Category: Highlights

Who Am I?

The other day someone I don’t know added me on MSN, after finding my msn email on the blog. After a small introduction and all, this person asked me to tell them about myself. Being pretty sure the little profile I had on my blog’s “About” page was enough, I sent them its link.
The person told me they had already read it, but what they wanted to know is “Who is Marwen?”
Me being at work at the time, and that being an opener for a very long chat, I apologized that I wouldn’t be able to chat much because I was quite busy, and suggested we talk more later.

Anyway, between myself and I, the question sort of bugged me, and I thought I might be even using my work as an excuse to run away from answering the question.

It’s not the first time I’ve been asked this same question, and although it seems a very simple and easy one, it actually isn’t, it’s a pretty hard question.

The question pretty much asks you to define yourself in a few words, but how can you do that? How can you sum up such a complicated being like yourself, your set of feelings, dreams, ambitions, mistakes, beliefs, opinions and more?
It just can’t be done that simply, it’d take hours to go through even bits of it.

Another annoying thing about this question is that it makes you somehow question yourself on why it’s so hard to answer, and why you can’t come up with a good response right away.
That leads you to question your life and start asking yourself whether you’re actually happy with it all or not. It also gets you thinking of answers you would like to answer to that question, definitions you’d like to have for yourself, how you would like to be and view yourself, which is actually not that bad, because it’s good to do a little review of your life every now and then and see where you are, where you’re heading to, and where you’d like to be going, but when you first meet someone isn’t really the time for one of those reviews.

I know that when most people ask the question, they don’t really mean something that profound, they just expect a little introduction about yourself, but still the answer you give does constitute a big part of their first impression, and more importantly it tells you what you think of yourself.

Other than friendly first encounters, where it matters less, the same question is asked in job interviews, which we all know are some sort of low level psychological warfare, in which the person’s answer to this question could result in him getting or losing the job. The answer has to be a good one, confident and somehow majestic to give you the upper hand and leave an overwhelming impression on the interviewer.
Of course, that is not the time to be having discussions with yourself in your head on whether you’re happy with your life or not; your answer has to be ready and more job oriented, which actually makes it easier, well for me at least, because I’m quite proud of my career life so far.

Anyway, if someone were to ask me now “Who is Marwen?”, I think I’d answer that I am a lot of things, that I’m still discovering it all myself, and that the first place anyone could go to begin to know me is my blog where I’ve been writing for over 3 years, documenting some of my thoughts, bits of my life, events and news that touched me and more.
After all what is a person but his thoughts, doings and dreams mashed up together?

BioDiesel in Tunisia

The prices of fuel keep on rising all over the world, and no one is winning except the big oil companies.
The consumer is losing more and more money on fuel for transport and other uses, and the environment continues to be suffocated by our fuel emissions. It’s just those big oil companies that happily sit on very fat wallets while the whole world goes to hell.

Us Tunisians are luckier than others because the government subsidizes a percentage of the fuel price to keep it lower for us, but the country won’t be able to go on doing that forever, as prices soar even higher and demand continues to grow.
That’s why, just like the rest of the world, we should be looking for alternative fuel and energy options.

There are many directions that companies and governments around the world are pursuing to get rid of the human dependency on petroleum based fuels, ranging from the simple to the really sophisticated.

An option that I find really accessible for a country like Tunisia, that can’t afford to invest a lot of money in hydrogen-powered fuel cells for example, is BioDiesel.

Biodiesel is fuel made from renewable materials such as vegetable oils or animal fats, or even recycled fryer oil. It is biodegradable and non-toxic, and has significantly fewer emissions than petroleum-based diesel when burned. It also functions in current diesel engines and reduces engine wear by as much as one half.

Biodiesel is made through a process called transesterification whereby the glycerine is separated from the vegetable oil. The process leaves behind two products – biodiesel (Mono-alkyl ester) and glycerine (a valuable by-product used in soaps and other products).

I really wish the government or some private companies would explore this option and maybe other ones too that could help reduce our dependency on environment-unfriendly foreign fuel and keep the fuel prices low.

New Modern Islam

Every now and then, I come across an article, a blog or someone talking about how there should be a new modernized version of Islam.
Some go as far as taking out verses from the Koran that talk about war, while on the other side of the spectrum some seem to limit it to making things like the hijab optional, and of course there are many thoughts in between those two.

Some countries are taking steps forward with some of these ideas, with some of them taking out certain Koranic verses from school curriculums, some others trying to make the hijab unfavorable, …etc.

But, in my opinion, I think the whole approach is very wrong.
What we need is not a new and modernized Islam, what we need is a new and modernized understanding of Islam.
We have to understand that our time is very different from the time in which Islam came, the rules are different, the society is different, the circumstances are different, everything is different; And so the understanding and the application of Islam’s laws and teachings should be different too.

We have to understand why a certain Koranic verse came, in what situation, under what circumstances, and to solve which problems, then draw realistic parallels with our life today and see if that verse’s teachings apply to our new situation, circumstances and problems.

Islam, through the Koran and the teachings of Prophet Mohamed (PBUH), came with a set of general laws and teachings that will apply for all ages, but it also came with some specific laws and teachings for specific situations. It’s wrong to generalize those for all ages too, because they don’t necessarily apply. It’s up to us to understand their reason and then draw the lessons that could help us in our new reality.

We should not allow ourselves to be like the people who pick a verse out of the Koran, take it out of context, without understanding it, and then say that Islam is a religion of this or that. Everything has a reason and a lesson behind it for a certain time, place and situation. We have to understand that and our children have to understand that too.

So what I guess I’m trying to say is that it’s not Islam that needs modernizing, it’s us and our way of understanding, analyzing and drawing lessons from it.

Children…

Today, I went to the dentist’s for another one of my seemingly endless appointments for dental work. Sometimes I feel like I have some sort of membership card.

Anyway, as I entered the waiting room, I found this cute little 9 year old kid who was flipping through a French magazine, mainly focusing on the many pictures, flying by some and looking closer at some others.

I said hi and sat next to him and pulled a magazine from the stack too and started flipping through it myself.

The boy came across this perfume ad with a guy holding up this big snake, and he asked me: “How can he do that?”
I answered that I didn’t know, to avoid getting into the whole issue of it being a non-poisonous snake and how they can tell if a snake is poisonous or not, and I added that it looked scary, feeling a bit of responsibility there and not wanting him to go and try it if he comes across a snake someday. He agreed, so I felt reassured.

He then started pretending to read, even asking me about a word that I explained to him.

He continued flipping through his magazine, until he came by a picture of the president. He then told me about how he was in the car with his father the other day when they stopped them for the president to pass by.
And he asked me “Why can’t everyone meet him at anytime?”
I didn’t know what to answer, as I didn’t want to get into how and why the president is a very important person and all the security issues involved with his job, so I just told him that maybe there are certain times when he receives people and other times when he’s too busy.

He went on flipping through the pictures until he came across a picture of an American soldier holding a weapon in what looked like a war zone, maybe Iraq.
He asked me “Do you watch TV at night?”, pointing at the picture.
I said: “Do you mean the news?”
He answered “Yes, do you watch all the explosions and shooting?”
I said: “Yes, sometimes I do watch the news and I get to see things like that.”
He said: “I don’t like to watch it. It scares me. I like to watch cartoons.”
I said: “Cartoons are the best thing to watch. I like cartoons too.”

I then asked him what grade he was in at school, and he answered that he was in the third grade. Which made me know that he was a 9 year old, for you who wondered how I knew his age earlier.

He asked me: “And what grade are you in?”
I answered: “I finished school and now I work.”
He asked: “What do you do?”
I said, trying to stay as simple as possible: “I work with computers, I’m a programmer. Do you know the internet?”
He nodded, so I said: “I work on things on the internet.”
He asked me where I worked and so I told him that it was in the Lac region which he said he knew.

I then asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up and he answered that he wanted to be a dentist.

Seconds after that his father walked out from the dentist’s office and the boy said bye and ran away to his father to go home, leaving me thinking about our litte conversation.

I admire how children think, how they analyze things, how they try to understand everything, how they break the barriers between people and start a conversation, how they’re not afraid to ask the questions in their minds, how they are spontaneous and just speak their mind, how they’re instinct guides them to know what’s wrong and what’s right, how they are very peaceful, how they seem to know what they want in life…etc.

I wish we would all listen more to our children and try to be more like them, for they really have more wisdom, purity and innocence than we do, they speak the truth as they see it, they hold our human values by instinct, they see the world the way it should be, they haven’t been twisted and changed by life, they’re simply what a perfect person should be like.

The world would be such a better and more beautiful place to live in if it were ruled by children or at least people who thought like them.

Ramadan And It’s Crescent

So the holy month of Ramadan is on the doorstep, starting tomorrow or the day after, depending on whether they see the crescent today or not.

Now, just this once, I want to get this whole crescent thing off my chest because it’s bugging the hell out of me!
Every year, religious insititutions in all Muslim countries go out and start looking out for the crescent that marks the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan. But of course, they won’t all be able to see the crescent from all over the world on the same day, and we end up with Muslim countries starting the month on different days and ending it on different days too.

Ramadan should start and end on the same day for all Muslims, I think it’s wrong the way things are going now.

Some people suggest we all follow Saudi Arabia, and some others think that if one country declares it has seen the crescent then all countries should declare the beginning of Ramadan.
But then second thoughts, politics, international relations get in the way of those ideas.

I personally think the solution would be for all Muslim countries to get behind one International Muslim Institution, that has among its duties the watch for the crescent in all Muslim countries and declaring Ramadan for the whole world.

Such an institution would have members from all over the Muslim world, and also serve as a central for Muslim scholars to debate and issue religious decrees (Fatwas) for the whole Muslim world, avoiding having scattered scholars issuing different and conflicting decrees on their own.
This would also eliminate the risk of having rogue self-claimed scholars issuing decrees for their own benefits and influencing Muslim youth.

Of course, Muslim countries’ adherence to Islam varies and so a decree that would be accepted in one country might not be in the other, but that’s politics not religion.
In the end, and when it comes to religious matters in our time, I think that it’s important to have one centralized source. Whether the country chooses to apply the decree or not is something else, but the source should be one.

This post turned out something a lot different from what I had in mind when I started writing it, but well that’s the beauty of writing I guess. you start somewhere and end up somewhere else.
Anyway, this is my opinion, maybe a bit optimistic or even unrealistic, but well we can still dream.

Anyway, I’ll be tuning in to the news today to see the Mufti (Head scholar) of Tunisia announce whether Ramadan starts tomorrow or the day after.
In either case, Ramadan Mubarak to everyone. May it be a happy and blessed month for you all.

Update: Ramadan in Tunisia starts on Wednesday, and started on Tuesday for most other countries.

Emigration

Yesterday, I found these really interesting numbers about Tunisian emigration on Zizou from Djerba‘s blog.

– 80% of Tunisian youth would like to emigrate.
– 80.000 to 100.000 Tunisian youth leave Tunisia each year (Some come back of course).
– 25 to 35% of Tunisians abroad are jobless.

According to statistics from 2003, the number of Tunisians abroad is 850,000. 6000 of them are students.

Even though these numbers might not be 100% accurate, I do believe that they are pretty close to reality and I think they’re very interesting.

I’m sure numbers like these are reflected throughout the Arab world with only slight differences.

A common idea between Arab youth nowadays is that the only solution to a better life is to emigrate. The choice of countries to emigrate to depends on the country of departure, for example in French speaking North Africa the most popular destinations are France and Quebec (Canada), in the Middle East it’s more like Canada, USA, New Zealand…etc.

But it’s not always true that a better life awaits these emigrants. As numbers show, a lot of them end up jobless and on the streets.
Still some are able to build great lives, that’s true too.
It all depends. It’s pretty risky.

I think the whole issue of emigration is a very sensitive one. It’s a shame when some of the best minds in the country as well as its youth find themselves tempted to leave. It’s a big loss for the country. But still I do understand how some of them feel.

Death

A distant relative of mine passed away, God bless his soul, and yesterday I attended his funeral.

Funerals must be one of the most depressing things in life.
Just the thought that a person you knew to be so full of life, energy, kindness and good has passed away and is being lowered a stiff lifeless body into a hole in the ground is a very depressing thought.

Most people start thinking of their own deaths, and they get more and more scared of it, fearing it could come and take them by surprise at any second.

As for me, I don’t really fear death, because I know it’ll come when it’s supposed to come, and when God wishes for it. But death makes me think a lot about my life.
With death eventually coming sooner or later, I can’t but think about the limited time I have on earth and what I’m doing with it. Am I really doing the stuff I want to do? Am I really enjoying life? Am I really going to look back at this life of mine with a smile when I’m on my dying bed? Are my priorities in life balanced like I want them?

In short, all the questions can be summed up into one: Is this the life I want to be living?
That’s a hard question though, because if answered in negative, it means that there are a bunch of life changing decisions that have to follow, and those are always very hard.

In my case, when I look at it from a distance, I’m happy with what I’ve done in my life up to now, but I do see that it’s time to change some things here and there, move on to new things here and there, build on what I have here and there.
After all, life isn’t constant, it’s a moving ever-changing thing.

One important thing though is that a person should always hang on to his optimism throughout life. I think it’s a very essential ingredient to having a great life.