Today, many people are busy lamenting the breakdown of such traditions. They exist on many levels of my native society, but there is also the fear that they will disintegrate. Alarmists paint a typically dystopian scenario: “elders” no longer exist and society is in shambles. Five-year-olds are snorting crushed Viagra pills, and houses of worship have been converted to seedy “massage parlors.”

I would like to take a critical look at traditional relationships between parents and children without falling victim to reactionary rhetoric that has little in common with reality.

Now, it is true that parents usually want what’s best for their child. However, do parents always know what’s best? If you have been around the block a few times, you know what the answer is.

Parents are people, and people make mistakes. This has been true since the beginning of time, and it will be true in any age and any culture.

When I was younger, my father was convinced that I needed to study engineering or medicine for the sake of having a stable career. It did not matter that I had absolutely no talents when it came to either one of these esteemed fields of study.

I shudder to think as to how miserably I would have failed if I didn’t stand up for myself at a crucial moment, and rejected my father’s well-meaning advice.

Am I a bad daughter?

The above is a rhetorical question, but goes to the heart of the matter. What should we value more in our children? Obedience? Or common sense?

Now that I am a parent myself, I worry about what my child will internalize, and what she will reject. Yes, I believe rejection is inevitable. When our children are very young, we reject their ideas and wishes all the time: “No, you cannot eat the glue! You cannot pet the stray dog! You cannot stick your fingers in the garbage disposal/watch the R-rated movie/repeat the bad word that your father was silly enough to say in your presence!”

As children mature, however, autonomous thinking must be allowed to take place. This is the only way for a child to become an adult.

As they grow, children begin to reject many of our ideas. If we can find a healthy balance between a child’s personal growth and anarchist leanings at this point in life, we can keep our relationship and our household relatively sane.

Children who are not allowed to think for themselves every once in a while will remain infantile and immature. I encounter this phenomenon particularly often when I go home. A thirty-year-old woman who cannot function without being told what to do is a sorry sight. Do not even try to tell me otherwise!

I still go to my father for advice, personally. He respected me enough to let me make my own choice regarding my studies, and he respects me today. Respect is an essential element of wisdom, therefore I know I need to take his opinions into account.

There is an important lesson in that, and it will stay with me as I go about my own life as a parent.

Amar is an Arab-American poet. For privacy reasons, she writes under a pseudonym.

She is a persistent reader despite the fact that our kind of society may even look down upon people who read, because reading is not yet an integral part of our social, cultural, and psychological make up.

While in other societies it is common to see people holding books and newspapers in public places, such a sight is rare in Jordan, or, for that matter, in the different parts of the Arab world where I have also lived in. This is why I look with curiosity upon my “reading wife” simply because the reading culture or the book culture is not there to support her. In spite of that, she would munch through myriads of words, as if their meanings and extrapolations were Turkish delight.

She was socialized in a “readersless” society and had the tenacity to pick up books, opening her mind and indulge in a literature that took her far from her roots, though she continues to value our Arabic and Islamic traditions.

In between getting the house chores done, taking the kids to and from school, cooking, cleaning, and taking them (and, occasionally, me) to doctors, the flow of her reading today remains at a constant pace, a steady momentum that only she can control.

I don’t really know how she manages to find the time, but she closes herself in, finding “reading time” whenever she can. When she reads about something that really matters to her she might discuss it with me, but most modern novels, some that may be wrongly described as pulp, she leaves to herself.

I don’t mind me telling you she is putting all of us to shame, since we rarely read and looking at words on a page is not really in our blood, despite the fact our Holy Koran has instructed us it to read, and fathom knowledge; even if we have to go to China to acquire it, as the saying goes!

She sometimes teases me that most of us don’t have not the guts to read, nor the energy to understand, we prefer verbal communication, and are guided by cinema and television. When I shoot back that she too watches television, she replies that she is in favour of balance.

She makes sure she sticks to a balanced reading ‘diet’ while I sit by and envy her, sometimes inspired to follow suit. Hers is an acquired habit of discipline, as if she were saying to herself “I’ll put in two or three hours a day to nourish my mind.”

She makes it a habit to read on the couch even while the kids are watching television, and I don’t know how she can actually become so consumed despite the noise. She reads in the bathroom at long and frequent bouts, and reads in bed despite the fact that she hardly needs to be rocked to sleep late at night.

She started first reading in the 1980s when she came to England, with one of her first books being Spy Catcher by Peter Wright, after the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher tried to ban it. She decided to read the book because of the controversy surrounding it, due to the fact that certain officials said it compromised intelligence.

For her this was to be the beginning of a reading journey that blossomed over the years, despite the fact that reading and writing is a solitary, lonely, confining experience.

Because of the nature of our society, that which stresses kinship, my wife carries on with her reading without compromising any of her social commitments. She reads away from prying eyes of my mother, father, sister, and so on. Her reading is confined to our house.

Following Spy Catcher, she moved on to the works of the late Edward Said, which are today standard textbooks on post-colonial societies and their development.

I had bought the books to read one day, as I suppose many people do, but they ended up as decorations in what has become an interesting English and Arabic book library. I complained that I had no time to read, because of my supposed other engagements. She would leave me to my complaints and keep reading quietly.

As a housewife she is a multi-tasking reader, reading for knowledge, intellect, and sheer curiosity, to improve the agility of her brain and exercise her mind, as well to simply enjoy herself, to relax, and to lose herself in the narrative when other matters threaten to overwhelm her.

She was the one who taught me that one can read books purely for enjoyment. It occurred to me then that veteran readers start to accumulate what can be recognized as “reading experiences,” whereby you become fluent in language and sentence construction, which becomes useful when you are editing other people’s work.

My wife has accumulated a rich reading experience, while her thought process has become more methodical. Similarly, I have felt that my ideas, and the way I expressed them, were becoming more organized and systematic, as I read to improve the quality of my writing.

Marwan Asmar is the Responsible Editor of Jo Magazine, a monthly publication produced in Amman that mainly deals in local affairs and writes frequently on Palestinian-Israeli and Arab issues. From 1993 until 2003 he was the Managing Editor of the Star, an English-language political, cultural and economic weekly, also in Amman.

And she did.

“I can’t have children,” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks. She looked like a child who just learned that they had lost their parent forever. I didn’t know what to say to comfort her. I’ve only heard of such personal affairs in the old Egyptian classic movies I watched as a child. In one movie, the lead actress, Amina Rizk, gives up her true love and decides to share her husband with another, Huda Sultan, in hopes that her husband’s name will be passed on.

Noha calmed down once the waiter brought our food. She explained that the doctor determined that her husband was the infertile one, not her as they initially presumed. I confess, I was shocked. In Arab culture, infertility is always blamed on the female.

Even if a woman is strong enough to challenge her society and demand that the man take a fertility test, he almost would always refuse. Noha’s husband had a different view, thus the unfortunate results of the test.

I didn’t know what to say: “should I advise her to leave him or encourage her to just accept her destiny/test from God?”

Fortunately, Noha was loyal. She wanted to stay with her husband, no matter what the future looked like. She loved her first love and wanted to be with him, childless or not. Which made me wonder, if tables were turned, would her husband do the same?

Or would he betray her the first opportunity he gets to marry a second or third? Forgive my pessimism, but what I’ve seen/heard from Arab/Muslim men has only solidified my mistrust.

Middle Eastern and Asian cultures, as well as Islamic tradition, encourages couples to raise large families. As a result, infertile men and women are viewed as worthless contributors to their community. The communities will go out of their way to let the infertile couple/individual know that they are different and unwanted.

If the woman is infertile, other women in the community will hurry the poor husband to marry a second wife. One of my dear friends, Ghada, recounted to me how she faced malicious commentary from a group of native women from Pakistan, about her inability to conceive children. They repeatedly, in public, requested her to see a doctor, although they very well knew she had been married for 16 happy years.

Sometimes it’s difficult for some people to understand that you can be a happy couple without children, and that having children doesn’t guarantee eternal happiness.

My friend Noha’s story is repeated millions of times all over the world. It could happen to anybody regardless of their race, gender, nationality, religion, ethnicity, political beliefs and socioeconomic status. According to Wrong Diagnosis, 1 out of 136 women in the United States is infertile.

I believe a new couple should discuss the possibility of infertility in their relationship. They should set a plan for the “what if” situation in which they can’t have children.

Most Middle Eastern and Asian cultures don’t welcome the idea of adoption. However, in Islam it’s highly recommended to support an orphan child in the community.

A couple should reflect on the possibilities and outcomes. What if all else fails? Will they remain a couple, or give up on their relationship? I believe discussing the issue prior will reduce the pain and stress that later might appear. It’s important for new couples to know, infertility doesn’t have to doom a relationship, there are many solutions that cultural practices have often made us neglect.

I am happy to report that Noha’s and her husband’s prayers were answered and they are expecting their first child early this spring.

There was a war over there.

Her father had once stood with her and spun their globe. His finger covered the entire country. He pointed it out with the white crescent at the top of one nail. Sirena had squinted at the small blot, its name printed in a nearby sea. She imagined that the whole country was probably the size of her elementary school and pictured the blue and red hallways packed with tall men and women who looked just like her dad.

Sirena couldn’t remember when the war had begun. Her father said it started a long time ago. Her sister Aisha was ten now, two years older than Sirena. Aisha couldn’t remember when the war started either, but she said she was six when the first phone call came, and she could remember how things were before it happened. Aisha said Baba smiled a lot more and he used to read stories and sing songs before bedtime. Now he just tucked the covers around you and said, “I love you, baby. Sleep well,” before flipping down the light switch and pulling the door almost shut.

“The war,” Aisha had said, and she said it with authority, “changed everything.” In the last four years, there had been five phone calls, each reporting the death of yet another cousin, aunt or uncle that the girls would never meet. Of the calls, Sirena could only remember two. She was afraid this might be the third phone call she would come to remember.

Sirena knew about war because her Baba had explained it to her when she asked him about it a few weeks before. He told her that lots of people argued about God. He said that sometimes they had the same religion, but there were small differences between what they believed, and when they disagreed, the trouble would start. When people got really angry, they would try to hurt each other.

“That’s what happened with the Jews,” Aisha had told her. “I heard Baba say that if it wasn’t for the Jews there would be no war in Lebanon and we would be there instead of here. But the Jews are greedy and they want to kill everyone. I was playing spy and listening while he was talking to Mama, but she caught me and asked me what I heard. Then she told me that there was a bad man named Hitler and he hurt the Jews. Baba got mad and said it was no excuse. Just because the Jews felt sorry for themselves, that didn’t mean it was okay for them to hurt the Palestinians like they did. And now they’re hurting the Lebanese.”

“Then what happened?”

“Mama sent me outside while she and Baba had a talk.” Aisha put her hands over her heart and made sure Sirena was looking in her eyes. “Right now, Jews are over there hurting our family.”

Sirena felt sad and angry at those Jews. “Why?”

Aisha shrugged and flicked something from her fingers. “Dunno. Some people are just mean.”

“Do all Jews hate us?”

Aisha shrugged again. “Maybe. Joshua at school doesn’t like me, and he’s a Jew.”

“Oh,” Sirena said, and thought of a girl at school who was really nice, and wore one of those stars on her necklace.

Her father had talked to her about the war one other time. He said it was the reason their family had never been to Lebanon and might never have the chance to go. Baba had told her this over breakfast one morning, sipping coffee and scooping up eggs and beans in a folded piece of bread. Sirena had leaned forward, fist under her chin, wide eyes narrowed in concentration, the way she always did when Baba explained any matter of life to her. There had been a stack of buttered toast in the middle of the table. After Baba finished counting off his friends and family members who had been killed so far and whether by bomb or bullet, his face a mask of resignation, every piece of toast had become cold and wet, but it didn’t matter to Sirena because she had lost her appetite anyway.

The disturbed rumble of her father’s deep voice filtered into her room. Sirena pushed her yellow-flowered sheets aside and put her narrow feet on the floor. She peered over her shoulder at her bedroom door. It was open just a crack, and, if she squinted, she could see across the hall into the darkness of her parents’ bedroom. She inhaled deeply and held her breath, waiting for their doorway to light up. Light would mean nothing was wrong; that her father was going to use the bathroom and then go back to sleep. Maybe this would a prank call or wrong number. She waited until her eyes became accustomed to the dark before releasing her breath. Her mouth tasted like she’d touched her tongue to a battery, and her stomach was in knots.

There would be no light tonight. She’d known it from the second the volume of her father’s voice spiked—he had to talk at a near shout to be heard over a bad connection.

Sirena stood up and straightened her blue “Daddy’s Girl” nightgown, letting it fall down over her knees. Occasionally, in her dreams, she was the one bravely calling her father and hearing his courageous reply. She was issued a rifle like the ones in the U.S. Army ads and fought alongside her relatives whose faces she knew from the black and white photographs Mama kept in a music box on her dresser. She made the call with mud smeared across her cheeks and some faceless cousin lying dead in a puddle of blood beside her, one hand reaching up and grasping her own. These dreams made her chest tight and her face wet with tears. Mama said it was because she had a kind soul.

The cool material of her nightgown against her warm skin reminded her that she was awake. This wasn’t a dream. She needed to know what was happening. She pushed her wild, dark hair out of her face, and sinking one hand into the mass to hold it back, tiptoed around the corner of her bunk bed toward the doorway.

She heard Aisha moving around with their younger sister Hadeel in the next room. She stopped, listening through the silent wall separating them, glad she was alone to investigate. Sirena opened her door very slowly, stopping it before it creaked, and stepped onto the worn carpet in the hallway. She inched toward her parents’ brown door, halting suddenly. The crackle of whispers invaded her ears. Her mother’s lips were producing comforting noises, her hand rustling against Baba’s shirt, on his shoulder, between his shoulder blades. The places where Mama always put her soft hands to comfort seemed ominous and threatening as Sirena squinted at them through the dark. The sounds were uncomfortable. The air smelled wrong, night-breathing that had turned sour. She waited.

She heard a man’s voice—like her father’s but pitched higher. Sirena moved closer to their doorway, freezing mid-step. Was someone else in the house? She hadn’t heard anyone come in. She peered into her parents’ room. The streetlamp outside their window cast enormous shadows on their bare, white walls. Mama said they wouldn’t waste money on decorations when the family overseas needed it. Sirena pushed their door open a little further so that she could see the stranger who must have come with the phone call.

Streetlight fell across her mother’s solemn face. And her father’s shaking shoulders. Her mother’s hands worked rhythmically on his back as Baba’s shoulders trembled harder and harder. The stranger’s voice was his.

He turned to look at Mama, and Sirena saw a tear on his thickly bearded face. Baba put a dark hand up in the air, the palm facing his cheek, and shook it gently forward and backward in a failed attempt to slice away whatever pain had come with the phone call. He turned his face down and placed his hand on it. The stranger’s voice stopped for a moment. A deep breath rasped against his dry lips and soggy throat, then the voice came again, in whimpers.

“Froggy throat, soggy throat,” Aisha would have teased, but Sirena wasn’t laughing. With warm shame on her face for witnessing her father in a moment of weakness, Sirena stared at her feet, sundark and olive. She tunneled her toes into the thin gray carpet outside her parents’ door for a moment before turning away.

Aisha had come out into the hallway and was poised in front of her bedroom door. Her hair was like Sirena’s; thick and dark, and standing off her head from sleep. She had one arm around little Hadeel’s shoulder. Hadeel gazed into the darkness. Brown curls sprang angrily from her head in all directions. Her pink nightshirt was twisted around her small body and partially tucked into her ruffled panties. She kept her tired eyes wide open, and she looked at Sirena suspiciously.

“Who was it?” Aisha asked quietly, taking a small step in front of Hadeel. Sirena looked at her younger sister, who was now peeking around Aisha’s side, clutching at the hem of her oversized, tie-dyed Spring Fling T-shirt. This would be Hadeel’s first phone call. She was old enough to remember this one.

Aisha leaned forward and gently poked Sirena’s shoulder. There was a probing, unanswered fear in her eyes that Sirena responded to with a lone nod. The two looked at the floor silently for a moment, mourning the loss of yet another family stranger. Aisha’s eyes tightened and she ushered Hadeel, who stood tense with awareness that something was wrong, back into their room. Hadeel went silently but with a thoughtful look on her face, as though she were piecing together a puzzle in her mind, as though she almost understood and had suddenly aged past four-and-a-half as a result.

Sirena headed back to her own bed, pausing briefly to listen to her sisters crawl under the same set of sheets. Aisha would take the outside of the bed to make sure Hadeel wouldn’t roll off while sleeping. Sirena considered joining them but left them to each other when she heard Aisha singing Hadeel “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

A vicious anger took her so that she trembled with the memory of her own first phone call, of waking up in the middle of the night, cold because it was winter. Aisha had squeezed her hand and piled extra blankets on the bed they were sharing, but Sirena couldn’t stop shivering. The cold in the air wasn’t just from the frost outside. Now she felt hot and stifled. She wanted to bang on the wall and yell at Aisha to stop singing, or maybe to change the words.

It should be: “There’s a land that I heard of where all our family dies.”

Sirena bunched up her pillow and focused on the cool of her sheets blanketing her legs. She turned from side to side, pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped the covers around her head to block out the still sour air. It was just her and her pillow in here. Her sisters were already asleep. Her parents too. The apartment was again silent. No ringing phone, no muffled cries. It seemed even the crickets and cicadas had stopped chirping.

She thought of how she would go with her sisters in the warm, Texas summer morning and collect the cicadas’ shells from the back yard. They would gather them with spoons and forks and put them in empty ice trays, then crush them up just because they made a crunching noise. Later their mother would scold the girls for using her good silverware. It was a joyful game the sisters played every day. But Sirena wasn’t looking forward to the joys of tomorrow. She could still hear her father’s small cries in her mind. She stared at the empty bunk above her, wishing that it was Hadeel’s week to sleep in her room, and willed her father’s voice to fade from her ears. Instead, she fell asleep to the remembered rhythm of his pain.

When morning came and they were collecting their cicada shells, Sirena and her sisters were asked to please come back inside. In the dining room, where they could still see the small square of brightly lit, fenced-in yard behind their condo, Baba told them their great aunt was shot by a sniper. His words scratched at the air and he spoke between stilted breaths. They waited, standing side-by-side, oldest to youngest, staring at him. They waited for some sign that everything would be okay. But Baba just looked beyond them. His eyes were swollen and his face was hard. The girls stared until Mama ushered them back outside.

Sirena and her sisters began to file through the sliding door. Sirena went first, but paused. Hadeel bumped into her and Aisha whispered harshly, “What’s the hold-up?” Sirena toed the doorframe, one hand resting against the glass.

“What is it, baby?” her Baba asked.

Sirena hesitated, uncertain but needing to know. Finally, she said, “Was it the Jews?”

“What?” Mama asked, her voice a bit panicky. “What?”

“The person who shot Aunty Samira. Was it one of those Jews?” Sirena repeated.

Her father hung his head and shook it from side to side. Her mother stood away from him, the hands that had been quietly massaging his back now hovering uncertainly in the air, her mouth silently working.

“It probably was a Jew,” Aisha said matter-of-factly, ready to steer Sirena outside. “Everyone knows they’re a bunch of lunatics. It’s their fault there’s a war. All they want to do is hurt people—”

“It wasn’t a Jew.” Their father cut her off before Aisha could make the triangle on her face with her thumb and pointer finger; the secret sign she and Sirena had come up with for a big Jewish nose.

“Then who was it?”

He looked up at Sirena from under his bushy eyebrows and sighed, “A Druze.” At the same time Mama said, “It doesn’t matter.”

Sirena looked back and forth between them. Baba spread his hands, then straightened up. “Your mother’s right,” he said, “It doesn’t matter.” His voice became deep and resonant. “Go ahead, girls. Go outside and play.”

“We’ll talk about this later,” Mama called after them, already turning her angry eyes on Baba.

Sirena wanted to ask what a Druze was, but her mother’s voice had that edge of finality that caused even Aisha to shrink in on herself. She bit her lip, angry and confused, and followed her sisters outside. The three moved in a silent line, crouching forward like a small army. Outside, they collected more cicada shells, this time crushing them under bare feet and between fingers, pretending they were gunshots crackling through the air.

S. M. Ayoub is a Lebanese-American mother, wife, writer, and recent graduate of Indiana University’s Creative Writing Program with an M.F.A. in Fiction. She keeps a daily life blog at “The Days Are Just Packed” and is currently putting together Islam on My Side – an anthology of Muslim American experience post 9/11. Ayoub lingers on themes of the Lebanese Civil War and resulting diaspora, as well as islamophobia. Her poetry has been published in The Oxford Review.

Fine, I exaggerate. However, sometimes I wonder if she is more emotionally committed to the latest installment of “Grand Theft Auto” than to me. Of course, I was the one who irritated her with my obsessive devotion to “Final Fantasy.”

Revenge is sweet.

I would like to see some type of statistical study on the kind of damage that video games can do to a marriage. Forget setting up romantic dinners or remembering her second cousin’s wife’s birthday: the real challenge to many committed couples today is making sure you don’t kill each other while arguing about whether or not “Assassin’s Creed” lived up to its hype (I say yes, she says no).

It chokes me, but I have to admit that my wife is a better gamer. To be perfectly honest, she even has a better relationship with my parents than I, their son, do (“why can’t you be more like Dina*, son?” – a question I hear almost as often as the “when are you going to give us grandchildren?” inquiry). Maybe, she is better at living.

Does my wife have to make a mockery of my high scores? My knowledge of elaborate cheats? My commitment to the art of gaming?

The answer, I am discovering, is affirmative.

I have no one to blame. I created this situation. Once, I made a horrible blunder. I became competitive with her. I forgot that in relationships, excessive competition is not healthy. Before we were married she knew that I was the better cook. The sight of a kitchen makes her confused, while I navigate everything from the stove to the juice-maker easily. This didn’t trouble her.

It didn’t trouble her that I could touch the tip of my nose with my tongue and she, by contrast, could not. She could be humble about such life-and-death matters.

I had lost my humility, however. Perhaps now it is time to find it again.

Men are jealous of women who excel in a “boy’s” field, and gaming is still dominated by the boys. There is nothing manly or natural about the jealousy. It’s simple stupidity. Even as one’s friends point out that one’s wife is more fun to play “Halo” with when we visit them (we have steered clear of buying an Xbox, if only because we don’t want to die, covered in mold, while attempting to play every good game the world offers), one must remain committed to the idea that she has the right to the praise she receives.

Let her continue the Playstation affair.

I’ll console (pun intended) myself with my secret shrimp recipe.

What? I have to be good at something.

*- Name changed to protect the innocent.

And I should have known.

Her husband never struck her, and never smiled at her. She was grateful to him. He re-married quickly.

I should have known.

Her old classmate came to me years later, in a different city, where the air thankfully did not smell of her hair. Did I want to have a cup of coffee? Did I want to know the truth about my cousin? “My cousin had an accident.”

She had so many. Starting at age twelve.

I should have known.

My father does not speak to his younger brother. He will deny it. Or pretend not to hear you. Leave the room in search of his glasses and not come back for an hour. But he does not speak to his younger brother.

We should have known.

I look at my daughter’s toothless smile.

What do I know?

Amar is an Arab-American poet. For privacy reasons, she writes under a pen-name.

This brave young girl was allegedly killed at the hands of the man that should have been protecting her: her own father. Canadian media has reported that the 16 year old argued with her father about wearing the hijab, or traditional Islamic headscarf. Friends said she would leave the house in traditional dress and change into western-style clothing when she arrived at school.

Her father, Muhammad Parvez, called 911 to report that he had killed his daughter on Monday, December 11th. She died from her injuries only hours later. Her 26 year old brother has been charged with obstruction of justice for failing to cooperate with police. To me, Aqsa is a martyr for the freedom of individual choice.

I am especially distraught that this alleged murder happened in Canada, home of “Little Mosque on the Prairie,” a TV sitcom produced by a brilliant Canadian Muslim director, Zarqa Nawaz. In the episode, “The Barrier,” first aired earlier this year; the teenage girl, Layla and her very conservative father, Baber, disagreed about her attire. She was an active girl and didn’t want to be restricted by her garments. She hid the fact that she had had her period—a traditional moment when girls are encouraged to begin covering their hair–for fear that her father would want her to wear a headscarf. While the two fundamentally disagreed about the issue, as is the case in most civilized families (Muslim or not), violence was never an option.

To some zealots, there is no place in heaven for a Muslim woman who doesn’t cover her hair. For some, it is an ancient patriarchal tradition that should be abolished. But American Muslim teens themselves are embracing the autonomy that Islam and America afford individuals. In recently released The American Muslim Teenager’s Handbook, Yasmine Hafiz, her brother, Imran Hafiz, and their mother, Dilara Hafiz, of Phoenix, Arizona, advise teens (and parents): “According to the Quran, as long as Muslims are dressed modestly and behave respectably, no specific dress code is required… modest behavior is also encouraged, therefore ogling the cute boy in Chemistry class or leering at the cheerleaders is definitely out! …Each person must read the Quran for herself and form her own opinion.”

Teens and others are turning to interpretations of Islam that assert that there isn’t one way to look if you’re a Muslim girl or woman. According to the distinguished Islamic scholar, Reza Aslan, “The veil was neither compulsory, nor for that matter, widely adopted until generations after Muhammad’s death, when a large body of male scriptural and legal scholars began using their religious and political authority to regain the dominance they had lost in society as a result of the Prophet’s egalitarian reforms.”

Some so-called “traditional” Muslims argue that ‘Western’ women are oppressed because they must derive their self-worth from the gaze of men. However, it is also true that within some Islamic communities a woman who does not cover is not afforded the same respect as one who does. The expectations are different but the result is the same; a woman’s worth is still determined by others, including men.

While living in Yemen, my friend, Kelly Wentworth, who is also a convert to Islam, experienced pressure to cover herself that did not stem from a religious mandate but a cultural one. As the wife of a Yemeni man, if she chose not to cover, the society would consider it a dishonor to her husband’s family.

It is essential that men and women make their own choices about dress for internal reasons rather than succumbing to external pressures. This is only possible when individuals have the freedom to choose. Personally, by wearing hijab, I experience a sense of autonomy, confidence and femininity I did not before. Yet, for those who have been forced to wear it, I believe it is a very physical barrier to connection with the Divine. Perhaps it is because of her belief in this freedom of choice that Aqsa Parvez was so viciously murdered.

As a Muslim, a woman, a wife, a daughter and a citizen of the free world, I am outraged by the fact that Aqsa was taken from this earth. No human being has the right to destroy the life that God has made sacred. I am sickened that this man has shamed Islam through his very unislamic acts. There is no place in the world for this kind of intolerant, chauvinistic and bigoted thinking, no matter in what faith tradition it appears.

An important distinction difficult for fundamentalists of all faith traditions is that dress codes are a matter of choice, not religious mandate or obligation. Without choice, no act bears meaning. According to Islamic scripture, an act is judged by the intent with which it was performed. If a woman chooses to wear a scarf because she believes in its benefit to her, she has a pure motive. However, if she covers to please another person, whether that person is her husband, brother, father or mother, while not believing in its benefits, the motive is lost and the act of wearing it loses all meaning.

I believe Aqsa has found her place in Paradise. I pray that in her passing we will not miss this opportunity to take a lesson from the tragedy of her death, inspiring us to practice tolerance, love, kindness and understanding with all, however they are dressed.

When I started having kids in 1988, I read the right books, fed them the right foods, bought them the right toys, always put them in a car-seat and went to church every Sunday. And everything went well. They did well in school, they had friends, and people congratulated me on my well behaved children.

And then, something happened. I’m still not sure what, but something definitely happened. My perfect 1st golden boy decided to go his own way. My perfect second boy knew beyond any doubt that he knew more about stuff than I did. My charming and attractive third boy was diagnosed with ADHD, had to repeat the second grade, and endured several summer school sessions in order to proceed to the next grade.

Eventually my 1st son decided to go his own way completely, climbing out the window at midnight to meet friends and smoke marijuana. He decided school was for losers. Mentally, he dropped out in the 9th grade, and eventually dropped out for real in the 12th grade. He also brought his drugs into the house, and we threw him out. Literally. We packed up all his belonging, and put them in his car, and told him he no longer lived with us. I felt like I cut out my own heart and packed it up when we did that. But what do you do, when there are 3 younger brothers in the house, including a 7 year old?

When all that happened, I doubted everything I’d done for the previous 17 years. I tried to figure out where I’d gone wrong, should I have read a different book? Did I spank too much, or not enough? I questioned everything, seeking a source of blame, convinced that source was in *me*, was something I had done wrong and all my son’s issues were lying squarely on my shoulders.

But, you know, my son had (still does, I believe) a brain. He was (is) capable of self-determination. There comes a point in a child’s life where they become autonomous and they *WILL* make their own decisions. Sometimes those decisions will go contrary to everything we raise them to believe, because they can. It pains us, as parents, to watch our child go down a road that the books and tapes and parenting magazines would have us to believe doesn’t exist.

Fisher Price never tells us that our child might smoke pot even if we buy the latest BabyJungleGym. Gerber never warns us our child might fail the second grade even if we feed them organic applesauce.

The best a parent can do is to equip that child with the tools they need. Beyond that, I don’t know what else we can do. If the child has the tools, they will eventually use them, we hope. When they get to that point where suddenly everything you’ve ever told them is WRONG WRONG WRONG because it’s not what they want to hear, they’re going to have to figure out their own way. You gave them the tools, the moral compass, the ethical road map, if they want to wander in a wasteland for a few years, then they will. And chances are, if they survive (there’s an awful thought), they’ll eventually remember the tools and find their way back.

I’m telling you, when you see your child come a-wandering out of the wasteland, tired and remorseful, it’s really hard to resist the temptation to say “see, I told you so!” That’s not the thing to do, though, because they’re already saying that to themselves.

In the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32), the son returns after wandering that metaphorical wasteland, and his father greets him with joyous enthusiasm, thrilled that his boy is back. I like to think that’s how we’ve acted when our son came back to us. No recriminations, no “why the… did you do that?” Just: “Welcome back. What can we do to help you get back on your feet?

Beating ourselves up over the way he behaved is pointless. He was a free-thinking, autonomous creature who paved his own road. The tools we gave him when he was younger are coming into play now as well, stuff like a solid work ethic, how to pick friends, as well as a sense of integrity. He still does things I’m not quite sure I approve of, but he’s making it, and that’s what matters.

My point in all this is to ask you, if you have kids, to be careful in becoming complacent about how you’re raising them. Half of how they turn out is within them. The other half is in what you teach them. And if your kids are doing things that you *KNOW* you didn’t bring them up to do, don’t beat yourself up about it. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out the way you planned.

Vroom… vroom, roared the Harley before its engine was turned off outside the pharmacy on duty in Geneva one quiet Sunday morning a few years ago in September. The six foot ‘quelque chose’ rider dismounted the daunting machine, took off his intimidating German helmet, neatly tucked it under his left arm, and walked slowly inside the drugstore.

Click…clack, he steadily thumped his way across the aisles in his huge boots and leathery attire. Elderly Sunday morning shoppers could not hide their disquiet at the site of this unusual visitor with his menacing looks, but pretended to mind their business. With the dark sunglasses carefully hiding hung-over eyes, but betraying weekend stubble, disheveled hair and an overgrown goatee, he placed his helmet on the counter.

“Beba 2-HA, s’il vous plait,” he demanded from the almost trembling lady at the cash register.

No, that was not the trade name of prescription heroin for a morning junkie. Nor was it extra-large, strawberry-flavored condoms even, in case you’re wondering. Nor anything else too wild or bohemian; that was actually me buying baby formula milk for my son, but decided to take the bike because it’s quicker – and makes the assignment more fun on a sunny day like that. Whatever remaining aura of mystique or coolness that has not by then already turned into powder milk had soon subsequently vaporized as I explained to the staff that although the packet says from 6-12 months, the pediatrician said that little Omar could continue to take it even if he was already 13 months. I swear I could hear relieved customers giggling around me as I said this. Yes, this unforgettable scene sums it all up if someone asks me about the changes that fatherhood brings into one’s life.

Other changes are less awkward. For example, when I blast my car stereo to Boney M’s Bobby Farrell singing “She’s crazy about her daddy, oh she believes in him…,” I’m actually thinking of my little Sama, the bluest sky of my life. But you know what? Although I learnt by heart every Barney and Elmo song out there, the outcome of every Tom and Jerry chase, the name of every Teletubby and PowerPuff girl, the man behind the mask of every Scooby Doo mystery (and the plots of a host of other weird cartoons that cannot possibly be targeted for child or adult entertainment), I still wouldn’t trade it for the whole world. Children are an immeasurable source of joy, and a daddy is still cool, Bobby.

Of course, being a father is a walk in the park compared to a mother’s job. That’s where the real hard work lies, believe me, and in our part of the world we don’t always appreciate that. Indeed, the cruelest thing ever said to a mother was what I witnessed when I went to Cairo last April to give condolences to a dear friend whose young brother had died of a heart attack, leaving behind a young wife and two children.

In Egypt, Muslims receive condolences differently than us in Jordan. They do it not in the family house, but in two adjoining halls to a mosque, one for women and another for men, at the same time, and only for one night. So when the sheikh started reciting the final prayers for the deceased towards the end, one line struck me as especially insensitive and downright disgusting. After asking God to enlarge his grave, make it comfortable and what have you, the preacher went on to request that God gives him a better house than his current one, and other similar requests for better things than he had in life.

But it was when he started saying “God we ask you to give him a wife better than his wife” that I really wanted to climb up his high chair and drag him down by his beard.

The poor widow was next door, listening to these prayers. As if she was not traumatized enough by her loss, this guy comes and rubs it in by making such an obscene remark. I cannot imagine a more hurtful thing she could have heard at such a moment. But the truly sickening episode was what happened next. This dirty old man came down from his pedestal and sat right next to me as people were leaving and started making passes at me that I will not dare mention here – after inviting me to have dinner in his house that night. I could not believe what I was hearing; it was already almost midnight while this guy wanted to take me home, and I assure you dinner was the last thing on his mind.

If there is a surreal Egyptian movie, this was it and I was a main character – or about to become one, depending on how I would react to the plot. Well, it wouldn’t be vain to point out here that I have been hit on a few times in my life, mostly by females I have to stress, but never before in a mosque and certainly not by such a character. I could not tell this to my grieving friend (although the next morning the story cheered him up and gave him the first real laugh since his tragedy), so I SMSed a friend in Amman informing him that I was about to be sodomized by the sheikh. My friend immediately replied saying: “You’re a writer, aren’t you, so go to the dinner and write an article about it. It should be interesting to read.” The problem is that he was serious. So there you go, and thanks for your solidarity and sympathies, Firas.

Cairo was a mixture of so many things all happening at the same time; I think it is one of the most difficult cities to describe. There is too much history, too much geography, too much misery, too many contradictions, and way, way too many people. The ability of the Egyptians to keep their contagious smile and their trademark sense of humor in spite of all the odds is truly incredible. I don’t believe there are another people on Earth more prepared to laugh at absolutely everything and anything at absolutely any time or any situation than the Egyptian people are. It is like the entire population is on a 24-hour readiness alert to laugh and make you laugh.

Perhaps it is a defense mechanism people develop to live with the absurdities and predicaments of the grueling everyday life. Another less refreshing subconscious mechanism to release frustration which you cannot escape noticing is the uncontrollable tick drivers have which urges them to keep blowing their horns in the endless traffic jams of Cairo – despite the forensically proven pointlessness of this exercise. So I decided to observe this phenomenon by closely watching when and why drivers do it, and whether there is any rationalization to this nervous habit.

To my disbelief, I found that drivers were still doing it not only when traffic was frozen on a red light stop and was unlikely to be influenced by noise, but my cab driver was also blasting away even when the street ahead of him was completely clear or when he was in the first row of cars on traffic lights. So I casually asked him why he was blowing his horn if there were no cars in front of him. In typical Egyptian lightness and ironic smile he said, “I’m doing it for the cars behind me, ya beh.”

So you can understand why returning to Geneva is literally like traveling to another galaxy, and driving is not even half the story. Speaking of outer space, I always believed that the best place from which to sit back and get an objective overview of anything is always from the outside, and therefore, in order to get a uniquely sobering view of our world and of humanity, it has to be done by outsiders. But since I don’t believe in extra terrestrials myself, I have used some imagination and found the following scenario to be really mind-opening. Imagine that a highly superior race of scientists from another galaxy were traveling on board a fact-finding spaceship and have spotted planet Earth for the first time. They want to report back their findings on the status of our relatively primitive species. So they lower their UFO over North America and begin their observations from there. Here is how I think the summary of their report would roughly read:

The first activity we detected was of people walking across open green fields holding a variety of different metal rods. They seem to be trying to get certain small white round objects into small man-made holes in the ground. Many other people are intrigued by watching this process on the field and around the world.

Although humans have advanced to levels by which placing these white spheres in the holes can be done by automated machinery, these creatures seem to enjoy playing games beyond their childhood years. This would have almost lead us to conclude that this is a peaceful, fun-loving species were it not for the fact that the main community of these club-wielding men appears to be comprised of owners and managers of institutions that are depleting and usurping the resources of this planet for the benefit of a few other like-minded men obsessed with the same round white objects.

Meanwhile, further down south, a great number of darker-skinned people appear to have been left to drown in their homes and very little attention was paid to them by the people chasing the white balls. Across the great body of water to the right of this land, there is a continent with many more brown people, many of whom look like skeletons and are perishing by the millions for the lack of food and the spread of disease. The lands with not too many dark people in the north seem to have excess food and medicine and it is not clear why the dark people were left to rot as carcasses.

Further east, there are two peoples who speak a similar language with harsh, throaty letters. They have common ancestors, similar features and the same facial hair but appear to fight over the same piece of land and are both obsessed with an insignificant hill that has two temples on its top. One of the two parties, who has many more weapons and money, is supported by the same guys with the metal clubs and holes in the ground. Using that support, they have built a concrete wall over the lands of the weaker people in what appears to be an attempt to strangle them.

Further east, again it is uniformed fighters from the land of the men walking the green fields who have been causing massive gunpowder detonations (the recurrence of individuals from that land popping up everywhere is notable). They are blowing people up so far away from where they live for no apparent reason, resulting in untold death and mayhem. The residue left by these explosions is a substance so lethal it remains in the earth and atmosphere for literally billions of years and is proven to cause a slow and painful death for anyone in its vicinity, including their own people. In short, this is a planet where 20 percent of its population consumes over 70 percent of its material resources and owns over 80 percent of its wealth. That is why it is also a planet with an unlimited capacity to produce exaggerated gunpowder quantities per inhabitant.

Furthermore, the capacity to obliterate the entire planet is constantly becoming more efficient and gradually becoming more likely. Finally, both the leader of the nation of the men hitting the little white balls and the people he is trying to exterminate repeatedly attribute their actions to an alleged troublemaker whom they both accuse, without evidence, of instigating all the killing. They both refer to him as God. As of yet, no sighting of this alleged super villain was detected on the planet.

N.B. A strange looking fellow with a noisy machine is causing a commotion at an establishment selling non-edible, strawberry-flavored sheets of nylon.

Recommendation: A hopeless, incomprehensible species. Abandon mission and depart galaxy.

The above may seem like an idea for a science fiction movie. Why not? Sometimes in order for us to truly capture the morbid reality of what’s taking place on our own planet and visualize the implausible insanity of humankind, we need to look through equally unconventional lenses to see the truth. The way I see it, a dumb president and a few stupid leaders are making this world a very dangerous place for us and our children to inhabit. That’s why I think we should get rid of them before they annihilate all of us.

On the day my daughter was born, I switched on the camcorder on my way back to the hospital at night after grabbing a few things from home, to capture the moment, so to speak. Juggling both the camera and the steering wheel became a little too dangerous when I answered my mobile phone (I was too excited, and technically speaking, I was still only a few hours into my new role as a responsible father, if I ever became one). It was a friend calling to congratulate us on the newborn.

I suddenly found myself impulsively telling him how blessed and fortunate we felt to have our child born in such peaceful surroundings, without bombs falling on our heads, without checkpoints and sadistic soldiers forcing women to give birth in the street, without sanctions depriving us of the most basic medicines, without famine or disease, without the eternal evil of depleted uranium, without the daily fear of random death, nested away in safety from the barbarity that man inflicts upon his fellow man. I pray that my children would grow up one day and watch this clip. If hopefully they don’t notice the bad example of dangerous driving, I wish that they would learn to think of other people with less fortunate destinies by never taking their privileged situation for granted. The world would become a much better place if we all tried to do that.

Take care, and if you ride, do it safely.