,000 dirham threshold. I am incensed. I mean, I’m not surprised. But what an immense waste of resources. And so one of my thoughts for next year is figuring out how to resolve all these issues and I’ve broken them down into several camps that I’m blueprinting and wanted to share my thoughts.

First of all, the idea that we should live sustainably (in the traditional sense) is cute, if a little ridiculous. Cooling a home in the desert during a summer that now breaks 50 degrees, whether anyone will acknowledge it or not, basically requires that you are unsustainable. But the real loss with cooling is that when we do cool our homes, we just dump all this energy into the air. It should surprise few people that covering many of our buildings in glass means that the amount of heat being dumped at any one time is immense and where does indoor heat go through the magic of air conditioning’s heat transfer coils? The outside air. I imagine most people don’t really think about how air conditioning works and just chalk it up to technological magic but the actual principle of how this works is very interesting and I recommend everyone check out the scientific and engineering wizardry that allows this to happen. It is very reasonable to believe that if we can improve our heat dumping then we can definitely bring down the outside air temperature but this will require a lot of planning across many different aspects of society in order to achieve a lower overall temperature in a country that almost has too many people for its own environmental good. But on a home-by-home basis, changes can definitely be made to make this whole process more efficient and I think I’m going to spend a bit more time to devise a working plan for this and then apply it.

Every home needs clean sweet water, hot sweet water, electricity, resistance to immediate heat incident points, robust filtration, and protection of all failure points from the immense heat and dusty weather, which has only gotten worse as time has gone on. A home should also be considered sustainable by the amount of overall heat it dumps into the air. The solution is almost too obvious.

Air conditioning stands to be much more efficient if rather than dumping heat into the air, the heat is first used to heat up the water in the hot water tank, which should be fed by the chiller. The chiller actually solves another problem because the cold water tap typically gives searing hot water for the first few minutes that that tap is open during the summer. And of course, using the handheld bidet in the summer is an experience I don’t need to recount to anyone. This damn water needs to be chilled. On top of all of this, the water that we receive should be filtered and drinkable. It would be very nice to shower in water that superstitiously will stop contributing to my increasingly bald and shiny head that everyone seems to enjoy teasing me about. Sweetening the pH of the water also means that solubles like soap will take to the skin better and the gentleness of this water will likely be a boon for everyone living in the house. And while you’re already sweetening the water, why not also mineralize it so you can sometimes take a drink while in the shower or at the tap after brushing your teeth? It’ll also decrease piping issues and reduce rust forming at the tips of the shower heads and at pipe joint points. Overall, it’s a good idea to do this. Because, sure, the water use itself might not change but why have all of it go to waste? If you can drink from the tap, wash from the tap, and have ready temperatures of water at the tap, you might actually reduce your usage? I know I’ve left the water running one too many times just so the temperature stabilizes to even allow me to enter the shower. Unsustainable. Moving on to the biggest consumer of energy…

Air conditioning systems consume so much more energy in the summer because the outside air is already hot. If typically the heat exchange is between two points that are at 50 degrees outside and zero degrees inside, then you’re asking the air conditioner to operate at its near-theoretical maximum. The weather is simply too hot. And the beating sun and albedo radiation is not helping it either. And so the air conditioner drones in pain as it manages to complete its exchange and the thermostat needs to be set ever so lower to achieve the same results that it would be able to achieve in a climate where the maximum temperature doesn’t break the very low 40 degrees. And so the air conditioner itself must be helped with shade and some sort of primitive cooling. The final issue we have is one of filtration. The air conditioners can get especially filthy and once they do, the blowers are going to carry the dust and grime inside. Yes, the filters are still keeping most of the dirt out, but at some point, you’re once again asking too much of these machines.

And so, we come to the plan.

First off, the entire area that spans the air conditioning units must be covered in perpetual shade. Once covered, the covering is sealed on all sides by a mesh that allows air to flow freely but that also acts as a first barrier for dust and grime. Meaning, rather than washing the air conditioning filters directly, we wash the mesh that surrounds the whole area of the air conditioning units. The air conditioners are then all hooked up to a special heat exchange controller where all heat is transferred to a hot water tank. Once sent to the hot water tank, the controller will switch back to dumping heat to the air once the hot water is at the desired temperature. While this would be wasteful in other countries, here it would not be such a big issue because you actively want to avoid dumping hot air from your home as it hurts the overall environment. Trapping the heat in water is a net positive on the society and on the overall pleasantness of the climate, which in this case takes precedent over traditional sustainability. And this mesh guard for the air conditioners? You cover it in solar panels. And you cover the garage in solar panels. And you cover the service area in solar panels. And! You cover your windows in solar panels.

So earlier, I said you have to reduce the heat incident points in the home. That means windows. Even with double-glazed vacuum windows, you’re still letting in a surprising amount of heat. Walk up to your window and hover your hand over it. Or just touch the window. Warm, right? How do you account for this? Drapes, curtains, and a shade outside that stops the sunlight from directly hitting the window proper. And while you’re at it, make it a solar panel; An elegant-looking solar panel, to be sure, but a source of energy nonetheless. Couple the solar panels with a power management system and some batteries to level out the electricity and you’ve got yourself a solid source of electricity that, even if it doesn’t take the full load off your house, will at least remove the heavy cost of the air conditioners from your bill.

Air conditioning consumes up to 70% of the UAE’s electricity capacity. It is a behemoth requirement for this country and one that is so deeply unconsidered. (Long note: This is why I said earlier that net-zero is not something I think is even possible. Solar on every home is not going to cut it when you’re cooling basically everything. Energy is simply a necessity of living. And we need plenty of it.) Electric cars are helping nobody when the air conditioning inside of the car is constantly dumping heat. Multiply that by millions of cars and millions of homes and thousands of hotel rooms and countless little security rooms, warehouses, and all sorts of buildings and you don’t have just a pollution problem, you have a heat problem. And this needs to be solved. Whether by finding new ways to use that heat before releasing it into the air or by figuring out ways to dump it underground or by creating large heat-soaking points in buildings that will reduce the rate at which heat is released into the air. It’s a big problem and a big factor that contributes to why living here during the summer is so miserable. And everyone will remember from their childhoods that it wasn’t like this. And even on the hottest of summer days, going somewhere that isn’t so filled with buildings is relatively pleasant. It’s not great, but it’s definitely better than the misery of the inner cities.

Keeping the energy in the home for as long as possible and supplementing the main energy draw with renewables while cleaning up your pipes, your water, and your air filtration will go a long way to improving the overall quality of living in the city. And I’m going to try doing all of this next year. I hope I’ll have a nice update to share when all of this is over.

Not the whole Internet obviously. Just the main parts of it. Like Google, Twitter, Instagram, and so on. The golden age must have been the day before ChatGPT came out and the day before Elon Musk bought a social media platform. I do remember a time where opening a social media app, I could probably get a decent amount of information about the world and my friends. Opening Twitter now, I get nothing that makes me feel remotely aware and I feel like I have no friends on there. The Twitter algorithm seems like it now hyper-fixates on any post you spend more than 3 seconds looking at. And then it gives you more of them. A lot more of them. There’s weird racism posts, innuendos, adult content ads, zero news or friends, weird glitchy videos. I’m in a silo that isn’t even of my own making. And even if I do look at something racist for 3 seconds, it is because it is so outrageous. Why would I not take pause and wonder how someone can post something so brazen so publicly?

Instagram is different in that I feel like everyone runs a personal magazine and those that don’t are buried by an algorithm that favors advertisers, suppresses news, and so on. The real news? You gotta pay real actual money to get real actual news. And that removes the advertising, right? Nope. You still get advertising. The New York Times… Runs ads! On its paid version! Excuse me? I canceled that immediately. I’ll give you guys a hack: There’s a website (archive [dot] ph) where you can go and paste any news article into and it’ll pull an archived version of the site without the content pay-wall. Have fun.

Anyway,

But at least TV’s a good deal? All you can eat buffet for a small monthly fee? That was how I remember it working. Now I find more things worth watching on the iTunes store than I do on the streaming apps. So why even bother having them? And the iTunes store shows me the tomatometer score. Paying 20-60 Dirhams for a highly-rated film has somehow been cheaper for me in the longterm if I sit and run the math against time spent actually watching and enjoying a movie or show. I’m almost guaranteed a a better enjoyment per dirham rate than if I was watching the drivel on Netflix, which at this point feels like they’re just throwing anything at the wall to meet some sort of quota. Also, TV shows on Netflix are all filmed with the same plastic sheen slathered on top to make them look good on a TV but the shows look artificially “clean.” And that’s not a compliment.

Google? Doesn’t work at all. Thank God YouTube search is still working well but Google itself cannot show me useful results anymore. Every single first page link is a blog post that is so obviously written by AI, there’s no more substance. No more surprises. Nothing “new” to glean from the information you’re searching for. Want the best restaurants ever in your city? It’s the same list vomited out over and over again. Want to figure out what’s wrong with your tummy? We’re not super sure, your symptoms can be present in all diseases ever and you’re dying, Ahmed. Consult a doctor. Want to understand a certain concept? Here’s a carefully curated brief that doesn’t take into consideration the depth at which you’d like to learn and nerd out about a topic. Oh, you WANT those details? Well, buddy, I simply don’t have them for some reason. Check the hard-to-read wiki. All this because I wanted to learn about the industrial process to manufacture silicon wafers, I am losing my mind, people.

Even the silliest things have turned into such sad carcasses of what they once were. I used to regularly visit Kotaku dot com for gaming news. It was a wonderful little blog with really great op-eds, nice long-form written reviews, great little exposés, fun interviews with top brass, whatever you want. Kotaku is not even trying to be its old self. All the old guys have left, they weren’t replaced properly and the website continues to be stabbed at and gutted along with all the other sister blogs that used to form a part of the larger Gawker network. But why? Why couldn’t a normal business owner just buy them and not try to shake things up. If it ain’t broke, for the love of God, leave it alone. And the story of Gawker specifically is sad because it was ruined because of the pettiness of their new owner, not because of their ambition. How can something like this even be allowed? 

There’s no world larger than the screen I’m looking at anymore. A few years ago, the Internet still had those infinite possibilities. There were plenty of forums and moderators who took time to carefully curate them. They were organized and fun, you met real interesting people, you talked to them about life and exchanged cultures and found weird and quirky solutions to a lot of your specific problems. Now? Everything is locked behind a paywall, every app asks you to watch an ad, every social network is a vehicle for the most brain-rotting and addictive material that literally presents you with zero added-value. There’s absolutely nothing left on these apps that is worth looking for or paying for. Having a streaming service is a net-negative. You’re asking a generation that grew up with file-sharing on Limewire to pay monthly for content that keeps getting removed from the service. You’re asking the generation that grew up with sophisticated and self-policed forums to use a service like the new Twitter that has become a cesspool for the worst of the worst to have louder voices than the people that actually affect change in global society. And owned by a man that has, on multiple occasions, shown himself to harbor racist views towards Arabs and who egregiously champions the cause of the oppressors. I can’t anymore justify paying for something like this, not least of why because I’d originally thought that paying for the service would mean I got a better service. And so, I’ve canceled it. They told me the service runs to March 2025. So be it.

I’ve always had a naive belief that if I pay for something, the experience I will get will be marginally better. I’m a customer willing to pay for an above-standard experience. I’ll pay for news, movies, video games, more leg room, a better view, and for front of the hotel valet. I don’t mind. I pay for the stupid Duolingo jewels so I can keep learning. It’s all nice, it adds to my little life and my small delusions that things can be better for me. But on the 2024 Internet? I’m running a net-loss of added value. I’m buying negative value, almost literally. The only things I find still worth paying for as subscriptions are Apple One, ChatGPT 4o and Midjourney image generation (and of course for the license to the exquisite ahmedalshaer dot com domain). Other than that, I’m happy just paying as I go as the options and breadth of content available to the pay-as-you-go customer are much better than those that are available to individuals that are paying for the walled gardens like Amazon Prime or Netflix or Starz or whatever. And if the logic is to pay for all of them at once to have access to everything at once, then let me tell you, my friend: That is some faulty logic. These fees add up fast. And you know what the net amount is? Double that of a traditional Orbit Showtime satellite box! Ridiculous. 

Where did we fumble the ball, man. Instagram is a meme-sharing DM platform, Twitter is just garbage, Reddit is liberalism+, Google might as well be called Gateway-to-Reddit, Netflix is B-Movie Central (feat. Standup Comedy!), and the rest of the Internet flounders as it becomes more and more difficult to even find it to begin with since Google is no longer servicing its customers properly. I mean, sometimes you’d have to scroll two whole times to even see the first natural legitimate result to your search query! This is the end result of the Internet? This is what it came to? A vast interconnected superhighway for all public-facing data… and this is what we have to show for it? On phones that cost 5,000 dirhams? It’s just sad, man.

But at least I have my own little corner of it all to myself. Even if it all burns down lol. And at this point, I think those last 2 sentences are going to be my personal mantra moving forward.

One of the ways that I know I’m going through some sort of massive shift is the increased level of overall anxiety and sense of despair that I feel inside of me. Last time this happened was in 2017. I guess at the time, if I were to think about it, I was sort of thinking to myself, “oh, life’s getting serious and a lot of my old juvenile self is still left out there on the Internet and I don’t like that.” But really, if I were to allow my inside voice to really speak up, which I rarely do, it’s probably my inherent paranoia. Not in others so much as it is in myself and in my capacity to get high off my own strengths. Which… What an absurd statement on its face and an awful attempt at pitiful self-aggrandizement, which is exactly what I’d rather not really generally portray. 

And so, around the summer of 2017, I wiped the slate clean. Deleting a massive amount of my public-facing information and doing a lot of online cleanups, account deletions, restructurings, getting into the habit of writing, and so on. These bursts of anxiety push something inside me to reevaluate every single aspect of my life. So while the public facing stuff is changing, my insides are changing as well. I’ll look at my room and throw everything out, reorganize all my papers, settle down into a, “what’s my new life going to look like?” sort of vibe, and just generally set these weird personal action points that’ll get me to this new normal. This started about a couple months ago when I’d bought a server, relegated myself to doing a deep digital reorganization effort of all my files, and slowly mass-deleting or mass-migrating a whole bunch of old media. And then I’d look at all my logins and cut the cords and delete accounts and unsubscribe from every mailing list and generate new email accounts and reset every single password and throw out every empty perfume bottle I keep around for some reason and throw out a whole bunch of old clothes and just cleanse. Obviously, most people call this spring cleaning but I don’t do this sort of behavior except once every few years, when so much crap has lodged itself into my brain that I can’t help but finally be overwhelmed and feel like I have to actually face all the stuff that’s in front of me. Couple that with an even larger sense of social anxiety and some sort of inner rebellious attitude that makes me want to go out a lot and you’ve got yourself a very combustive character. My angers and frustrations peak and my generally very forgiving attitude falls to the wayside, deciding to finally honor all my inner opinions and feelings. 

So that’s the anxiety. As for the sense of despair, it’s like a dark hand over my face every time I wake up. I’ll think about the long and annoying road ahead and the point of new normalcy that keeps being another couple of weeks away for like 3 months. The thought is always, “when is all this going to end?” And I know that it will but it’s just tiring to push through a lot of mundane busywork to get to that point. Stability isn’t some magical feeling that falls out of the sky, it has to be willed into existence through character projections and mundane busywork and a feeling that everything is easy to find and easy to control and easy to change. I have all the required information to make an informed decision and creating an apparatus of the sort requires a bit of mundane busywork. Actually a lot of mundane busywork but why overwhelm myself now. 

As you grow older and make it to different inflection points in your life, you can either talk to your idealistic self and tread carefully, behaving honorably, or you can say something like, “you know what? The rest of the world is already like this, I should be like them too.” As with all things, there’s place for balance and no honor for any human these days. I didn’t know where to put this paragraph.

And so, here we are. I have 2 new home offices, rigged up to just have a computer or iPad plugged in. I have all my files synced up perfectly and effortlessly. All my junk is in a landfill somewhere. Everything that has to be fixed or renewed is in the process of being so. Every little thing can start anew once again. And soon, I’ll be able to just sit here and see how it goes. And I sound like an absolute psycho. Maybe I am, I don’t know.

One area I’ve always wanted to do more of is travel. I find that my inner guilt won’t let me leave the country unless my affairs are in order. The last few years, my affairs were most definitely not mine alone and I think that general vibe is now here to stay. But! I do feel a bit more at ease thinking about a destination and planning a vacation. I’ve got a whole bunch of little experiences I’ve always wanted to give myself and that’s something to look forward to, I think. 

Another weird thing, which kind of inspired my Maktoob idea that I wrote about in the last post, is for one reason or another, I feel that my experiences are bringing me closer to realizing a specific dream I’ve had for many years now. It’s the sort of dream that lifts my heart when I think about it and I think I’ll soon be able to take the steps to start bringing it into fruition. 

When I was in my teen years, I read a book called ‘The Secret.’ A ridiculous book to read at the time, it was recommended to me by a friend of mine in school, Bilal, who I am very glad will never ever read this. The book had a big idea for my small brain. It was manifestation. And I really wanted a Playstation 3. So like an idiot, I’d write out on a piece of paper many times that I wanted a PS3 and then put it under my bed and then settle into my Mickey Mouse blanket and sleep. Anyone who has read the book should be minimum chuckling right now. Waking up the next day, I found nothing. Nothing! This book was stupid. But I did keep thinking about the PS3, wanting the PS3, going to shops and trying it out, I made an empty spot for it, bought some cables that it could use, and was ready to have it. And I got it. Now obviously, I’m being ridiculous, there’s no such thing as magic and I did eventually get it by asking Dad for it after we had lunch at Sammach at Beach Centre, something which required zero effort or manifestation. But I do remember thinking, “what a nice feeling.” Everything is ready for it! I can just settle into it and start playing games and setting it up and so on. Didn’t even have to think which device I’d have to unplug, God forbid. I loved that feeling.

And really, I think I apply The Secret without ever really thinking about it. I’ve always been a gut-instinct sort of person. It’s hard for me to really describe why I do the things that I do or why I do them with such fervor. Honestly, sometimes, I don’t even know why I speak the way I do or say specific things to people. But as I continue to make room in my life, I find the right things eventually slot into them, whether they’re needed experiences, new opportunities, or just a nice day off that I can have because I crammed everything into the previous day. I’ll keep doing that. And my recent purge is also just me honoring that inner desire to make room, I think.

P.S. I recently watched a film, The Boy and the Heron. I highly recommend it to anyone that has experienced loss. It is a very inspired film that puts a child in a unique situation to meet their lost parent again. 5/5.

P.P.S ‘Cause I’ve lived different lives! Different lives!

The Dune movies, Part 1 and Part 2 so far, are some of my favorite movies I’ve ever seen for a variety of reasons. The first reason is aesthetic; These are very well-made movies. They’re drop-dead gorgeous. The second reason is that they are clearly analogous to, and romanticize, Arabs and Islamic culture as a whole. There’s plenty that’s left out of the films that are instead in the books, like major conflicts being referred to as Jihads (before that word was given a new English connotation), as well as other smaller examples of the usual Hollywood Arab erasure but the core themes of the book are still present in the films because you simply cannot tell this story without them. 

The Lisan Al Gaib concept, referring to the Mahdi, Paul Atreides, as a Messianic figure who is reborn as Paul Mu’addib and the exploration of the circumstance around his coming is so fascinating that when I saw it executed, something in my mind clicked a little. There’s real wisdom to be gleaned here and I think the wisdom goes back to another concept that most Arabs, and all Muslims, share: Maktoob.

The Lisan Al Gaib is a prophesied figure that is created by the Bene Gesserit. This secretive religious order influences the politics of the Dune universe of worlds and on Arakkis specifically, the home of the Fremen (Arab-like people), the prophecy is something that is gospel for some Fremen from the South while it is rejected by the people of the North. Basically, the Bene Gesserit have created the tale of the Mahdi, or the Lisan Al Gaib, through oral traditions that have been passed down through generations in the hopes that the Fremen will one day pick on a certain character as their Mahdi, initiate them into their ranks, and allow the Mahdi to lead them to salvation and freedom. He will turn these people from simple desert-wanderers into intergalactic conquerors, ridding their region of the evil of the Empire and its greedy lust for Spice and the Bene Gesserit that control them, supposedly.

How do these events play out in the film? As well as the Bene Gesserit could hope for, it would seem. Despite this conspiracy being completely fabricated and having little basis or potential for coming true, the prophecy does indeed come true. Against every attempt to show the Fremen that he is anything other than an ordinary outcast aristocrat, Paul is thrust into a position of reverence among the people and is finally given a choice: Take this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and see that these people can be “liberated” under your leadership against the Empire that betrayed and ruined your family… Or refuse and nothing happens. 

He chooses to reveal himself as the Mahdi and as one group acknowledges his religious significance, all others eventually bow down until the very last non-believing person is forced to their knees. It is him, the Lisan Al Gaib. Just as how it was written. Maktoob. 

(A note: The line between clear conspiracy and happenstance is also walked very tightly. While the Atreides family is decimated on Arakkis, Paul and his mother are miraculously able to escape along with very few others. But it’s also strange that of all the people that could escape, Paul and his mother along with very few others were capable of doing so. So let’s not entertain the conspiracy but if the Bene Gesserit had planted someone on the inside to get them out, it’s totally plausible that this would serve the prophecy. But guaranteeing something like this leading to the outcome of “Mahdi is recognized and destroys Empire” is ridiculous and would be a logistical nightmare anyway.)

What I love about the Maktoob idea is the exploration that if something is believed to eventually happen, then it simply must happen because faith will make it so. Paul Atreides is aware of the Bene Gesserit conspiracy. Paul’s mother is aware of the conspiracy. They know how the Fremen have been manipulated and they know the signs they will look for. They even say it to the Fremen point-blank that you are all being manipulated. But when something is so fundamental to your very being, to your culture, to your understanding of how the world works… You can’t just toss that shit in the bin.

The Benne Gesserit in the Dune story remind me of the Jesuits, or the Order of Jesus. It’s a Christian (Catholic) order that would launch Christian missionaries around the world for years. They were close to the ruling class wherever the seat of the Roman Empire was. They’d do things like research, education, spreading the message of Jesus, whatever other activity of zealous significance might be needed. But the point I’m making is, “wow, similar! An order here and an order there.” It’s also safe to assume that as power became more concentrated in post-Islamic Arabia that each ruling government had its own Department of Religion or Wizarat Al-Deen or whatever apparatus it was, I’m not sure. Actually, I think it’s the Madrasas and the Ulama hierarchy. Anyway.

The Fremen have an oral tradition in the Dune story. They pass down stories that have been essentially lost to time. In fact, the author of Dune clearly placed a very great deal of thought into what Muslims might be like if they left Earth for a place like Arakkis. But specifically, the oral tradition is very important here because even Muslims have a very very very vast oral tradition that may or may not be (but definitely isn’t very) accurate, that has contradictions, and that is fundamentally unverifiable: The Hadith. And in these Hadiths, we have a prophetic figure, a Mahdi, who will save us during the end-times and his significance, his description, his placement in the theocratic timeline of events, is all derived from the Hadith and both major factions of Muslims (Sunni and Shia, like the Fremen North and South) differ in their descriptions of this prophetic figure.

But if the signs come true, who will stand in his way? It’s maktoob! It’s written! So it must be him!

Now I’m not saying that the Jesuits injected information into Islamic eschatology 1175 years ago to make people complacent and to just wait around for a charismatic figure to lead them to salvation. That would be insane lol. But I am saying that if any people on Earth can understand the excitement of the Fremen at seeing their Mahdi be born in front of them, it is definitely the Arabs. Because the core concept that every single person in this region fundamentally understands and applies in their day-to-day life, the concept that has never been taken to its logical conclusion, came true in cinemas! And it looked awesome!

Think about all the prophecies as they have been taught to you and think about how we observe the world. The UAE just experienced historic rainfall. And the vast vast majority of people definitely thought to themselves, ‘sign of the end-times.’ It’s in our veins to think this way. And while yes, some of these prophecies are stated in the Qur’an and will definitely come true, some of them are just not there and have different contradicting versions. And yet, whatever version of the future will seem to start happening, we will cling to. And whatever we cling to, we will accept with a fervor and a passion that will force it to become true.

Because it is written. Because it is maktoob.

You know, if you take the time to read about what AI is and how it works exactly, it’s interesting. Cause there’s not really all that much about it that’s too difficult to understand but there’s also something quite strange about it.

Let’s take the one everyone knows: ChatGPT. The idea behind it is steeped, mostly, in probabilities. Arguably the worst of the math disciplines, what “the model” does is basically predict, based on your input, to its best ability and with high confidence, what the expected answer to your query is.

Let’s say you asked a baby of zero years what a certain color is. It will not even understand that you asked it a question but it will definitely receive the input.

At 1 year old, it might throw its food on the floor.

At some point though, the baby will realize, holy shit, this guy’s asking me a question! I can see what he’s holding! I’m gonna say dada.

At some point even further on, the baby will think, okay I saw this at that weird place with all the other kids and the baby will say, “blooo.” And the parents will rejoice and cookies will be served and the kitchen will fall apart.

What happened in this scenario? The baby has spent years looking at the parents, other people, the world, hearing noises, understanding its body. The baby realizes that when asked a question, an answer is expected. And finally, the baby realizes the value of answering correctly. And so, the baby’s understanding of how it should interact with the world is clearly defined and its ability to grow into a proper member of society is set in motion. The probability that it will conform increases.

Honestly, the human experience, when thought about on that level, is very simple. We are constantly learning and learning until we start specializing, and then our bodies deteriorate, which then breaks apart all the knowledge we’ve had into spots of wisdom and universal truths.

ChatGPT, incredibly, has had a similar trajectory. It’s important to understand that computer scientists don’t actually know what happens at the hardware level. In fact, the robustness of these predictive models is still a mystery to everyone and the ability for ChatGPT to respond in such a detailed manner to so many queries is likely something that even the developers find bizarre. And this is all for a service that only relies on two things: text and vision. You can send ChatGPT a photo or document/photo. I once sent it a medical report. It analyzed it perfectly. And I’ve started using the service much more than Google, as I find the information it spits out to mostly be just enough.

As far as I’m concerned, ChatGPT is an adequate Internet Intelligence. It’s trained on primarily internet content. In fact, it responds to you like the Internet. In bullet points and easy-to-digest snippets and blocks of code. It speaks the language that we speak into the computer. It does NOT behave like a human being (at least if you don’t include GPT 4o). It’s like a living version of every blog post ever made. Because, trained on Internet data, any human being would become… an Internetty person. That’s all they know!

And this is where the importance of the input data and the importance of the context of the model and the importance of the types of outputs are very important for us to understand how these models are going to develop and what the ceiling of what these models can do is. You can train ChatGPT all you like but at the end of the day, it is always going to be a model that is going to speak back at you the same way that any page on the Internet is going to speak back at you because fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, that is the kind of data that it is being trained on.

If you go back to the example of the baby, what sets human beings apart is that we have multiple points of input and an entire planet of data and multiple ways of output. We receive data from our eyes, ears, skin, mouth, and internal organs. And our outputs include speech, emotion, touch, thought, and more actions of the sort. What sets us apart from AI is that we simply have more to work with. We are the perfect possible intelligence for our type of body.

What is the perfect type of intelligence for the computer? Let’s take the example of the iPhone. What are the possible sensory inputs that we can give to an intelligence that runs on the iPhone? We can give it the data that is being seen on the screen. We can give it the data that is being stored in its flash memory, we can give it the data that it can see in memory. We can give it the data that it gets from the microphone. We can give it the data that it gets from being touched and we can give it the data that it gets from being moved. We can also give it the ability to automatically connect and contact the Internet. But the most important thing that we can give it is knowledge of how it works on the inside or, in other words, we can give it the data that corresponds to its internal organs. Maybe the iPhone needs to know how the alarm is set. Maybe the iPhone has to know how a calendar event is created and what the significance of it is, maybe the iPhone needs to know how a post is created on Instagram.

And more important than any of these things, the iPhone has to know what all of these actions and events mean. If I create a calendar event that is going to tell me to go and pick up my mom from the airport, it has to know who that person is and why this is important to me and what are the actions that I might want to be done to make this process easier. The iPhone has to understand how it is being used and why it is being used in the way that it is.

And the outputs? What are the outputs of a phone? The screen. And the speaker. And the vibration motor, maybe, but that’s a less significant output. So the iPhone has to be able to take the inputs that I just mentioned and then do something with them and then it’ll present the results using one of its two outputs. And if you can do this with a reasonable amount of predictability and confidence, while reducing my need to interact with the phone, and showing a reasonable understanding of my request, then we can say that the iPhone now possesses intelligence.

And therein lies the secret sauce of where this technology is going. Multiple inputs and multiple outputs along with an understanding of its internal organs. In my opinion, this is how you can give intelligence to anything. It is to allow the device, or the entity in question, to understand all of its inputs and its outputs, and how it works on the inside, and to bring all of that together in a way that is somewhat self-aware. And as the level of self-awareness improves, the higher your achieved level of intelligence is.

This is what is both exciting and scary about artificial intelligence. And this is what is both exciting and scary about what Apple just announced. Apple Intelligence, when taken to its logical extreme, could mean that you have an iPhone that knows what it is. It’s just trapped in the body of an iPhone, limited by its limited reach, and always at our command.

What is consciousness? How different are we, as organic beings, from the devices that we are slowly, through sheer force of will, beginning to understand less… as we begin to develop them further.

Is our intelligence artificial? What separates a human’s mistake from ChatGPT’s mistake?

Eid Mubarak,

⁃ Ahmed

What a strange year it’s been for me. I felt like I had to relearn life all over again, redefine myself all over again, reestablish old beliefs into new ones all over again, and be jolted awake in a way that, for the first time in a long time, felt like genuine growth. The kind of growth that happens against your will, not the type that you force yourself to experience through the seasons.

As I look at the date, I realize 2024 feels condensed but I can remember so many days and so many experiences so vividly that it almost feels like I’ve lived every day that has passed this year twice. The days simply will not end. And the thrust of new responsibility has kept me on my toes to the point of mild visible deterioration.

When the Israelis bombed the Maamadani Hospital, killing 500 people in one go, I remember I was coming home from the supermarket and had opened the news piece while I was in the elevator. My heart plummeted out of my body as I realized the weight of that event and I slumped outside my apartment door, reading, watching, and listening in disbelief at what had just unfolded. Sitting outside the apartment, the milk went warm and the world stopped having meaning. I eventually picked myself up and moved my news-viewing to the television. I called my father, in anguish, expressing my sorrow and sadness and looking for some kind of sense into what had truly turned out to be a nonsensical mad mad world.

Crying into the phone, I eventually managed to steel myself to a steady rhythm and awaited his wisdom. “God’s plan is much bigger than everything you’re seeing. We are witnesses to it. Doing nothing and doing everything will bring the same result.” I had only found out a few months later that this exchange had meant so much to him; that he had brought it up in pride in a setting I wasn’t present in. My dad had followed the world’s injustices in earnest. I was always a witness to it and never realized how much this hatred of injustice had characterized him until I was so fundamentally broken by it.

The days had gone on and another heart-plummeting event had happened. May God have mercy on him and grant him heaven, my father’s soul had ascended. The sheer amount of grief I had experienced through the last couple months is not enough to express the great loss I feel. The sudden loss of those moments of wisdom, the loss of the feeling of invincibility, the loss of security and safety, the loss of the family routine that seemed unbreakable.

There’s only one person to call for any issue I have. Only one get-out-of-everything-free card. From my little squabbles at school to my uneasiness in selecting a job to the nervousness of joining the workforce to the ‘how do I do this weird thing at the Amer center’ to the ‘can I afford something like this, how do I buy it?’ to the my car broke down to the I feel so very alone… and so very… small…

Now there’s no running away. I have to be my own man. In this mad mad world. And when it’s all over, I will thank you. So very much. And so very infinitely. And you’ll stop me so quickly that it will never be enough. Even in eternity. Even in heaven. I love you and miss you, baba.

اللَّهُمَّ اغْفِرْ لَهُ وَارْحَمْهُ وَعَافِهِ وَاعْفُ عَنْهُ وَأَكْرِمْ نُزُلَهُ وَوَسِّعْ مُدْخَلَهُ وَاغْسِلْهُ بِالْمَاءِ وَالثَّلْجِ وَالْبَرَدِ وَنَقِّهِ مِنَ الْخَطَايَا كَمَا يُنَقَى الثَّوْبَ الأَبْيَضَ مِنَ الدَنَسْ ..

إنا لله وإنا إليه راجعون

The number of dead is fast-approaching 5000, if it has not already reached that number. Five thousand. What does that number mean? My nuclear family is just five people. I sometimes, as we all do, have those dark thoughts where I wonder how I would feel if one of my direct family members passes away. The permanence of that pain and that damage is something I can immediately feel even in imagination. The idea of my mother not being with me is already painful enough that it can bring me to an absolute standstill. Even while she waits for me at home. I do not want to imagine that world and do not want the pain of the days that will follow and the emptiness of the future that I may live without her. It’s normal to feel this way, of course, and very human. And the inevitable will occur, whether it is me or anyone else. We will all return to God.

Think of that one person. Think of just one. Think of the immeasurable pain. Sit in that pain. Live, for a moment, the days of grief and the confusion and the psychological damage and life-changing outlook and perspective. Does it take you 3 days to grieve? 40? Will the pain never leave you? Now imagine that pain. Again. And again. And again. For the same person, maybe a child, maybe a parent, maybe a sibling. Five. Thousand. Times. It is the equivalent of someone you love dying every day for thirteen years and six months. Thirteen years of pain and suffering because someone you loved was suddenly gone. And you didn’t even have the opportunity to say goodbye. It is the sort of image and life-experience that truly makes you wonder where humanity went wrong and, honestly, why are we going through this? There is so much that is wrong with the world but why are we living through days like these? How is it possible that humanity cannot learn anything from its past? How is it that all the systems we supposedly put in place to govern the world and stop it from committing catastrophic violations of “human rights” have failed?

The Media Manufactures Consent

It has become abundantly clear today that the media is not interested in reporting the truth. I sincerely am beginning to doubt anything that I have read that was supposedly dubbed as, “independent journalism.” These days prove to me more than any other that these news organizations exist to manufacture consent, best described in detail in the book of the same name. The news organizations have owners, the owners seek to make a profit, the profit is generated through advertising revenue, and the product that is ultimately sold is the audience.

One thing that confused me about this model was that I thought, for a long time, that the real person the media should serve is the viewer! Because the viewer is the one that will keep tuning in. They’re tuning in to hear the truth. They want the best possible service provided by these news organizations. And while this hopeful side of me has maintained this thought for a very long time, it has become abundantly clear to me today that they do not serve me, they serve their owners. And that the only choice that I have is to decide which owner of which news organization will likely represent me best. And that even then, I must be cynical.

But why is this the position that the news organization wants us to believe? Why do they insist, against every fact that comes their way, that the good guys are the good guys and the bad guys are the bad guys? The facts are impossible to ignore!

Following the horrors of World War 2, there was a diaspora of Jews that spread all around the world. Now, for some reason, people seem to think that the Jews run the world. They come up with weird names like the Rothschilds and say that they pull all the strings. They make nonsensical and easily debunked claims about how the Jews run the world and so, it becomes easy for officials and news outlets to say that the Jews, in fact, do not run the world because the idea is simply preposterous given the lack of evidence to support the ridiculous claims. 

However, The Jews that moved to New York, following World War 2, actually were very smart. They were looking out for themselves and knew that they had to win the favor of the American government to ensure that they would not be persecuted again. Because, historically, Jews were always persecuted, abused, killed, and displaced. The Roman Empire was very happy to completely disenfranchise and abuse the Jews and kick them out of their holiest lands and sites and just generally make their lives miserable. So, when those same Jews found themselves in the United States, they acted fast. They established a zionist lobby that promoted the idea of Jewish Zionism, an unpopular and unorthodox movement among the Jews at the time, by the way, and would use this lobby to represent the Jewish mind and opinion to the United States government. They knew that they needed to be an attractive group and that they needed to find a way to align their values with the American values. They basically had to become friends, shake hands with them, do business with them, and prove their worth. And so they worked and donated and put in the effort and met with constituents and explained who they were and what their aspirations were. There was even a time around when Israel was established when American Jews knew they should not show support for the fledgling state, fearing the American backlash at the violence in Palestine before  and during 1948. This position changed as they realized that America, in fact, saw value in this new state.

They would donate to key political figures on both America’s left and America’s right to ensure that the government would vote, if not in the Jews’ favor, in a manner that would not harm them. This lobby eventually morphed into another lobby, AIPAC, that dropped the word zionism but it strangely became even more brazen and more zionistic over time. Why? Because America itself at the time saw Israel as a key strategic ally in controlling the Arab Region. In fact, I think there was a sort of political feedback loop. America supports Israel so AIPAC supports Israel, which donates to candidates that continue to support Israel and that support grows and grows among more and more politicians until you basically have a singular opinion across the entire political stage.

Personally, I do not think that sane minds in the United States would consider Israel to still be an essential representative of American interests. If anything, America’s wars in the 2000s and 2010s against the cruel militias across the Arab Region prove to me that Israel only complicated already complex alliances and conflicts and added an unnecessary amount of confusion to the mix. Like the Israelis, Americans, Turks, Iranians, and Saudis were all fighting against ISIL. What a cocktail. So then why do they still support Israel so unconditionally? The lobby. The friendships and relationships and business interests. To me, this is the only explanation grounded in reality. There is a little bit of religious fundamentalism in there on the American side as well but I’m not really in the mood to make that point right now and I do think America’s done a lot of anti-religious things so I don’t think it’s a truly deciding factor.

When an elected Congress unanimously votes to support the Israelis, while other more permanent government officials/workers suggest mutiny, they are not voting because of their beliefs and values. They are voting because of their relationships and donations. The lobbying has been so incredibly effective that not only is the US voting unanimously, but the media also cannot, under any circumstances displease their owners. Jewish people do very well in the United States financially and they have contributed greatly towards the advancements of various industries (Just take a look at your favorite film’s credits). They even hold executive positions in many of them. This accumulated wealth and status is utilized so well that the political spectrum no longer allows for any kind of dissenting voices. And you can bet top dollar that this applies to the news organizations as well. No one wants to be against them. They simply can’t. They’ve been given too much money, have had too many conversations, and are put into power through these very donations. It would be career suicide to go against them. And the news organizations would simply stop being allowed into the press rooms. And so, here we are. The media, which is always looking for the most official sources, receives a bad stream of “official” information from politicians and states that cannot afford to give any other opinion. It’s just too risky.

So now we reach a point where the media we are consuming is effectively propaganda. And while not all propaganda is bad, propaganda during times of war is definitely very dangerous. Just ask the Jews.

Just as an aside:

I don’t believe in conspiracy theories as they are normally presented. I believe that the real conspiracies are just a product of human relationships. I like my brother so I’ll help him before my friend who I will help before a stranger. I receive money from a client, so I will make that client happy. I receive love from this person so this person will be the one I love and the hill I die on. And so on and so forth. There’s no conspiracy in the way we read online here. There’s just a clear preference that is built through relationships and mutual benefit. This idea is at the core of every human institution, transaction, and relationship on the planet. The human element is so often ignored in favor of the abstract. The abstract being the dollar value. It does not take money to build a road. It takes people and machinery and materials. Those are what the dollar value represents. But people forget that. People forget that money is just a representation of resources; A representation of the market at large and the value being added to it through labor. They focus on the impressive numbers. You have billions of dollars! You can do anything! Even a billionaire is restricted by the reality of finite resources. And even a supposedly powerful nation like Israel is limited in resources like land, food, number of people, and even.. the bravery of its people.

No Great Empire Goes Down Without a Fight

We are living through a changing world order. Anyone that thinks that the American Empire will be the ruling force in the world in a decade is delusional. During the downfall of a great empire, there is great uncertainty in who the emerging power will be and an effort by all nations to realign themselves with the new power while still clinging onto the old ruler of the world, likely to not get nuked into oblivion. The interesting thing, though, is that historically we’ve never been ruled by a single power. The Arabs, Romans, Persians, and Asians traded land through conquest over the course of thousands of years before the Roman Empire took the sum of Persian, Arab, and Egyptian technology, improved on it, and receded and morphed, through the British, French, Spaniards, and later Americans, into the modern world order of nation states. Literally anything can happen over the coming decades and there is no reason to think that things will simply go back to normal following all this strange behavior of mobilizing large weapons of precise destruction, armies, and tension around a conflict in a small part of the Cradle of Civilization.

I’ve seen a lot of talk online about why some nations don’t just declare unwavering support for the Palestinian cause and take some decisive action. The real reason in my mind so far is that the world is literally transforming around us and the last three decades have not been kind to anyone that didn’t toe the party line. No one knows what will happen next and what the price of any action will be when there are clear, real, scary, and sobering potential consequences to those actions appearing around every corner. It’s also difficult to act without having a clear plan. We are over seventy-five years removed from any kind of solution that can be imposed. The damage is far too great.

Some people are calling yet again for a two-state solution. I personally think that that is a very idealistic solution that shows little understanding of the reality on the ground that there are first-class citizens, second-class Arab citizens, Palestinian citizens governed by two different organizations, and a very difficult internal political climate. The people somehow live together while also living apart in a pattern that is not all too clear on the ground as it might be from the sky. It is muddled and difficult to understand and there are surprising business relationships and methods for living normally during times of relative calm. It is a mess. And it will likely not survive a solution that further divides the people that live there. I honestly doubt that that is the correct solution. But what do I know.

Something to Think About

When the Muslim army decimated the combined forces of the Romans and Persians in battle-after-battle and marched on Al Quds (Jerusalem), the Roman ruler of the city at the time, Sophronius, met the terrifying army under the command of Amr Ibn Al ‘As (and Khalid Ibn Al Waleed) and agreed to surrender the city only to the ruler of this new emerging Arab Empire, Omar Ibn Al Khattab. Omar was of course not there. The reason he agreed to surrender was that there was literally no one left to defend them, so strong was the army that stood before him.

Since Omar was Khalid Ibn Al Waleed’s cousin, they figured they could just let Khalid pose as the ruler of the new secular Arabia and receive the city but one of the Romans realized that this was in fact Khalid (likely because of his scars) and they furiously returned to Al Quds, awaiting the arrival of Omar. The army I guess was just left outside to wait.

In the ancient world, it was common for conquerors to seize a city, plunder its wealth and gold, rape the women, and generally indiscriminately kill the politicians and ruling class of the former power that held a city. It was just the way wars were fought and won.

When Omar finally arrived, he was leading a camel with a man resting on it with an army behind him. Sophronius, the ruler of Al Quds, came to meet the army on his cushioned chair carried and fanned by several servants. He asked which one of them was Omar and it turned out that Omar was the one leading the camel. Dressed like a common man, Omar would introduce himself as the Arab Caliph and requested that he would enter Al Quds with Sophronius while they discussed the terms. Sophronius learned that the man sitting on the camel was a servant that was allowed to rest on the camel that was guided by his leader. They were taking turns and it was just his turn to rest. These displays of humble character eventually led Sophronius to join Omar on the ground as they both walked through the streets of Al Quds.

Omar’s terms were very simple: All the Roman bureaucrats were to leave and any belongings that they could carry, they could take. They could not use carts or wagons. There would be no plundering, no killing, and no raping. Shocked, Sophronius asked why and Omar simply replied that it was just not the way they were. They simply did not do that. The Romans of course wholeheartedly accepted the generous terms of surrender.

As they walked, Omar asked to see the Temple Mount, explaining that it was a place of very significant importance to all religions, certain that the Christians had taken great care of it for the Jewish people. They did not. The Temple Mount, that today holds the Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock once held a temple that held the remains of Solomon, a significant place of worship for the Jews. It was destroyed by the Romans and the Jews were either killed or displaced from the Jewish Quarter, leaving the Jews outside the city walls. It likely didn’t help that the Jews were aligned with the Persians at the time but they cannot be blamed since the Romans persecuted them so fiercely. Anyway, Sophronius explained that the Romans were using the Temple Mount as a waste disposal area, effectively a garbage dump.

“Show me…”

Aghast at what he was seeing, Omar buckled to the ground and began removing the garbage strewn around. Shocked seeing their leader on his knees removing trash, the Muslim Arab army quickly began removing the garbage with Omar. Omar proclaimed that he would not rule a Quds without the Jews as the city was very holy to the Jews. He ordered one of his men, a Jewish-to-Islam convert, to find 80 Jewish families and to bring them to Al Quds to establish a Jewish presence and to reinvigorate the Jewish Quarter of the city.

During this day, Sophronius was interested in hearing about Islam, believing that a new prosperous age was being ushered in by what he could only see were humane and beautiful values, and asked Omar to pray alongside him in the Church. Omar refused saying anywhere he prayed would be transformed by his men into a mosque. So they prayed in a little enclave together side-by-side opposite the Church’s entrance and sure enough, the Omar Ibn Al Khattab Mosque today is directly opposite of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, one of the holiest sites in all of Christianity. 

That is how the Arabs conquered Al Quds.

I still remember the excitement of coming home and always looking forward to the latest technological news of the day. I grew up during the perfect time where every day, there’d be a major new announcement about a video game console, a new Nokia phone, the shift from Nokia to Blackberry, the focus on security, and the constant breach of said security. I grew up during the time when, “twice as fast,” was a yearly and necessary improvement. I grew up during a time when the processors got more cores and the MegaHertz were turning to GigaHertz and staying there. I grew up during the time where accelerometers and gyroscopes were making phones and games more intuitive and fun. I got to play the Wii, which I know I will maintain for the rest of my life as being the most inspired piece of tech ever created for its time.

I loved formatting my computer. I loved infecting my computer. I downloaded movies and waited excitedly overnight for them to download. I’d watch the films on my awkward twirling chair and feel accomplished that I’d done some impossible technological feat. I loved figuring out the different video formats, converting a dot AVI to a dot MP4 and it had to be a specific kind of MP4, otherwise my PSP wouldn’t read it. I loved the mess of wires and I loved working my way through them. Every single part of growing up with technology had a sense of awe to it; A sense of discovery.

I fell in love with computers, I fell in love with the screen, I fell in love with the iPod, I fell in love with green circuit boards, and I fell in love with the promise of a future that would be twice as fast, 3D, HD, non-stop information flow, and always fun to explore. Technological growth meant a messier room doing messy things with cables, mice, keyboards, controllers, joysticks, headsets, microphones, speakers, memory cards, SD cards, hard disks, and all the stuff they interfaced with. I fell in love with anything electronic and it has been my true inner passion for over 15 years now. I love this stuff.

I never thought what it might mean when technology would eventually get so good that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with it. When I was growing up, Facebook was something that I controlled. It was mine. I was the one that would put immense effort into perfecting every aspect of my wall. I’d pull the photos off my phone with a cable that plugged into a computer and make an album that I could accurately estimate would be seen by only my friends. And I’d need a different cable to load a virus-carrying Eminem song onto my iPod. It felt cozy and small. The internet was truly a way to communicate with the people I already knew and that limitation was safe, despite the speed and convenience of the internet.

Any time I was asked to communicate with people I didn’t know, like in a Call of Duty match, I’d have an alias. The people I was talking to weren’t my friends and we all knew it. There was a clear barrier and we wouldn’t be able to talk to each other once the game ended. I miss that. I miss knowing that the Internet revolved around me and my actions. It wasn’t about the platform. I miss feeling like the Internet didn’t follow me around. I wanted the Internet. The Internet didn’t want me.

Today, it’s not like that. At some point, money and greed got a hold of the big Internet companies and they decided they’d effectively whore us out to advertisers. Our information is being sold to companies that rip us down to our core to figure out the best way to serve us a targeted ad. Taken on its own, it might not seem so bad since the services are free and the ads might actually be useful but this data is ingested into machines that can learn, predict, anticipate, and react to our online actions to a point where they can now truly and near-accurately take advantage of us. The ads are inserted at the best part of a YouTube video. The ads are served so well that they can blend into our feed and we sometimes mistake them for real content. The ads are so pervasive that the very act of being popular on social media is encouraged so that advertisers can use them as well. I can have a friend on social media that is popular enough to tell me to drink Coca Cola. Bro, get a billboard.

There’s no denying that there is economic value in having this kind of behavior be encouraged. Social media is an excellent tool for business owners as it feeds into our very core of wanting to keep up with the Jones’. We all want to believe we’re doing better than each other and this can (and maybe even should) be exploited to force us to do our best. But why does it have to be all over the damn ‘net?

My very existence on the Internet eventually restricted me from doing all the fun stuff I used to be able to do on the Internet. Netflix is the logical endgame for a generation that downloaded their movies for free. Now Netflix will introduce an advertising-supported subscription tier. The Internet was supposed to stop satellite TV and its incessant ads. Now we will not only have Netflix with ads but we will have Netflix with ads that are catered to our personalities, like are you fucking kidding me? We got jacked, bro.

The real concern that I have is related to Artificial Intelligence. These algorithms have gotten really clever really fast. You can give them a normal text sentence and they can create a brand new image out of thin air based on everything they’ve learned about our world so far. It’s insane. You can also feed an algorithm a video of you and a database of someone else’s image and create a video featuring someone else that never even happened. I don’t know what a good logical conclusion of technology like this can be. There’s simply no way that it can be something good for us in the long term. People today are still susceptible to misinformation and the sheer scale of information-bombardment means you really cant trust people to fact-check everything they read. On top of all of that, there was an interview with an ex-CIA agent where he explained how he manipulated the news wire to effectively force a distorted version of facts to make it into the most established newspapers and news stations that we know. What!

Take a moment to just think about an AI being allowed enough time to learn about humans on YouTube. Think of the sheer scale of the content on YouTube. And think about how it can learn everything that YouTube has. Nothing on Earth should be allowed to be that resourceful. Even if humans will be the ones that eventually control it.

If this is the future that technology has in store for me? A meta verse-inhabiting population that can’t think faster than the algorithms that know how to please us? Yeah, no thanks, I don’t want that shit. I want technology to be an extension of me. I don’t want to be an extension of the computer. I don’t want it, man. Simple as that. Look at where we are. It’s so incredible. The computer has succeeded at replacing everything that used to be on our parents’ desks. The phone has succeeded at replacing everything that used to be in our pockets. It’s an incredible human achievement and a testament to our limitless ingenuity. And the tracking and constant surveillance and clearly looming Big Brother future (that’s already kind of here) is a testament to our disgusting, insatiable, and unforgivable greed.

I still sometimes have those moments I had as a kid. When my Mac can seamlessly makes my iPad a second display? That’s the magic I crave. That’s the technology I want. They’re not gonna put a targeted ad on my second screen. At least not yet.

P.S. As a matter of principle, one man shouldn’t be allowed to buy anything on Earth like Twitter ever again.

Hi, everyone!

So here’s the deal:

Let’s say there was an alien civilization far more advanced than our own. They exist across multiple planets, if not galaxies. Their scale is far beyond something we can comprehend. Their numbers dwarf that of ours. Their bodies allow them to be stronger than us. They can fly and survive immense gravitational pulls. Their technology allows them to build cities on gaseous clouds and beneath the harshest of surfaces. Their cities are efficient and always-growing. They can harness the power of entire stars to the benefit of their society. They are less random and do not bicker between one another. They are expertly hierarchical putting the strongest of human militaries to shame, the same way we can put a line of organized ants to shame by stepping on them. Their language does not stop at speech. They communicate with one another on a deep and unimaginable level, harnessing electromagnetic whatever-the-hells. They are a networked society with deep access to each other’s minds and use their linked minds to advance their society at a speed we could never comprehend.

In short: They are better than us in every possible way. And it’s scary. The way our very presence scares a bird away.

Now, would you want to meet a civilization like this? Would we, as humans, be interested in meeting the aliens we have forever longed we would find?

I think not…

Let’s zoom in to ourselves a little bit. On Earth, we are the best, the strongest, the expert communicators, the beneficiaries of all of Earth’s resources. We are hierarchical but with the capacity to change and shift as our societies boom and grow.

What have we done, as the greatest civilization we have ever known? We have explored with our minds and our hearts to create technologies we could never dream of, and art that moves us to our very core. We have merged the advancements of the mind and the beauty of our hearts into beautiful… products? How did we make those? Humans have ravaged the planet that feeds them to come up with increasingly complex products and services. We have abused each other, whether enslaved by each other or with money, and have taken from Earth with little regard for the animals and creatures that called the trees, oceans, and skies home.

Which, by the way, might not be a bad thing from our perspective. I mean, without the resources that allow me to sit here and communicate with all 3 of you, I… would not be doing this. But life is definitely more enjoyable that I can do this and that I want to do this.

And, sure, to a certain extent, it’s easy. Why would we care how we destroy the Earth if it benefits us? Even the want to save the Earth’s climate is likely more about us than it is about the planet. As for the animals that live in their resource-rich habitats, they can’t make noise. They’re mostly dying in silence, sometimes on farms. And then we eat them. And we are all the more ignorant of it. You can’t be sad for what you can’t see or hear. As humans, we are in a position of absolute unquestionable power and we are the true masters of our own fate on Earth. 

By the way, you might argue that it is God who is the master of our fates, and your faith would be respected, but I’m not going to entertain that here because I’m speaking only about what humans have been able to do with the power afforded them by their sheer brilliance.

Anyway, as humans, as the masters of our own fate and our own planet, we have bent nature to our every whim and desire. Even, to an extent, the nature of each other. Economies are driven by greed as much as their balance is held by scarcity. Our social structure has been torn apart turning us from hunter-gatherers to self-serving labor. Our emotions are understood and used against us and we have very few limits to the degree of information we can hold and use. But, of course, we are consumers of resources. It’s a very normal thing to want to consume resources to try and quench our bottomless thirsts.

Going back to the aliens, there is very little reason to believe that they would not be greedy as well. And planet Earth is a gold mine. With vast oceans and lifeforms and sources of energy, Earth would not be far behind the Sun or other stars as one of the best places to turn your eyes to if you were an ultra-intelligent, inter-galactic species living on multiple planets of varying types of climates, gravities, and so on. We’d be zero match for them.

They’d look at all our metals and see value… For themselves. They’d look at our oceans and desalinate them… For themselves and their crops. They’d look at us and… What do we do to animals? They might hunt us and eat us. Or find a way to farm us. Imagine a farmed human: All our nuance reduced to insemination and death. Men would truly not even matter anymore. You could inseminate every woman with a handful of men, genetics be damned. You can be certain a lot of them would be curious to taste us and all the other animals on our blue and green planet. We would be reduced to the same animals that we shrugged off when we tore down their habitats.

Aliens, in concept, are a curiosity but are also scary to me. I would be hesitant to celebrate a day we find aliens but I would definitely be terrified if an alien civilization actually managed to find us. If we can tear through the planet with our technology, what’s to stop another civilization from doing the same? Why do we think we are so special that a civilization would humor a human-infested planet? They’d rather kill us than try to integrate with us, I’d imagine. Finding us would already absolutely guarantee the aliens’ superiority to us. So what could we bring to the table? Maybe they’d treat us like we treat pet dogs, if we could be trained well enough.

Of course, they’d never hurt each other; We are also very averse to harming our own kind. But them killing us? The less they know about us, the less they understand us, and the more valuable our resources are, the more likely they are to kill every last one of us until one of their more sensitive and liberal folk save a few of us for a zoo on Jupiter or something, putting us in an Earth-like habitat while our true home is completely taken apart for their benefit. And maybe only then will they attempt to understand our quirks, stripped of the nature we needed to be able to excel.

I mean why not? I get that it seems pessimistic but it kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?

In a way, the vast emptiness of space is a safety but also a trap. It would take a truly advanced and incredible civilization to be able to make their way to us. Since that seems very very very unlikely, I’m glad we don’t have to think about what a trap it would be if we were actually found.